Tristan und Isolde

There are productions in the history of opera that mark an era. Peter Sellars' production of Tristan und Isolde with its videos by Bill Viola is such a one. First performed in 2005 at the Opéra Bastille, it is being revived under the benevolent gaze of Peter Sellars himself. One of the great visionaries of the stage, he talks about the work – perhaps the greatest in the history of western music – and this, now legendary production, which seems to give substance to that Wagnerian dream of a work of total art.

Tristan und Isolde is a work that speaks to everyone. It contains a universal yet tragic message: the world in which we live cannot fulfil us. It is a profoundly Buddhist notion taking us back to the Four Noble Truths. Through awareness of suffering, we go in search of deliverance. Wagner also wanted to show all the variations of love: loves that elevates, wounds, or kills; love beyond death, the love inherent to resurrection. When I was twenty, I already knew I wanted to work on “Tristan”. I listened repeatedly to Wilhelm Furtwängler’s recording without succeeding in fully grasping the music. It’s an extremely complex work to stage. In each of the three acts, the real action takes place in the final minutes. The singers could very well do nothing since all the drama is interiorised.
  

What interests me most is the human being as a miracle. When I was young, my productions were criticised for lacking theatricality. For me, there was an abundance of that in politics and that was enough for me! So I went in search of a form of expression that forsakes pure theatrics in favour of the human being with all his or her fragility and radiance. Sometimes, it takes a great deal of patience and effort before we see a person reveal their true self. But that patience is worth the effort. And it’s a huge privilege to witness it as it emerges. The performers incredibly generous and courageous people that I invite to do extremely difficult things. My productions may appear minimalist, but they’re enriched by the contribution of all these artists. The fact of having bare non-illusionist spaces makes it possible to better grasp their presence which I wish are to be strong. If we can sense the majesty of the person, the aim has been achieved.

That’s exactly it. Wagner’s music is immersive. We are completely engulfed by the score which is like an ocean wave. It’s something which must be experienced from inside. Wagner wanted the experience to be total in such a way we cannot imagine anything existing outside. That’s where the idea of placing the singers, the chorus and the English horn in the auditorium came from, but it was also intended to avoid people viewing the stage as if it were screen. We had to introduce a dimension into the acoustic space. It’s true that Bill’s videos have a “flat” aspect... but they also have depth. They project us into nature and reflect the feelings we experience in contact with it. It’s touching to see the 19^th century set designs in the Opera’s Library. The trees are painted with great finesse but they are devoid of life. Nothing moves. That Bill was able to bring the Californian forest into the theatre,and that we see the trees affected by the wind and the light, is extraordinary. He fully understood that the forest is not something we experience frontally, but rather, something we go through. We had to find a way to enter it.

I wanted to avoid the singers appearing like a distant image. The needed to be close to the orchestra pit, close to the audience for the experience to be sensual. You need to be able to feel each word, each breath. The singers' anguish has to become our own. But Wagner also requires distance. The sublime music of Brangäne’s calls needs to be perceived as if it were coming from the moon. As the two lovers make love, cut off from the world, where do these calls come from? Are they even real? The manner in which they appear and then dissolve into space need to be shrouded in mystery. Just as the menacing presence of the horns must be perceptible everywhere. The sailors' sea shanty in the first act suggests the 19^th century and the underlying discontent of a social class... We are almost among the Nibelungen!

The voices must be physically situated in places where we can sense the echoes of the events. They become spaces for memory, prophesies in an eventless dramaturgy.

I’d known Bill in Los Angeles for a long time and hoped to involve him in the theatre. However, he was loath to commit to the stage which, in his eyes, could never be as clean and polished as a work in an exhibition space. Ultimately, it was at his invitation, and in a museum, that we ended up working together for the first time. It was his first retrospective and we created the scenography. Over that period, I was able to read his notebooks which contained years of his annotated thoughts and reflections. And so I proposed he worked on “Tristan”. We talked a lot about the work. One day, he shut his door and, two years later, he came up with five hours of video. It was a genuine shock.

Yes. Unlike a set with painted canvases, Bill Viola’s videos are in motion. They introduce a temporality that follows Wagner’s music. As such, they run in slow motion. And this process reveals the seconds in the seconds, the minutes in the minutes, etc. It is like being on a long pilgrimage: only by experiencing the interiority of time are we able to have revelations and understand the essence of things. With Wagner, there is an extremely drawn-out temporality which interacts with a sudden action of fleeting duration. We had to seize on that moment and make it astonishing by creating an object that maintains tension for 90 minutes.

None of the videos on show are comparable to that experience. Bill’s work is not meant to be displayed in a museum or some white cube gallery. The nocturnal ambience of many of his pieces confirms that they need to be surrounded by darkness. And “Tristan” is itself a poem of the night. We can compare it to that moment of pre-dawn prayer in Islamic and Buddhist traditions as well as with Christian monks where desire is in conflict with the body and soul.

Bill and I were particularly interested in Buddhist traditions. He took the various stages we go through when we leave this world very seriously: the transition from a burning state to another extremely cold one, the liquids that dissipate... This way we understand what is released in the struggle. This is what summarises the third act. After four hours, the music becomes extremely tense and complex. It’s particularly challenging for the instrumentalists and the tenor singing Tristan since it requires a strength that no one possesses having reached this stage. They have to to go and seek this lost energy at the source from which they draw new force to to complete the seemingly impossible. They are transcended. And thus we are confronted with the most beautiful thing ever written, a world at once sensual and spiritual, neither Christian nor Buddhist, but all that at the same time. This also sums up the work of Bill Viola.   

Absolutely. The question is, how do you portray that experience on stage? The third act evokes the solitude inherent in death. That’s why I isolate Tristan in that experience. He is alone on the bed. He and Kurwenal never look at each other. They don’t see each other or touch each other. Each lives through a different experience. Even though they are physically close to each other, there is already a considerable distance between them. I also wanted to broach the question of how we regard a dead person. The moment we realise the body is nothing but a shell. The living being passes away but the gaze of others needs to convey the idea that he is more alive than ever and, for the first time, happy. In the Liebestod, Isolde talks of Tristan’s smile and invites us to look at it. And yet, until then Tristan has never smiled.

That imagery is a reference to the painting by Titian that obsessed Wagner when he was composing “Tristan”¹. Just as in the painting, where the Virgin ascends carried by a new force that contrasts with the despair of the figures in the lower portions of the canvas, Isolde asks the devastated group surrounding Tristan to contemplate another reality. The Liebestod can prove to be a trap and is often treated as a fixed moment. Musically, it escapes us; nothing has prepared us for that music. And nothing on stage manages to equal that passage. But Bill's illustration of this idea of transfiguration is so profound, so complex… The meeting of opposites gives rise to something extraordinary. We can say that a visual artist has managed to create images as transcendental as Wagner’s music.

A corner stone of the Western operatic repertoire, Tristan and Isolde stands alone in Wagner’s oeuvre as the superlative expression of human feelings, as an attempt to utter the ineffable: “Only love brings self-knowledge [...] It’s essence is inexpressible, one can only show its movements and variations”, affirmed Wagner. Performing “Tristan” is thus a challenge obliging the performer not only to show passion but to live it.

One can easily have the impression, with Tristan and Isolde, of being confronted with a Wagnerian absolute. Whether this stems from the “metaphysical” aspect of his subject, or from the relative absence of nationalistic or Pan-Germanic references which, in many other of Wagner's operas might put off those music lovers most resistant to his universe, Tristan has a certain broadness of appeal. For, whatever the sources drawn on by Wagner (Gottfried of Strasbourg’s poem, Hymns to the Night by Novalis or Schlegel’s Lucinde ...), ultimately the subject explores the simplest and most universal themes in all their purity: love, suffering and death. And it depicts passion in so absolute a form that, as Romain Rolland said, Tristan towers above all other love poems like a mountain.

As has been stated, love in Tristan and Isolde, appears in its most metaphysical form. This can be seen for example in the way Wagner treats the theme of the love philtre, which here does not play at all the same role as in the original myth: the philtre, this time, functions as a poetical metaphor; it does not engender the love between Tristan and Isolde: that love was already there before the two lovers drank it. Had their love been provoked by the philtre, their passion would have been but a relative passion, a phenomenon belonging to the material and temporal world of cause and effect. It exists, instead, in its own right, timelessly: rather than an objective reality, it is the way in which the two lovers see the world, it is their desire and their will projected on the world (the extent to which Tristan was influenced by Schopenhauer is well known). One need hardly add that the love between Tristan and Isolde does not require staging: rather, it inhabits the characters from within and is lodged at the heart of the singing and the music. Technically, this translates, for example, into the abandoning of recitative in favour of continuous melody: it is less important to further the action than to give life to an emotion.

Wagner’s major preoccupation in Tristan, more than in any of his earlier operas, was to live passion and elicit it in others, rather than seeking to express or show it. In 1859, had he not written to Mathilde Wesendonck, who inspired the work, that he wanted all the subtle shades of human feeling to be heard in his music with their incessant swings from one extreme to the other, independent of any action depicted and that no discourse is able to express? He thought he had found the ideal performer for Tristan when the tenor Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, who first interpreted the role in the premier performances in Munich in 1865, understood and immediately embodied his thinking, almost without his having to communicate it in words. “When I told him in a low voice that it was impossible for me to express any judgement of my ideal, that he was now about to realise, his dark eyes sparkled like a star of love ... A sob, barely perceptible, and never again did we utter a word concerning the third act”. Carolsfeld was so powerfully possessed by the role of Tristan and lived its passions so fully that Wagner, fearing for his health, ordered performances to be interrupted after the fourth night. “I do not think I have the right to inflict such a state of distress on a man”, he said. And, in fact, the singer, aged twenty-nine, died six weeks later ... Wagner, devastated, mourned not only a friend but also the ideal interpreter of his music, a performer that Carolsfeld had allowed him to glimpse and of which he held the ineffable secret.

Tristan appears once again in 1903 in the eponymous novella by Thomas Mann, exemplifying passion represented in art with such purity that one can only play it by experiencing it from within, and not express it or describe it. Thus, when the ingenuous Gabrielle plays some of Wagner’s most memorable passages on the piano, (the prelude, the second act and the death of Isolde), all their expressive force naturally pours forth. By her side, Herr Spinell, a connoisseur, launches into a long exalted speech that takes up some of the most passionate expressions used by Wagner in his libretto; but his words alone, not being music, appear to Gabrielle as mere obscure rhetoric, leaving her mystified. “I don’t understand everything, Herr Spinell, there are many things I only guess at [...] But how is it that you who understand this so well, cannot play it?” she asks. “The two rarely go together,” Spinell concedes, caught off guard. What one cannot express in words must be lived, played: that is where art begins.   

Tristan and Iseult. Isa and Tristan. Of the mythical amorous passion, of which Wagner made an opera just as legendary, the young author, Sarah Léon, has transposed the heroes to a contemporary winter landscape, in which the cold finally freezes the broken heart of a delirious young woman. Delirious with love, for the handsome Tristan seems to have betrayed their lovers’ pact. From the moment of their meeting at the Longing Bar, toasted with an Irish love philtre, to their passionate exchanges, Isa ceaselessly tries to detect the deception and lies as the heroes' destinies become forever sealed by a love triangle. Alone, Isa flees her love the better to bewail her despair.   

Flee. Flee this bar, this town, those glances, either sneering or sympathetic, flee from myself out into the snow and the night, endlessly walk, wear myself out on the icy pavements, until I can no longer think, not of anything and above all not of you whose eyes, voice, hands caress me still – you – you at the piano, laughing, carefree, you so young, you – Tristan – beloved, faithless, wonderful Tristan.

Flee, flee those images that whirl in my brain like snowflakes around the street lights, the tears drying on my cheeks, these rags of memories, now shredded up. Flee that poisonous, intoxicating music, and the black hole growing inside me, seeking to devour me from within, ever stronger and more insatiable. If only it spread silently, like an oil slick in the wake of a tanker, dark and surreptitious – but no: it is like an animal tearing at my entrails, gorging on them until I scream with pain, on my knees in the snow.

Gone forever. Gone forever our evenings at the Longing Bar, gone forever the gentle pink light of the Nirvana, gone forever your smile from the other side of the bar. And those nights when you taught me to pick out a few notes on the keyboard, and when I watched you, fascinated, in the half-light, improvising on themes suggested by the clients. And that evening when you took me to the Paris Opera to hear the story of the hero whose name you bear. Gone forever.

Oh, our first meeting. Oh that evening when you erupted into my life just as you erupted into the pub, tousle-headed, radiant, a little drunk, to order an Irish coffee. And I, Isa, queen of cocktails, a magician in the matter of skilfully mixed potions, she whom all the barmaids in the area acknowledge to be the expert, handing you the glass crowned with cream, my hand trembling a little, already under the spell of your laugh, your eyes. Then our first words, your invitation – “In the evenings I play at the Nirvana, come and listen whenever you like” – and on the evenings that followed, when I wasn’t working, our complicity growing, and the hope that grew within me little by little, the certainty too, that you were the one, at last, the right one for me, that – it seems laughable doesn’t it – that we were made for one another, made to go through life side by side, live and grow old together, strong in our twoness, supreme.

And that certainty became obvious, not just for me but for all those who saw us, so much so that things seemed to go without saying – they would come in their own time – it was enough to enjoy each evening at the Longing Bar, to listen to you play, to talk late into the night, roaming the city streets, those street I run through now beneath a murky pinkish sky, a snow-laden sky, streets I long to lose myself in, never to see another morning – what’s the point?

Yes, to wander forever in dark alleyways, drawn like a moth to the flame of a shop sign, of neon lights in purple or mauve, of a luminous garland. Or disappear in the night, letting myself be lured by the banks of fog, by the maelstrom of snowflakes. Yes, to meander in the cold, and forget all about this body, this soul, leaving behind me only tears on a window pane before I dissolve.

And the black hole that engulfs me little by little, in which I sink and drown, struggling in vain, perhaps it too will disappear, absorbed by the starless night. Unless the whiteness of the snow overcomes it, filling it up and hiding it, as it has already hidden the tarmac and the pavements, blanketing the entire town bit by bit, burying it, and me with it, in endless oblivion.

I could have seen it though, should have – in spite of our complicity, not the least gesture of affection – never once did you ruffle my hair, never once did you rest your head on my shoulder – you shrouded your past, your liaisons, in silence and remained evasive when I tried to find out more. I put that down to your natural discretion which, all things considered, rather pleased me.

About Marc, you simply told me that he had taken you in on your eighteenth birthday when you ran away from home, that he had helped you, before giving you a job as a pianist in the bar over which he reigned. I saw him as your adoptive father, dazzled by your musical talents, intending to give you a chance – after all, it would only take some one, one evening, to spot you and engage you somewhere else, for your career to be launched. I liked that man, somewhat in the background, crazy about jazz, whom I sometimes used to talk to at the end of the evening, waiting for you to finish playing.

I remember one evening – I was listening to you, sitting not far away with a liqueur in front of me – an evening when Marc came and sat at my side. His eyes, which were fixed upon you, shone; I thought he was savouring the harmonies that you strung together with careless virtuosity, the caress of the melodies, the frisson of the arpeggios – perhaps also pride in having recognised your worth and knowing what an asset you were to the Nirvana. That evening, however, he didn’t talk to me about music, as he usually did; he talked about you, about your glorious, medieval name, of the exploits of the other Tristan from Cornwall. At his words, the Nirvana seemed to fill with eerie forests, wandering knights, swords and dragons, and I listened, fascinated, like a rabbit mesmerised by the eyes of a serpent.

Did he know, Marc? Had he understood what was going on, had he resolved to enlighten me or to let things take their course and amuse himself at my expense? I wasn’t supposed to be there that evening, I didn’t usually turn up without warning, but it had been days since we had seen each other, and I wanted to enjoy the snow with you – like children we would have chased each other, bombarded each other with snowballs, skidding on the ice, stars of frost in our hair – oh, my beautiful dream melted away, gone for ever...

I believed it all though, I believed in the transparency of our words, our gestures – I thought you knew, just as I thought I knew, I believed that all was limpid, clear water like a mirror in which, leaning over, we would each see the reflection of the other – a mirror that cracked this evening when I saw you together. Marc and you, face to face, entangled in an embrace that left no room for doubt. One gesture, a simple gesture like a knifeblade between my shoulder blades, like acid spreading through my veins, like poison - and yet I must not betray myself, must keep up appearances for a few more minutes, until I can flee into the night and give free rein to the suffering of the wild beast that beats against my ribs.

Oh fallacious light of day, the purple lights of the bar that hid the truth from me, the only truth worth anything, that of self-negation in the snow and the night. Such self-inflicted blindness, only to find myself here, alone at the heart of a place as livid as a shroud, staggering on the edge of the abyss, ready to annihilate myself.

Never did I try and see you anywhere but at the Longing Bar, or the Nirvana, in the city streets; never did we see each other at your place or at mine. What you did with your days, I could only imagine: practise the piano doubtless, sleep of course, listen to music. That you frequented other people didn’t concern me. I thought that the whole truth resided in those stolen moments in the night! What mockery! Your truth began elsewhere, when you went back to Marc’s, when you played the piano for him and him alone. And Marc himself – never, I admit, did I think of him except when I saw him behind the bar; for me he was one of those acquaintances that one appreciates and forgets as soon as one’s back is turned. He was so much a part of the Nirvana that in a sense, it never occurred to me that he had a life outside the bar.

What is life but a comedy, a string of illusions we forge for ourselves, we nurture against all odds, blinded by the light of day, when only night can dissipate the chimeras that dance around us. Before him who has lovingly looked on death’s night, and has known its deep secrets, the lies of daylight, honour and fame, power and fortune, glittering so bright, are scattered like barren dust in the sun.

But perhaps my life is already behind me. Perhaps these streets I roam are those of hell, and here and there, these vague silhouettes, the souls of the dead, wandering in eternal twilight. These white petals whirling around me, are they not those of asphodels torn from their stems by an icy wind? Perhaps the dawn will come no more now, perhaps I have already passed over onto the other bank, a shadow among shadows, in the city’s night.

Oh the kiss of snowflakes that bite into my flesh, engendering long frissons down my spine, cold and burning, oh my breath panting in the night, the tremors that seize me. I stop the better to feel the snow melting on my lips, brushing my shoulders with its icy fingers – spin round, my heart pounding, my eyes half closed, and give myself up to the caress of the wind, my arms outstretched, my head thrown back towards the sky, offering myself.

I am delirious, perhaps I have a fever, I must go home. Go home? Back to that stifling room only to feel the brutish pain engulf me, pinning me against my bed, crushed by a blind force – no, no, never. To sob within those sheets that will never enfold our naked bodies, will never welcome our embrace – how long must I bear it before I find a draught of death more potent than my love philtre?...

No, no, better the mindless wandering, the cold that grips my chest with its talons of ice, rifling through it as if to tear out my heart, better the endless watch for a pale dawn. Better oblivion and the fleeting repose it might bring.

Or go to you now, naked beneath my coat, and denude myself, offer myself to you, because nothing else justifies my existence, you understand, because without you I am nothing, nothing but a poor envelope of flesh on the brink of putrescence.

Or perhaps come across you, suddenly, in a bend in the road ... I imagine you there, glowing in a halo of lamplight, frost sparkling like diamonds in your hair, regal, dazzling. And I advance, slowly at first, then faster, and a few seconds before we meet we stop, immobile, we look at each other, your face close to mine, your breath on my cheek, and then very gently, at last, your lips that brush mine, your arms that pull me into the shadow of a gateway, no names, no parting, one consciousness for all eternity.

How beautiful they are suddenly, the moths fluttering in the night. And the neon signs lit up for some obscure celebration, and Tristan, radiant, advancing towards me – it was only a misunderstanding of course, how could I have believed otherwise, how could I have doubted you, doubted our love, Tristan – Tristan and Isa, this sweet little word "and", binding love's union, and suddenly nothing else counts, all is forgotten, all is forgiven, for, yes, he is really here, I’m not dreaming, I see him approach, silent and serene. How gently and calmly he smiles. How he shines ever brighter, soaring on high, stars sparkling around him ...How softly and gently from his lips sweet breath flutters!...

Why don’t these occasional passers-by, wandering shadows, night-roaming souls, stop to look at him? Do I alone hear this melody which, so wondrous and tender in its blissful lament, all‑-revealing, gently pardoning, sounding from him,
pierces me through, rises up, blessedly echoing and ringing round me? Resounding yet more clearly, wafting about me, are they waves of refreshing breezes? Are they clouds of heavenly fragrance? As they swell and roar round me, shall I breathe them, shall I listen to them? Shall I drink of them, plunge beneath them, to expire in sweet perfume? In the surging swell, in the ringing sound, in the vast wave of the world's breath – to drown, to sink unconscious –bliss supreme!