Saturday, March 22, 2008
HD Liebestod
Prelude: I enjoyed last week's HD broadcast from the Met of Peter Grimes so decided to reprise the experience with Tristan und Isolde.
Someday I will write at length how Wagner's work is to opera is similar to what the Grateful Dead is to rock 'n roll. Basically, there is an individuality, an impact and and scope to Wagner that by revolutionary audacity and uniqueness sets it a part. The same can be said of the Dead. The world of Wagner is cast from ancient tales and legends, the Dead from the Americana, music and legends of what Greil Marcus calls "The Old Weird America." I was thinking about this comparison on the way to the movie theater for the telecast and, even more so, when I spotted a derelict looking Dodge van in the parking lot with a "Thanks Jerry" bumper sticker.
I arrived a half hour before show time, and once again, the first twenty rows in the right side and center sections were totally full. The predominantly older audience for these telecasts has no problem it seems showing up at around 8 for a 9:30 morning curtain.
Act One Act one of Tristan und Isolde is not a hard one for me to endure. Basically you have two strong willed women singing at each other for most of it, and in this production, Deborah Voight and Michelle DeYoung are both appealing big boned women with big hair that looks like it was done by a quality rope maker with a medieval recipe. I'm sure another commentator has made the point that if Baranagne had served the death potion instead it would have been like Strauss' Elektra or Salome in terms of length. Instead she gave them a precursor to Ecstasy, which made things a lot messier and more complicated for a while.
Partly to deal with the issues of length and the unique staging of this production, the folks at the Met enlisted an intermittent multi-screen approach wrought with lots of video control board effects. At first it reminded me of the documentary of Woodstock. One technique that was especially cheesy was the center placement of a wide shot with a border, making it look like a post card and zooming (cheapest of all camera "moves") into it. This is the Met? It kind of came off like community access video at times.
Act Two Actually, in this act the video presentation worked best. This production is almost entirely backlit of movie light wattage behind a layer of seamless muslin . The second act consists primarily of the love duet between Tristan and Isolde. The surface of the action for the actors in the second and third act is a large diamond shape platform at a 20-30 degree angle with vertical lines. For their tryst the actors are blue and back lighted silhouettes singing one of the most famous and amazing duets in opera history. Reversed screen angles created some interesting converged compositions of the lines of the platform and the connected lovers as the split screens somewhat matched or contrasted against each other.
Of course King Marke and company come to spoil the love potion party. Although the king's long solo sequence is not as tedious as Wotan in act two of the Valkyrie it certainly is a kind of buzz kill, at least to the somewhat uninitiated.
Act ThreeTristan is stabbed in act two, but takes almost all of act three to die. And here is where another issue came in to play. This act, except for another King Marke bit and the big soprano blow out at the end belongs to Tristan. The performer for the telecast turned out to be a fellow by the name of Robert Dean Smith , one of the last minute substitutions that had to be issued for this stand of Tristan because of Ben Heppner's virus. It was interesting to see him being blocked backstage prior to the curtain being raised on the act. And Deborah Voight in her interview segment confessed to the lack of rehearsal with her Tristans on this run, although she had sung with Smith in the past. So with those conditions you have to give the guy some credit, but he looks like Will Ferrell's younger, stockier brother. In a Wagner opera not everything can be perfect, eh? I try to suspend my thoughts of Rob Burgandy, Ron's brother who anchored TV news in the seventies in Spokane or Wenatchee as I see Tristan unravel towards the final moments of his passionate life.
After the Curtain It felt great to see a Wagner opera after many years. I was far less familiar with Tristan und Isolde than other major works, so that was part of the adventure for me here. I listened to a recording for the week prior by the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig and Chor des Mitteldeutschen Rundfu (for real!), but one can never really feel prepared well enough for these demanding experiences, especially when you are as occasional a Wagnerite as I am.
Length in Wagner can be overstressed, basically Tristan is three full CDs long with bathroom breaks in between. It was kind of unfortunate that a great early spring day for us coincided with the broadcast, so I took a few minutes to avoid the commotion of hundreds of elders trying to negotiate their cars out of the parking lot and consume the afternoon with a stroll through Holladay Park with the big chord progressions of classic and tragic romance still echoing.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:59 PM
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