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New York Review of Books, Jul 4, 2018 |
by Larry Wolff |
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Wagner: Konzert, New York, Carnegie Hall, 12. April 2018 (Tristan, 2. Akt) |
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Wagner sets unresolved longing to glorious music in Tristan and Isolde
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"Hörst du sie noch?" (Do you still hear them?) asks Isolde, listening for
hunting horns receding in the distance by night. It is the first libretto
line of Act Two of Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, which was performed
in concert by the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall on April 12.
The Boston horns were heard playing from offstage, very softly, as if from
far away. Isolde waits for her husband's hunting party to be gone so that
Tristan, her lover, can return to join her for the night. But Isolde's maid
Brangäne still hears the horns and warns her mistress, "You are deceived by
the violence of your desire." The ear itself is deceived by the longing of
the listener. Isolde can't hear the horns that Wagner has written into the
score.
Tristan und Isolde is an opera about longing, with a prelude
whose unresolved musical line expresses the intensity of unsatisfiable
desire and a famous signature chord (F, B, D sharp, G sharp) whose chromatic
tension suggests the impossibility of finding satisfaction. The longing in
Carnegie Hall was focused on tenor Jonas Kaufmann, who has repeatedly failed
to give satisfaction in New York over recent years, with several
cancellations, notably at the Metropolitan Opera. He is easily the most
celebrated tenor in the world today, sings to great acclaim in a variety of
styles, from Wagner to Puccini, and presents as glamorously handsome in
almost any operatic costume. At the end of this performance, he was
collecting so many bouquets that it began to seem a little insulting to the
marvellous Finnish soprano singing Isolde, Camilla Nylund.
Kaufmann-singing-Tristan meant Carnegie Hall was predictably sold out for
this exploratory attempt at a proverbially challenging tenor role. In 1959,
the great Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson required three tenors to match her
in one performance of Tristan at the Met, one tenor for each of the three
acts. Kaufmann sang only the second act at Carnegie Hall, but has announced
that he eventually plans to sing the complete role in all its complexity:
valorous knight and driven adulterer, irresistibly romantic and deeply
treacherous. Act Two shows him in both modes, first immersed in the night of
love with Isolde and then indicted for betrayal when King Marke, her husband
and his friend, returns unexpectedly from the hunting party. Without Act
One, which features a love potion as the pretext for passion, Act Two
becomes a more frankly recognisable drama of adultery.
Two
different endings In 1939, with Europe on the brink of war, the
Swiss writer Denis de Rougemont published a path-breaking book, Love in the
Western World, in which he observed that the fundamental model of passionate
romance in Western culture, dating from the Middle Ages and encompassing the
tale of Tristan and Isolde (as well as that of Lancelot and Guinevere), was
adultery, not marriage. The composing and writing of Tristan (Wagner always
wrote his own librettos) in the late 1850s anticipated Wagner's great
passion for Cosima von Bülow, the wife of his good friend and devoted
admirer the conductor Hans von Bülow. It was he who conducted the première
of Tristan und Isolde in Munich in 1865 – two months after Cosima gave birth
to Wagner's daughter, who was given the name Isolde.
While the
opera's forbidden love concludes in rapturous death (the love-death of
Isolde's Liebestod), Wagner's relationship with Cosima ended in proper
marriage and a comfortable family establishment at Bayreuth after his wife
died and Cosima divorced her husband. She presided as family matriarch for
almost 50 years after Wagner's death in a spirit of musical devotion and
venomous anti-Semitism, and was still alive when Hitler was first welcomed
at Bayreuth in the 1920s.
Marathon love duet Act
Two of Tristan offers the longest and most demanding love duet in opera – 40
minutes of on-stage intimacy with the music simulating sex and darkly
anticipating death. The Met production by Mariusz Treliński in 2016 set the
love duet in a ship's engine room, while the 2015 Bayreuth production by
Katharina Wagner (the great-granddaughter of the composer and Cosima) placed
the second act in a prison torture chamber. There was no such grim staging
at Carnegie Hall, where the performers wore formal dress, and Andris Nelsons
conducted with a brilliantly light touch and delicate dynamics.
Kaufmann is renowned for cultivating a carefully controlled vocalisation
that enables him to rein in the big, dark instrument of his voice to the
most restrained piano volume. That worked to excellent effect in his
Carnegie recital of Schubert's song cycle Die Schöne Müllerin in January,
and even more strikingly in this performance of Tristan. Nylund's soprano is
far softer in grain than most Wagnerian exponents. She triumphed as the
elegant Richard Strauss heroine Arabella in Vienna last year, and sang
Isolde here with a silvery voice (Birgit Nilsson was considered steely),
surfing the sound of Nelsons' big Wagnerian orchestra.
The very best
of the duet, though, came when Nelsons allowed Nylund and Kaufmann to seem
almost to be whispering their love. "O sink hernieder, Nacht der Liebe"
(Descend, night of love) emerged from near silence, the two voices slowly
trading lines – two lovers finishing one another's adulterous musical
thoughts, interwoven with the exquisite voices of the woodwinds.
Flawless control and expressiveness Nelsons was born in
Riga, the beautiful Baltic city where Wagner himself, in his 20s, learned
how to be a conductor in the 1830s. Kaufmann and Nylund sang mostly from
opposite sides of the Carnegie podium, separated by the conductor, which
added something seductively tentative to their adulterous endeavour. The
conductor offered them guidance from the orchestra, the French horn giving
Tristan the colouring of his fervour, while Isolde seemed to find a kindred
spirit in the plaintive oboe.
If Nelsons was coaching newcomers in
the leads, he had Bayreuth regulars in the important supporting roles of
Brangäne, who stands watch over the lovers, and King Marke, who returns
early from the hunt to surprise and reproach them in a long and beautiful
monologue. Japanese mezzo soprano Mihoko Fujimura and German bass Georg
Zeppenfeld performed their respective roles at Carnegie confidently, without
scores. Fujimura sang her most impressive music from off-stage, and her rich
tones filled Carnegie Hall, as she let the lovers know that she was keeping
watch over them – for Brangäne knows that the lovers hear only the music of
their own longing. Zeppenfeld sang feelingly of his betrayal by a friend and
his beloved wife's infidelity, and Nelsons brought out the deepest tones of
the orchestra – cellos, basses, bassoons and bass clarinet – to enhance the
colourings of King Marke's basso monologue.
When the suffering king
asks his friend, "Warum mir diese Schmach?" (Why this shame for me?),
Tristan responds slowly: "O König, das kann ich dir nicht sagen / Und was du
frägst, das kannst du nie erfahren." (O King, I cannot tell you that / and
what you're asking, you will never be able to discover.) Kaufmann invested
the questioning verb to ask – frägst – with particularly gorgeous sustained
tone, but after that, Tristan had nothing more to say to Marke and turned to
Isolde, as the music became slower even than before (langsamer als zuvor).
An English horn, the saddest of all instruments, began very softly, piano,
in the stillness of Carnegie Hall, the rising theme of Tristan's longing,
and then the other woodwinds joined forte in an irresolvably tense Tristan
chord. Kaufmann, now in his vocal element, with flawless control and
expressiveness, invited the woman he loved to follow him to another land,
which they both knew to be the realm of death.
There is always
something astonishing about this moment in the opera, when, in front of the
king and all his courtiers, Tristan and Isolde speak only to each other. The
Boston's horns joined Tristan in issuing his dark invitation to join him in
"das Wunderreich der Nacht" (the wondrous empire of night), Kaufmann
ascending to a lovely sustained D-natural for "Nacht" but saving his
sweetest note for the pianissimo E-flat that concluded his invitation, with
the second syllable of her abbreviated name, "Isold". These lovers have been
intent upon their own self-destruction from the beginning and now sensuously
court suicidal self-annihilation in an exchange that everyone can hear and
no one can fathom. The wonder of Tristan is that treacherous though he is,
indifferent to friendship and dangerous to everyone, especially the woman he
loves, we identify with him and respond to him. The wonder of Kaufmann in
this role for the first time was that he could make Tristan's invitation so
seductive.
Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, Act II, with music director
and conductor Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, was
performed at Carnegie Hall on April 12, 2018.
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