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| MATTHEW TAYLOR |
LOVE
YOU TO DEATH
By John Engstrom
Every
so often there’s a musical event of so exquisite a caliber that when it’s over you
are both dazed and breathlessly aware that the chances of ever hearing its like
again are slim. Bostonian music lovers--especially
ones who are starved for live performances of music by the ever-provocative
German Romantic opera composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883)—had such a revelation
on April 5 and 7. On those dates, the
Boston Symphony Orchestra and conductor Andris Nelsons, both clearly on a roll ever
since the sensational Shostakovich Fourth Symphony in March, and joined by an international
ensemble of very classy singers, out-did themselves with a luminous concert
presentation of Act Two of “Tristan und Isolde.”
Everything
about this BSO event was optimal: the orchestra, singers and conductor created
jointly an unforgettable landscape of sound and emotion, all of it enhanced to
the point of transcendence by the magnificent acoustics of Symphony Hall, where
you can be seated in a distant hole in the wall and yet hear everything
perfectly.
It
was evident that Nelsons—by now an experienced Wagner conductor who will lead “Lohengrin”
in England later this year and has performed that piece in the Wagner Festival
of Bayreuth, Germany--had fully metabolized Wagner’s rich, beautiful and
dramatic score. His confident grasp of
the vast architecture of the act (which ran for about 75 minutes) while
attending to a wealth of instrumental and vocal detail was a wonder and privilege
to witness. He led into an excitingly
propulsive opening and drew heart-stopping sounds from the hunting horns (over
a muffled drumroll) that tell Isolde, the Irish princess now married unhappily
to King Marke of Cornwall, that her lover is nearby. Nelsons and the singers imbued the text with
such intense urgency that the quarrel between Isolde and her hopelessly
cautious serving-maid Brangane over whether to extinguish a torch as a signal
to Tristan became what it really is: a life-and-death struggle.
Musical
highlights followed one another in stunning succession. When whispering strings segued into the
famous lovers’ duet—“O sinkt hernieder, Nacht der Liebe” (“Descend, O Night of
Love”), said to be opera’s longest single-take love duet—you could hear a pin
drop in Symphony Hall. Throughout the
act, with its dense interweavings of voices and orchestra, Nelsons navigated
the music seamlessly between soft passages that were phrased with exquisite
tenderness, and high drama given its full force and value. The BSO has done this Wagner act twice
before, in 1972 under William Steinberg and in 1981 under Seiji Ozawa, both
times with superior vocal forces; but the expressive output of the Nelsons team
on this occasion was one for the history books.
Written
from 1857 to 1859 but not world-premiered until six years later, and composed
from Wagner’s own libretto based on medieval sources, “Tristan” is the ninth
opera by the artistic innovator and theatrical jack-of-all-trades who brought
us the epic “The Ring of the Nibelung” and the religious “Parsifal.” This work was ahead of its time at more than
one level and still strikes many listeners as sounding uniquely modern. It is, in fact, widely considered by musical
scholars and practitioners to represent the birth pang of contemporary music
because of Wagner’s revolutionary approach to tonality. (“Tristan” has been called by Wagner
biographer Ernest Newman as “of all his works the most symphonic.”) Chromaticism and dissonance take over the
score to such an extent that individual keys get submerged in an oceanic flood
of sound, achieved by means of resplendent orchestration, ambiguous harmonies,
and herculean vocal writing.
The
piece can also be read as a subversive drama because of the implication of its
plot that cheating on your spouse is OK as long as it leads to transcendental
love. Cheating on your spouse was
something this composer knew about from extensive hands-on experience: he was
doing it at the time he wrote “Tristan.”
Part of the work’s emotional subtext is the married Wagner’s probably
unconsummated infatuation with Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of one of the
composer’s wealthy patrons.
Additionally, it was under the glow of her inspiration that the composer
wrote his famous and often performed “Wesendonck Lieder,” which contain motifs
and melodies that turned up later in “Tristan.”
When
the opera—designated by the composer not as an opera but as a “Handlung,”
meaning an action, plot, or drama—world-premiered in Munich, Germany in 1865,
the married Wagner was carrying on with the married Cosima Liszt von Bulow,
wife of the conductor Hans von Bulow who helmed the premiere “Tristan”
performances. Cosima later became
Wagner’s devoted wife and the mother of his three children. The scandalous affair was widely publicized,
to the great embarrassment of the parties involved; and many in the first
audiences saw in the medieval love story enacted on the Munich stage an
especially juicy roman a clef.
Wagner
wrote “Tristan” in different places all over Europe; the second act came to him
while he was living in Venice, Italy. Before
he started work on the piece, he wrote to Franz Liszt, his musical colleague
and future father-in-law: “Never in my life having enjoyed the happiness of
love, I shall erect a memorial to this loveliest of dreams in which from the
first to the last, love shall, for once, find utter repletion.”
But
the kind of love that “Tristan” depicts and celebrates isn’t only romantic and
sexual. It’s metaphysical, with much of
the text concerned with symbolic polarities of day and night, light and dark,
life and death--and its true consummation can only be the amorous couple
entwined in a deathly embrace. As they
merge spiritually in Act Two, they sing,
“Let us die and never part—united—nameless—endless—no more Tristan—no more
Isolde…” “Their situation,” the
composer’s great-granddaughter Nike Wagner has observed insightfully, “shares
something with that of both the mystic and the existentialist. Tristan and Isolde are in fact secularized
mystics. Their own experience of love is
as ineffable as the mystics’ experience of God, but their souls are modern.”
“Tristan”
has earned a niche in intellectual history because of its embodiment of ideas
by the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), whose work and ideas Wagner
studied and incorporated into his later works for the musical stage. The composer and philosopher never met in
person, but it didn’t hurt Schopenhauer’s cause with Wagner that the philosopher
considered music to be the most superior art form of all. The co-author with Goethe of a book on color
theory, Schopenhauer was the first to introduce Buddhist ideas into German
philosophy. In his study were busts of
Buddha and philosopher Immanuel Kant.
Schopenhauer’s pessimistic, atheistic writings—in particular “The World
as Will and Representation” (first published in 1819)—cast a powerful spell
over not just Wagner but such luminaries of the life of the mind as Tolstoy,
Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw, Carl Jung, Jorge Luis Borges and Samuel
Beckett.
There’s
been an abundance of terrific recordings of “Tristan” over the years, but the
chances of hearing and seeing it live remain few and far between, as they are
for Wagner operas in general. It seems
that the world surface is not crawling with Wagner singers at the top of their
game. Efforts of the valiant Boston
Wagner Society notwithstanding, Wagner-loving Bostonians have been starved for
local performances of works by their favorite composer-dramatist--who remains
anathema to many because of his notorious views on race--ever since the
Metropolitan Opera discontinued its regional tours in 1986. The Wagner operas
that I saw for the first time, with the Met in Boston, were “Tannhauser” and “Die
Meistersinger von Nurnberg.” The last
Wagnerian undertakings in the city were the Boston Lyric Opera’s “Flying
Dutchman” and Odyssey Opera’s “Rienzi,” both in 2013, the bicentenary year of
Wagner’s birth.
Contributing
to strong public anticipation of the BSO’s “Tristan” program last month was
superstar German tenor Jonas Kaufmann in the strenuous part of Tristan. Possessed
of a warm, dark and burnished sound, seemingly indestructible technique and
compelling dramatic presence, Kaufmann continues to be one of the most
polished, versatile and charismatic opera and lieder singers in classical
music. This was his second appearance
with the BSO and Nelsons: he sang a passage from Wagner’s “Lohengrin” here in
2014 in the gala debut concert for the conductor. In a recent WCRB interview the richly gifted
singer stated that he wants to sing the complete part of Tristan onstage,
“probably in 3 years.” A “singer’s singer” who is renowned for his assured
portrayals of “spinto” roles in opera--parts that lie between the lyric and
dramatic ends of the vocal spectrum--Kaufmann has made 24 DVDs, one of them of
Wagner’s “Parsifal” at the Metropolitan Opera, and 21 CD albums, including an
award-winning anthology of Wagner arias.
Four
of the six guest artists in the “Tristan” concert were making their
BSO-Symphony Hall debuts. All of them
sang with dramatic command and vocal luster.
Finnish soprano Camilla Nylund portrayed Isolde, an impetuous, passionate
lover whose fate at the end of the opera is to die on Tristan’s expired body
after singing the famous (and often performed) “Liebestod” (or “Love-Death”). Nylund’s voice has a light, pure tonal quality
that blended well with Kaufmann’s elegant tenor in passages in which the two
sang together. German bass Georg Zeppenfeld brought monumental
voice and emotional pathos to the part of Isolde’s cuckolded husband, King
Marke, who is devastated when he finds himself betrayed by the knight whom he
had loved as a son. Welsh tenor Andrew
Rees sang the part of the jealous knight Melot, whose tip to the Cornish king about
an impending rendezvous leads to the surprise discovery of the adulterous
lovers in flagrante delicto. Rees
brought such intensity to his short appearance that even if you were in the
“nose-bleed sections” of the house you could feel Melot’s searing anger and
venom.
Another
artist new to the BSO was Japanese mezzo Mihoko Fujimara as Brangane, Isolde’s
caring but disconcerted serving-maid, who (in Act One) inadvertently supplies
the love potion that triggers the adulterous passion of her mistress and
Tristan. It was Fujimara who, unexpectedly,
contributed one of the evening’s musico-dramatic highlights in a sequence that,
oddly enough, required her to be off-stage.
As Act Two opens—at night in Cornwall--Isolde commands Brangane to keep
watch over the trysting lovers from a nearby tower. At the height of the couple’s rapturously
death-seeking duet, Brangane issues an extended warning that danger is lurking
and the couple had better be on their guard.
“Beware! Beware!” she sings; “Soon the night will pass.”
The
haunting, lonely passage unfolds over ravishing instrumentation. Many leading mezzos have done well by it, and
Fujimara (who has recorded Brangane in a “Tristan” for EMI Records) sang with
warmth and feeling--but she was more than a disembodied voice. If you were seated in the second balcony off
to the side, you could see her statuesque form, unlighted, framed in an open
door at the rear of the stage. The
visual effect was striking and eloquent and did justice to the ineffable beauty
of Wagner’s score. Such an image
wouldn’t have been out of place in a high-level production in an opera house.
Rounding
out the supporting vocal forces was Boston baritone David Kravitz as Kurwenal,
Tristan’s faithful retainer. Kurwenal’s
part in Acts One and Three is considerable, but in Act Two all he has to do is
rush in ahead of the royal hunting party and blurt out, “Save yourself,
Tristan!” It was just one brief moment,
but you better believe that Kravitz—a singer well known in these parts for his
outstanding work with Odyssey Opera and Emmanuel Music—made the most of it.
The
theatrical savvy of Fujimara and the other soloists at Symphony Hall served as
a reminder that this concert was not staffed with an all-star assembly
(Kaufmann’s world fame notwithstanding).
It was a gathering of serious, skilled, accomplished theater artists who
brought to the table years of experience performing these parts in diverse
productions and venues. And the caliber
of the voices on this occasion signaled the possibility that the quality of
Wagner singing has improved since I began listening to these works more than
forty years ago. The generation of
Wagner singers who defined Bayreuth’s “golden age” of the ‘Fifties and ‘Sixties—Birgit
Nilsson, Astrid Varnay, Wolfgang Windgassen and Hans Hotter—was phasing itself out,
and its succeeding generation lacked transcendent vocal chops in spite of
dramatic gifts that were undeniable.
Preceding
the “Tristan” act on the Symphony Hall program was Wagner’s instruments-only
“Siegfried Idyll,” written in 1870 as a birthday present for his wife, Cosima. Nelson’s reading was lovely and
long-breathed, played with instrumental bravura and capturing successfully the short
piece’s emotional warmth and glow of intimacy.
There was a repeat of the all-Wagner evening on April 12 at New York’s
Carnegie Hall. If you’re a radio
listener, you could have heard the Symphony Hall concert on WCRB on April 7,
followed by a repeat broadcast on April 16.
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| EYE EYE - JENNIFER WEIGEL Viv Vassar with drawing photo texted back and forth over brunch where drawing was made with text Eye Eye. |