Completing the Gesamtkunstwerk
Barry Millington is intrigued by a ‘Tristan’ with dancers in the Cotswolds
Longborough Festival Opera, 16 June 2015
Having theorised at length about the Gesamtkunstwerk, in which all the arts would be combined in an over-arching totality, Wagner unaccountably failed to include dance when he came to compose Tristan und Isolde. It’s an omission that Carmen Jakobi, in her production for Longborough Festival Opera, has rectified. In a Jungian approach intended to represent the ‘choreography of the soul’, a female dancer embodies Tristan’s anima and a male dancer Isolde’s animus. The idea is not new: choreography and mime have been appearing in productions of the Ring for some years now, notably in Budapest, Munich and a co-production seen in Berlin and Milan. It’s a development to which I’m not unsympathetic: not only because it could be said to be in accordance with Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk principles, but also because I find the conjunction of music and choreographed movement uniquely powerful.
Everything depends, however, on its execution. Two examples must suffice to demonstrate where it succeeds in Jakobi’s production – for me at least. The dancers appear at various points in the great Act II love duet, their entwining limbs a beautiful and physical expression of sensuality that compensates in part for the lack of that quality in the bare, ascetic sets (rectangular or cubist blocks evocatively lit). Even more effective is the passage in Act III where Tristan hallucinates about Isolde crossing the water to him. Here the dancer movingly embodies the complex of sensual feelings and anxiety vying for supremacy in Isolde’s brain. Elsewhere I’m less sure, but one’s reaction is bound to depend on the extent to which one finds the music an all-encompassing carrier of expressive content or merely a collaborative partner.
Dancers aside, the production doesn’t contribute a lot: the characters are moved around efficiently – the fights at the end are an embarrassing exception – rather than imaginatively. Rachel Nicholls’ Isolde is powerful yet nuanced: any shortcomings were largely swept away by a deeply impressive Liebestod. Peter Wedd’s Tristan similarly drew on substantial reserves of tone but was always grateful on the ear: no mean achievement. Frode Olsen (a more than satisfactory King Mark) has a big voice which however needs to be more centred. Catherine Carby and Stuart Pendred acquitted themselves well as Brangäne and Kurwenal.
The virtues of Anthony Negus’s Wagner conducting have been lauded for many years, not least in this journal, and one looked forward to his Tristan with keen anticipation. Certainly there was much to enjoy and admire: Negus conducts with a rare intelligence and sensibility, and his detailed work with the singers once again pays off. To my ears, however, the orchestral results were not quite on a par with those of the Ring two years ago. Inevitably, perhaps, the size of the orchestra was scaled down from the usual corpus of players, though unlike the Ring, all designated instruments were present. It may have been for this reason that the orchestral sonorities seemed to have less bloom than before and that the layering of textures was less arresting. Fortunately, the best came at the end when, against a backdrop of indigo light, Negus provided for Nicholls’ glorious Liebestod an orchestral upholstery of glowing tone and heartwarming amplitude.