Hearing the Light
reflections on the significance to be found in Wagner's stage directions...
broadcast on BBC Radio Three, 7th June, 2003
Some years ago, as he left for Australia, a friend gave me a drawing by Powys Evans, whoever he was, entitled "Sir Tristan, showing the urgent need of the Love Potion". It’s clearly an image of Lauritz Melchior, the great Danish tenor; and it must have been done in those heady times when he was singing the role at Covent Garden in the mid-1930s, with conductors such as Sir Thomas Beecham and Fritz Reiner... The drawing captures nicely an ironic blend of nobility and the ridiculous, Melchior in a silly winged hat and warrior's skirt, his tummy a great balcony over his much taxed knees.
It’s the epitome of what we consider laughable in old Wagner productions, a legend-look we’d call stodgey, fousty, cardboardy and so on; clearly even in the 30s it inspired a snigger or two.
These days it’s come to seem even more ludicrous thanks to two tendencies since the war. First of all, towards poetic abstraction - the Wieland look, established as reverent revolution by Wagner’s grandson when the Bayreuth Festival was revived in the early 50s - and subsequently towards brutal abstraction, with all the sensuality of a multi-storey car-park, and offered up by designers who seem to stamp it upon any opera they happen to be doing...
It all leads to the temptation to overlook Wagner's stage instructions.
And I can’t help but wonder, "Hmmm, what are we missing?"
After all, Disney cartoons manage to retain the credibility of a legend- or mythological-look, breeches & tunics & what-have-you; what's more, Picasso showed us that antique costume can be given a fully contemporary look. The best we seem to get in the opera world is some muddle where you have a tunic-Tristan with goblet & sword lost in a subway...
Oh but the music’s all so glorious so what does it matter?
Lots, say I.
Wagner loved & valued the visual arts & architecture and in the composition of his dramas he had a clear image in mind for each scene. If we spend after-dinner time in his company, through the pages of the Diaries made by Cosima, his loyal wife and transcriber of every quip, fantasy or diatribe, we hear how often he holds forth about art — especially about Titian, a family favourite. (A Titian Tristan, now that would be a treat... )
Wagner had an eye. It may have been a standard-issue velvety Victorian eye but it was an eye nonetheless; and just as he was pretty much responsible for the innovative insistence on dimming the lights in the auditorium during performance, he was also the first composer of opera to be quite long-windedly precise about the stage settings...
Now, I'm not saying we should re-create the décor he had; nor am I saying that the Wieland abstract look fails or betrays him though the usual problem with abstraction is that within minutes of the first act opening you know just about exactly what it’s all going to look like & what they’re getting at throughout the evening... Conceptually abstrct productions back only one horse, while Wagner runs with so many... All I’m saying is, a closer look at Wagner’s indications repays the effort, both in appreciation of the work and in staging it.
Take a small detail: the third act we’re about to hear is set on battlements overlooking the sea and overhung by a tree. Nature... nature that’s impassive, but sheltering. We should see this, it’s part of what’s at stake — or put it this way, if we don’t see it there should be a damned good reason.
Nature & Song are the central lovers in Wagner’s entire output, — there, have that to dine out on.
What’s more, it’s not just any old tree, it’s a linden tree he asks for: the Lindenbaum, which in Germanic lore symbolizes the forlorn lover's sad resting place — epitomized by Schubert in the song cycle Winterreise... Yes, it's a small detail but it helps, like a little turn or twiddle from the third oboe somewhere or other - which, after all, we wouldn’t dare fiddle with...
It's a small signal of resonance.
And it signals that Wagner cares about what we see.
That must be part of his concept of Gesamtkunstwerk - whatever he meant by that; literally it’s 'an art-work gathering all the arts'. Commentators have made a great meal of this, sometimes misguided by the grandiose mistranslation 'total work of art'; and it has to be said, Wagner rather relished making a meal of it himself, a feast of red herring. But the idea is at least that "what you see is part of what you hear"...
And what you see is part of what you understand — part of how you understand what you understand...
The obvious visual reference throughout, is the sea. The score is full of picture-painting, more than enough to make a Debussy fidget. The first act heaves, tacks & buffets, the music a-swell with currents and undercurrents — creating an imagery true both of the vessel and the lovers’ hearts. The third act is set on a cliff-top castle-garden, in the sun, overlooking an empty, cold-hearted sea. The music evokes tides —
[HUMS] druhhhhh dah deh-uh - druhhhhh dah deh-uh
— a passive monotonous unthinking rhythm, the sea now the faceless dispenser of irony. It always makes me think of Breughel’s famous picture of the Fall of Icarus, into an uncaring sea, unnoticed by the ploughman...
And the second act? - is resolutely land-locked as fate stamps its seal. Tristan lies there like a butterfly pinned down by daylight. There is no escape. In Roland Aeschlimann’s sets at Glyndebourne the space is suitably cramped & restricted, defined by the ever-present abstract but rather too solid shape of wave or womb or arching tree.
In each case the setting exactly fits the psychology, with the music their catalyst. Odd as it may seem with this idolised composer, the descriptive power of Wagner's writing, his capacity to give us tone-poem precision, is if anything underrated
- though I'm aware you might use that as an excuse not to bother to integrate what you see with what you hear, if what you hear is already so visually charged. Hmm, poor show, all the same. Surely, Gesamtkunstwerk cries out for a teamwork of the arts, isn't that the point?
Wagner is just as careful with the pattern of daylight in the three acts, which gives a gentle little echo of the tormented banter between the lovers about day & night, appearance & reality, illusion & insight. The opera is rich in a juggle of paradox about the significance of day - deceitful day, the lovers call it, because sight of the superficial surface of things burns away their poetic dream-truth within.
So, Wagner asks that the first shafts of hateful daylight in Act Two pierce the lovers' dream exactly as the King blunders in on them; and that in Act Three a soft dusk settles on the scene during Isolde's Transfiguration. Not much; but enough. Still, I’ve yet to see this done with touching effect.
[Equally, the libretto is full of invocations to see, often in the form of sad rhetorical gestures of the sort "don't you see?"... Most poignant of these is perhaps the way "don't you see?" is the basis of Isolde’s Transfiguration — the so-called Liebestod — as she gazes upon Tristan's corpse lying there in a state out of the reach of all the plodding others with their homilies and sentiments.]
And what is unseen makes its point too. Hence for instance the scarey premonition suggested by the stage instruction not to have King Mark come on stage at the fall of the first act curtain, during those fatalistically vacant fanfares — fanfares which are meant to come from on stage as part of a bustling panoply magnificent in flag-fluttering grandeur — and irony.
It's a very powerful touch, a sure theatrical instinct to leave us in that fragile nervous hollow so well put by the music and by the sudden dislocation of where the sound comes from.
But why is it so frequently ignored, with the king popping up and looking distressed or uncomprehending? [The recently revived English National Opera production committed this act of deaf disrespect; so too even the concert performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra last year at the Barbican! — while at Glyndebourne the unwanted intrusion was even more distractingly convoluted by having Melot tramp in, in outrage!] It’s so much more harrowing without him clunking on while we’re flooded into the lovers’ dream & dread amidst a suddenly revealed clamour & tumult. The old fool will tramp in soon enough. Wagner knew what he was doing.
‘Suddenly revealed’? Well, that’s part of a similarly inspired play of curtains in the first act, a sustained strategy of manipulation of what we see. It’s as if Wagner fancies himself as Titian - or Picasso — with very cunning shifts of visible space achieved by the curtain that separates Isolde’s ‘area’ from the rest of the deck. This opening-&-shutting gives a visual underpinning to all those criss-cross paradoxes in the lovers’ banter of opposites... day-&-night, truth-&-illusion, trust-&-treachery.
It goes like this...
Wagner wants the work to open with Isolde in tent-like quarters on deck, ‘rich in carpets’, with a curtain shielding her from the rest... We’re not supposed to see the full extent of the deck, let alone Tristan, till Isolde has Brangäne open the curtain that shields her couch. The music gives us a claustrophobic texture of tapestry right from the start; Isolde complains of being stifled. The pent-up-ness in her heart can be heard and it should be seen on stage, that’s what Wagner wants:
Compare that with the sense of salty wide horizon as the curtain is first opened and the sailor sings of the sad wind...
Then, the confrontation between Tristan and Isolde begins with heavy steps -
[HUMS] deeeeeeeee-da-rumm-'tumm...
— that aren’t meant to be Tristan's advance (as it's so often done, but not here at Glyndebourne) but rather Isolde’s deliberate — and deliberating — slow retreat to the couch, in what Wagner called a 'pantomime'. Tristan’s is supposed to step in through the barely opened curtain that’s quickly closed behind him.
Wagner’s instructions bring out well the cunning of the situation, the intricate way in which Isolde needs to rush her own defences, to fool herself into seizing the destiny she knows is hers. It makes for an intense, rich scene as Tristan and Isolde sink further and further into their complicity of knowing-deceptions, deceptions that deceive neither of them.
The intensity is intimate, maybe more so even than the sexual intimacy of the love scene in the second act: each takes the other by storm — as well as taking their selves by storm. Their passions veer from formulas of etiquette to cryptic utterances we’re none of us sure we fully understand. The dire consequences become even more frightful if, as they near port and the curtain is flung open, the bright & bustling world of sailors & fluttering entourage floods in around them all of a sudden, — which it can only do if something has shielded us from that wide world during their confrontation.
Then, when the lovers are interrupted by the hunting party in the second act, Wagner asks that Tristan should shield Isolde from the others’ view, with a cape, just as they were secluded from the others when she gave them the potion on deck. It’s a helpful touch, pointing the pivot between actions & consequences.
As for the love scene, oh dear! Wagner asks for it to be set on a "flowery bank", Nature at its most wondrous & fragile — as the hunting party toots and patters in the distance through the trees. It’s a reference both to the betrayal of Christ, as he grapples with the cup of destiny, in a garden, and to a more general mediaeval resonance, like a tapestry of unicorns & maiden princesses upon a floor of flowers... Have you ever seen it staged as sensitively — or sensually - as that?
This air of courtliness actually informs the whole work, unobtrusively. The strange dotted rhythms Wagner uses at certain points —
[HUMS] di-yumm-ta-tumm ta-yutti-ti-tumm
— gestures like that, very visual music — make sense to me as suggestions of a courtly gait, a formal step, a tapestry-like poise all the more potent if [re-]enforced by costume and décor. At Glyndebourne there are such costumes, so it’s a start... But we seem too timid in this day & age really to follow through Wagner’s allusions to anything approaching a mediaeval aura, the Courtly Love look I can well imagine a Disney — or Picasso — bringing off in their own manner. [The shame is,] How often does a Tristan staging inspire that sigh of "How magical"?
No, we prefer our productions to ‘interpret’, which usually means a free-&-easy of alteration or superimposition. The result can indeed illuminate one of the strands in Wagner’s fabric. But it seldom illuminates the fabric as a whole. And it reinforces the gloomy hunch that our culture can’t produce its own creative originals – it can only faff about with others.
And as with Wagner’s stage instructions in Tristan and Isolde, the medieval resonances have much to offer our understanding of the work’s central themes.
The dressage element of courtly attire gives, very simply, a poetic imagery to the world of appearances, the "suits & trappings" life that the lovers seek to escape. The stilted courtly rhythm is often associated especially with the two shadow-characters, hand-maiden Brangäne and henchman Kurwenal. Beside the yearningly over-demanding larger-than-life heroes they serve, they’re truly earthbound — she with her servile fusspot nature, he with the bluff-blokiness of a loyal lieutenant. Both of them, as well as the King, are reprimanded at one point or another, for their complete incomprehension of the lovers' world.
Wagner's score was revolutionary; but he knew that he had also to represent the old order in his overturning of it. And his visual references are always carefully thought through to contribute to this drama.
At the very close, Isolde sinks lifeless on Tristan's corpse - lying there in a state out of reach of all the plodding others with their homilies and sentiments; and Wagner asks for the King to bless the lovers. It’s an instruction few directors follow, I suppose in case our reaction is to think, as we’d put it, "Is he out of it?"
But what more accurate feeling could we have, after all?