Whether you find it easy or difficult to lend yourself to Wagner’s overwhelmingly powerful agenda—and I am still not sure where I stand on this question—you will be aware of having to alter something in yourself to accommodate his patently unreasonable demands. They are unreasonable by design: self-restraint was never part of his mode, and easy entertainment never part of his goal. He wants to make you capitulate to him. This wish —this need, I should call it—is perhaps what makes him so astute on the subject of compulsion, whether of one being by another, or of one being by forces beyond his own control (such as fate, or love). That compelled figure can be either mortal or immortal, king or commoner, male or female, young or old: nothing gets you out of having to submit, in Wagner’s world.
As an audience member, you are most likely to experience this sense of submission in respect to time. It’s not just that the operas are four or five hours long. It’s also that, minute by minute, you are being asked to suspend your desire for completion in a way that no previous opera asked you to. Handel may run the same lines three or four times over in a single aria, but the boredom factor can be dealt with by antic staging, and in any case it always comes to an end fairly quickly. You cannot stage a Wagner opera so that we don’t notice the passage of time. We are meant to notice it. Fairly near the beginning of the evening, we may ask ourselves: Are these two people ever going to stop singing at each other in this way? Are they ever going to get off this ship, or this mountaintop, or this blasted heath? And the answer is no, they are not; it is going to go on for so long that eventually, if the performance is good enough, you will forget about the very idea of an ending. And once you have reached that mental state, you will begin to enjoy, indeed wallow in, the sense of endlessness. The eternal present tense of the music—the way, melodically as well as narratively, it refuses to reach a conclusion—will come to seem like a form of immortality that is being temporarily granted to you.
The production of Tristan and Isolde that I saw last Friday at the Metropolitan Opera House, performed under the baton of Daniel Barenboim, was able to induce this dreamy yet alert state of suspension, and that in itself is high praise. In his conducting debut at the Met, Barenboim drew from the orchestra a galvanizing, moving, delicate performance that made the five hours pass in—well, if not a trice, then a very brief five hours. Even the difficult horn solo (performed by Pedro R. Díaz) was pure and perfect: a hard detail to get right, and one that seemed indicative of the whole production’s musical attentiveness. In this drama about the intense delights and torments of love, where the tragedy could only be deferred and not averted, there was something both sympathetic and generous about the way Barenboim allowed us to cling to each passage, each note.
This is not to say that the production had no shortcomings. The supporting performers—Michelle DeYoung as Brangäne, Gerd Grochowski as Kurwenal, and, spectacularly, René Pape as King Marke—were all terrific, but I had some problems with the two leads. Katarina Dalayman was an adequate if not spellbinding Isolde: her clear soprano voice was just sweet enough, and strong enough, to convey the role’s emotional power. Peter Seiffert, the tenor who sang Tristan, was somewhat worse. He got through the part with no major missteps (and I gather, given the role’s difficulty, that this is half the battle), but it always seemed as if he was working, not singing. I never once fell into that adoring swoon which the greatest Wagnerian tenors can produce; the music of his voice just didn’t feel like music. And because Seiffert was comparatively mundane while Pape was unbelievably thrilling, the whole plot got thrown weirdly off-balance. What Isolde in her right mind would have chosen this Tristan over this King Marke?
Still, plot is the least of our concerns with Wagner. Even words (though he paid close attention to them) are not much of a focus in this opera. Once you grasp the basic outlines of the story, you can forget about anxiously checking in with your supertitles every few seconds: they won’t tell you anything that the music isn’t already conveying much more powerfully. So you are freed up to watch that elegantly simply, surprisingly evocative geometric set (designed by Jürgen Rose), and to bask in the gloriously rich lighting (done by Max Keller), and to admire the stillness that is so often central to what these characters are doing. As Tristan and Isolde endlessly sing of their passion and their sorrows, Kurwenal and Brangäne, their attendants, may be holding a single pose for what seems like half an hour or more. Unmoving, statuesque, often silhouetted against the brightly lit set, they are our stand-ins onstage—ordinary bystanders who have been frozen into timelessness, and who have nothing better to do with themselves than to listen for as long as it takes, which might be forever.
—December 2, 2008