Hailed as the event of the season, the Met's towering new production of Tristan und Isolde lives up to the hype. It is daunting, no doubt, running a massive five hours. I was so impressed with the orchestra playing essentially four full hours of the most heart-wrenching music ever written (plus two intermissions). I also impressed myself staying awake! My new strategy is to chew gum. I also think periodically lifting my binoculars to my eyes really forced me to focus and not doze off. The Met has had some well-publicized financial woes, but the house was packed today, at what was actually an added performance after the original run sold out. And I'm very glad to have snagged a ticket to this Saturday matinee because I don't think I would've lasted at an after-work performance ending at midnight. The line to enter the opera house 10 minutes before curtain stretched the full length of Lincoln Center Plaza, and double-backed twice. I've never seen a crowd like that for the opera, with such rapturous applause. Timmy Chalamet, eat your heart out! How hard can it be really to create blockbuster opera all the time (I have a lot of ideas for the Met to attract audiences!)? I think the length actually works to its benefit. It makes it something more than just opera, but an endurance test to experience. People nowadays seek out experiences. It bodes well for the upcoming Ring cycle, which will reunite Yannick Nezet-Seguin with director Yuval Sharon and Soprano Lise Davidsen as Brunhilde. Seeing Davidsen live was incredible; this must be what it was like to see La Divina in her time.
The set by Es Devlin is unconventional but inspired. It reminded me of a camera shutter or the barrel of a Skyfall-gun or an eye (with eyelid). At times it looked like a a James Turrell (the lighting by John Torres makes the characters glow). I liked that the singers are essentially elevated above the stage, aiding sight lines. There has been criticism about the cone shape making it hard to hear the singers over the orchestra. But that didn't really bother me. There's a delicacy to Davidsen's voice in the soft piano parts--but even if you're not hearing the note necessarily, you do still hear the shape of the phrase in the continuous melody. In Act I, there is a brilliant reference to Un Chien Andalou, the Bunuel/Dali movie that famously uses the Prelude to Tristan and Liebestod. Isolde holds up a dagger to Tristan's neck and the set perfectly mirrors the blade. It's so good it made me gasp. Only later did I realize the blade cuts the "eye", just like in the iconic scene from Un Chien Andalou. In Act II, the cone reveals segments that move in opposite directions separating the lovers. The production uses doubles, actors standing in for Tristan and Isolde doing a kind of performance art in slow motion in the foreground, seated at a table Marina Abramovic style. In Act I you don't quite get the meaning behind it. But in Acts II and III, they enter another spectral plane. They look down on themselves from a heavenly vantage point. The program quotes WH Auden about the yearning of their two souls to merge, a consummation impossible in the physical realm while they have bodies, and so their doubles allow them to to "leave" their bodies behind. The final coup is the ending, notoriously tragic but here ending not just with death but with a birth, confidently recontextualizing the Liebestod.
