Robert Tanitch reviews ENO’s Tristan and Isolde at London Coliseum
Richard Wagner’s opera has not been seen at ENO for some time. It was, initially, thought to be unperformable. The planned premiere in 1861 was abandoned after 77 rehearsals.
Stuart Skelton and Heidi Melton
Tristan and Isolde are up there with the great lovers: Lancelot and Guinevere, Romeo and Juliet, Orpheus and Eurydice, Pyramus and Thisbe, Marguerite and Armand.
The story of the adultery between a Cornish knight and an Irish princess has been told many times. They drink a potion, thinking it is the elixir of death only to find it’s an elixir of love and their passion is unleashed.
For those who have been brought up on portraits of Tristan and Isolde as seen through the Pre-Raphaelite medieval eyes of Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Waterhouse and Leighton, it is a shock to be confronted on stage with Stuart Skelton and Heidi Melton
Wagner took his inspiration not only from the 12th century Celtic legend, but also from Arthur Schopenhauer and from his own unconsummated (?) affair with another man’s wife, Mathilde Wesendonck.
His letter to Franz Liszt has been much quoted:
Stuart Skelton and Craig Colclough
“Since I have never enjoyed he real happiness of love in my life, I want to erect another monument to this most beautiful of dreams in which love will be properly sated from beginning to end. I have planned it in my head a Tristan and Isolde, the simplest but the most full-blooded musical conception.”
The opera is full of rapture and scorching torture of grief. Isolde and Tristan are Night and Day and the only way their love can be eternal is in death.
The music and the singing are thrilling. Edward Gardner conducts.
Daniel Kramer is ENO’s unexpected new artistic director. The high spot of his production is the great love duet in Act 2 when the music, the singing, the design and the lighting really gel. The ecstatic sexual passion is played out in the rocks of the moon. The striking vaginal design is by Anish Kapoor.
Heidi Melton, Karen Cargill , Stuart Skelton
Stuart Skelton is particularly impressive in his delirium in Act 3. The backdrop bleeds. Matthew Rose as King Marke, the cuckolded husband, and Karen Carghill as Isolde’s servant impress, too.
Heidi Melton in Act 1 has to sing whilst she is being dressed, an unnecessary distraction. Other Kramer distractions include Samurai warriors, hospital beds and servants in foppish wigs. Tristan’s servant, with his stepladder and telescope, is made to behave as if he is in Samuel Beckett’s End Game.
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Images courtesy of Catherine Ashmore
