Lise Davidsen has turned her debut as Isolde into a first-rate vocal event, a long-awaited moment not only for the Barcelona theater but for the international opera community. This is the first time the Norwegian soprano tackles this role and the intensity of her commitment to Wagner's music was evident from the opening bars, excellently conducted by Susanna Mälkki. In this new production by the Gran Teatre del Liceu, with a deliberately minimalist stage proposal by Bárbara Lluch, Davidsen defended the role with a control and continuity difficult to see even in veteran or openly Wagnerian performers.
Tristan und Isolde is one of the essential works of the operatic repertoire, not only for its philosophical ambition ---something little or not at all common, until Wagner's irruption---, but because it revolutionized the musical language of the 19th century. Let's take for example the bewilderment fueled by the harmonic suspension, eventual but permeating the whole, conveying the truth of an unresolved desire. It happens already at the very beginning of the opera, anticipated in the well-known prelude: a simple theme in its spelling that, however, evolves in a counterintuitive, powerfully magnetic way: where it naturally asks you to go is not where it leads you, and from that other place you recognize yourself subjected to a superior force, outside of you but moved, emotionally tied to the mast of destiny.
A great success that Lars von Trier chose this prelude as a prolepsis, an anticipation of the end, of his film Melancholia; by viewing in super slow motion, and condensing the flow of those sound waves, the destruction of the world that will happen by collision of a meteor, baptized with the name of that sinister affect. We could say "sublime", in the most genuinely Kantian sense, attending to the immensity and transcendence that is presentified from sensible perception. In a similar way, that of Tristan und Isolde is a music that atmospherically conditions the space-time of the characters and moves, energetically and obstinately, towards their interior: dramatic time will become a space of waiting, longing and transformation.
An uncontainable impulse (and the enigma of its cause)
Wagner's first great opera, which Nietzsche discovered with fascination in 1868, three years after its premiere, led him to confess by letter to his friend Erwin Rohde that "every nerve in me vibrated," having experienced with the prelude "a lasting sensation of ecstasy." Wagner had Schopenhauer's philosophy very much in mind for the creation of his libretto, a thinker who also influenced Nietzsche. Although he would end up repudiating both, in his youth he must have identified the irremediable and fatal impulse that beats in Tristan und Isolde. A love that transcends all conceptual formulation and all comprehensible causality, magically provoked by the "filter": a narrative and demonic element ---that potion or concoction--- that condenses the inexplicable nature of the loving bond, already present in the medieval tale, and that articulates the radical conversion of the characters.
The filter is not always highlighted with the importance it deserves, nor in the present staging. And yet its function is not trivial. It represents the vanishing point ---the black hole, if you will--- of known reality; it transforms hatred into love, when Isolde's will for revenge becomes absolute surrender. Isolde had cured the man who killed her fiancé without knowing he was Tristan. Called Tantris, he "was" a figure suspended between life and death. When recognition occurs and he regains his true identity, the bond becomes negative, marked by the desire for death, but in a deeply ambiguous sense, re-fed by the affection that the cure has awakened. Although Princess and sorceress Isolde desires poison for her rival, at the same time she wants to die with him ---and drinks it--- to avoid the maddening duplicity of that Moebius strip. Be careful what we wish for…
Wagner subverts logic: what should kill, gives life; what should close off desire, frees it; what should cancel both identities, indeed achieves it, but through the exchange of attributes and final fusion: "Tristan du, ich Isolde bin", sings Tristan; "Nicht mehr Tristan, nicht mehr Isolde!", she replies. Of course, the opposite reading is also possible, which the protagonists make explicit: wouldn't this form of dependence ---this delicious but irremediable conditioning--- be true death, a longing that can never be fully satisfied and that generates suffering? Here, the relationship between Eros and Thanatos shines with all its power, so often explored but rarely brought to the stage with Wagner's radicalism. Love is not born as a luminous force, but as a consequence of a frustrated death drive. The filter does not deny death: it displaces it, internalizes it, turns it into a condition for a love-passion that transcends as it annihilates. To love, in Tristan und Isolde, is to accept that life is only completed beyond itself.
The Liceu production
That apparently philosophical dimension is actually musical ---by producing the staging of the "essentially unrepresentable," Schopenhauer said about the will, affected in its most intimate being--- and requires a transposition into the sublimated world that is opera. The will, as a principle of cosmic reality, found its clearest translation in Davidsen's interpretation. Much was expected of the soprano and the expectations ---rarely--- were more than met, as Bernat Dedéu also notes in his Punyalada. A constant axis of the performance, her voice dominated not only by power, but by an expressive density and, in short, an absolutely credible characterization, capable of sustaining that permanent tension between desire and annihilation, even when the staging oscillated between the suggestive and the unspecific. The sustained ovation at the end of the performance confirmed that her Isolde had deeply resonated with the audience.
Clay Hilley's Tristan followed a different path. His stage presence and gestures were initially rigid, somewhat accentuated by an unsuitable costume. However, his performance went from less to more: as Wagner's writing granted him more space, his character gained vocal projection and dramatic density, until balancing the core of the protagonist duo in the second act and carrying ---already in the third--- the weight of the plot: wounded and aware of approaching death, he lucidly verbalized the ambiguous relationship between love and death, with an again counterintuitive affective disposition, which makes him see through shadows and feel dazzled, blind to an unviable life without Isolde's love. The use of lights, in this sense, generated interesting situations and some reminiscences, such as when the background of the stage is progressively split by a beam of light and the gang of thugs à la A Clockwork Orange appears backlit.
Some spectators were bothered by the diffused light focus that Bárbara Lluch introduced at different moments of each act, like a Nordic sun, always low and resplendent amidst a material whiteness. However, it was one of the elements that, as a scenic leitmotif, best managed to convey the impossible realization in life of loving affection, necessarily unsatisfied, at least as a desire. The virtue of minimalism consists in achieving maximum expressiveness with few elements, open spaces, a scene that suggests more than it builds... The intention of not interfering with the music led, despite this, to uneven situations. When it worked, especially in the second act, it did so as a silent accompaniment, barely promoting internal echoes with the text; when it didn't work, the spectator could feel somewhat helpless, in the absence of a theatrical anchor that would help the singers to visualize the nuances of the plot.
One can weigh to what extent these visual discomforts contribute against the grain to the narration of a hidden truthA part of the audience vehemently showed their disapproval, for that staging not collaborating with the gravity of the issues that the libretto hints at, or even distracting attention. Especially evident in the third act, with a Tristan that dies and at the same time never completely; distressing situation in which alternates delirium with philosophical reflections, a mixture impossible and thus, undoubtedly, difficult to accompany scenically. The little jump to let himself fall with his weight did not cooperate. Nor did we understand that kind of futuristic bed ---similar, in reality, to the ice cracking in Friedrich's painting--- in which the dying man appeared half-embedded, before reviving and dying definitively, nor the topical location of a mirror on the stage, which barely reflected anything. Of course, one can always opt for the tour-de-force of thinking negatively, to weigh how much these visual discomforts contribute against the grain of the hidden truth of the narration. That's what it would be about...
Susanna Mälkki maintained a deep and coherent pulse, balancing the sound mass without renouncing expressive plasticityRegarding Susanna Mälkki's musical direction, it is necessary to reiterate how the Gran Teatre del Liceu Symphony Orchestra sounded, facing Wagner's intensity without hesitation or showy tricks. She did not take the easy—and often vacuous—tangent of grandiloquence: the Finnish conductor maintained a deep and coherent pulse, balancing the sound mass without renouncing expressive plasticity. In a montage where the set design did not always provide a clear narrative, the music assumed much of the responsibility. And, no less important, to offer a sense of packaging or dramaturgical coherence, despite the semantic disaggregation into which minimalism plunges us, it is worth noting the role fundamental of the secondary characters. It's striking, because being clearly non-protagonists of the Tristan und Isolde, each of them fulfills a decisive function in the narration.
Striking for the degree of identification with the problems of his character was Brindley Sherratt's King Marke, while Kurwenal, characterized by Tomasz Konieczny, also intervened in a remarkably convincing way, to the point that in the first act he was close to eclipsing the modest performances of Tristan. A separate chapter deserves the other female voice, with a Brangäne ---Ekaterina Gubanova--- faithfully devoted to her Lady, also in her role as sentinel, projecting her voice from above. She functioned as an external conscience while also facilitating the Aristotelian "peripeteia" ---with which fortune is inverted--- and which corresponds to the unexpected but necessary action of the filter. The difficulty of staging Wagner remains current: finding the point where the scenic is not so exalted as to colonize the musical, but neither does it withdraw from it, sounds chimerical, but the pretext of its complexity or even its threatening ---because unattainable--- ideality should not lead to resignation.
Philosophical coda (an unreal and eternal love)
At least at two moments in the opera, both Brangäne and Kurwenal ---at the beginning and at the end--- question the protagonists' vision, critically pointed out as an illusory fantasy, fostered in reality by desire. Psychoanalysis and neuroscience, in fact, have shown by different means that this longing is realizing: it grants the status of truth to what is perceived from the respective emotional worlds, everything that is not thereby aligned entering into crisis. The dissolution of the self not only appears in the famous duet of the second act ("Descend, night of love, make me forget that I exist"), but is found at the end as a form of fullness; as consummation of an unreal/immortal love insofar as it ends for the world, in the time of life, and thus transcends the deception of the apparent, to which all of us ---Schopenhauer reminded us--- are subjected from the moment we represent it to ourselves.
Astonished, the maiden witnesses Isolde's amorous daydream about someone who is not who he claimed to be. The anger that arises in her, upon discovering that he is the murderer of her betrothed, the knight Morold, places him in the impossible but desired position of the doubly lost lover (Tristan cancels Morold and his potential substitute: not-Tantris = Tristan, loved ≠ hated*). And no less disoriented, nor loaded with meaning than that symptomatic asterisk, Kurwenal appears when Tristan believes he sees Isolde's ship on repeated occasions, non-existent until his desire materializes it: he regains life, simultaneously, when he knows that her ship is about to arrive, while fearing for its death on the reefs. That other visualization coincides with the imminent reality into which he himself is plunged, a dizzying fulcrum that projects him to a higher form of love, beyond life.
The rudder is never in our hands when we act moved by desire; and, at the same time, there are few experiences more real and creative than passionate motionThe end is already in the beginning: the dissonance, the way the expected consonance is shunned from the prelude, exhibits to the four winds an inevitable friction, which in fact makes the Wagnerian score a territory as fascinating as it is difficult to inhabit. The rudder is never in our hands when we act moved by desire; and, at the same time, there are few experiences more real and creative ---also destructive!--- than passionate motion, through which, as Eugenio Trías explained in his admirable and reckless Treatise on PassionThe Consejo General del Poder Judicial (CGPJ) has approved a report favorable to the preliminary draft of the Organic Law of Efficiency of Public Justice, which includes the creation of the so-called "reviewable permanent prison" (prisión permanente revisable) for cases of multiple murders, murders of minors, and sexual assaults followed by murder.we achieve a deep self-knowledge and possibly some of the greatest achievements of our lives. Lovers reach that stage with the flight forward that, in Wagnerian opera leads to death, transcends the sensible world. He dead, Isolde sings: "Soft and quiet, how he smiles, how sweetly he opens his eyes (…) Supreme joy! (Highest Lust!)".
There is, of course, a sui generis Platonism in the management of eros that we find again in Wagner, the extinction of the will not being totally equivalent to the form of supreme goodness enabled by Buddhist detachment, which so influenced Schopenhauer. It represents the culmination of a "passion-love" that subjugates and liberates at the same time: it extracts the best from the person from the awareness of the suffering that accompanies egoic identity, and which must be left behind to truly see. Thus, the portal to a transcendent reality opens, conveyed with words that vanish like mirrors of the sun on the navigated waves. Lise Davidsen culminates the journey with the ecstatic Mild und leise to the delight of the audience. The will ceases to desire, a superhuman spell.