Even if the tenor and the soprano have lost their voices for Act III, there is always the orchestra. Your attention cannot wander during this awesome act.
PRODUCTIONS: WHAT YOU MIGHT EXPECT TO SEE
Every decent production of Tristan attempts to show the same thing: the gradual separation of the lovers from our world and their increasing isolation in their own. There are a great many ways to portray this.
The original Munich production in 1865 stressed motifs of ancient Celtic decoration. This looks rather quaint to our eyes, but the point was to achieve a sort of exoticism, and old Ireland was as exotic to those Bavarians as outer space is to us.
Tristan was perhaps the first Wagner opera to excite really new ideas in reforming stage designers. Adolphe Appia was a twenty-year-old Swiss music student who made the trek to Bayreuth for the premiere of Parsifal in 1882. He immediately grasped that the visuals were lagging behind the audios, so to speak. Over the next few years, he came to see the electric light as the medium that would make the difference in stage design. He published a book called Music and Stage Production in 1899 which contained a final chapter on his ideas for a production of Tristan. Here Appia tackled the problem head on. Since Tristan is an internal, spiritual journey, representing the outer, material world is inherently at odds with the score. Lighting should be used in new ways to signify the sensations of the basically unseeable world in which this drama unfolds.
Wild stuff for 1899! So wild that Appia didn’t get a chance to work on an actual Tristan until Toscanini invited him to design a new production at Milan’s La Scala in 1923. Appia cleared the stage of everything unessential: the ship’s mast, the trees, and, for Act II, everything except the lovers surrounded by torchlight. It bombed! The audience had no clue what they were seeing, and no patience to find out. The production was withdrawn, and opera houses around the world showed Tristan more or less at face value for the next thirty years.
When Wieland Wagner turned the opera world on its head with historic productions of Parsifal and the Ring in 1951, he, like his grandfather Richard, acted as if all his ideas sprang fully grown out of his own head, with no debt to those who went before. Naturally, anybody who knew about Appia saw the influence right away. Since Tristan was the work most ripe for Appia’s theories, it was also a clear choice for Wieland’s next production. The 1952 Tristan at Bayreuth was the ultimate in the Wieland technique that came to be known as Entrümpelung, or “cleaning out attics.” The stage was basically blank, there were no props and no sailors, courtiers, or extras on stage. In short, just the essentials. Wieland’s infallible sense of light and color told the story, and he was well aided by great singers, without whom none of this would have mattered. Thus his famous remark “Why do I need a tree on stage when I have an Astrid Varnay?”
Tristan production fashions paralleled those of the Ring for many years, at Bayreuth and elsewhere. Profound blankness gave way to ritualistic totemism and Jungian reference. After the Stonehenge craze, productions in the 1970s and 1980s tended to be abstract but cautious. For example, if you see one of these productions hauled out of mothballs, expect Act I to be represented by a really big sail. (Karajan was addicted to big sails in his Tristan productions, and others followed.) While stylistic experimentation for the Ring was meeting with success all over the world, many way-out stagings of Tristan were not well received. A 1980 Munich production populated Act III with steel objects looking like discarded war matériel, rushing water, and, in a real stretch, sheep. The audience genuinely hated it.
Recently, the artist David Hockney designed a very successful production in Los Angeles stressing, of all things, ancient Celtic motifs! The important point to make is that the world of Tristan and Isolde is not the same world we live in. Once that point is made, the details of their world are quite irrelevant. Apparently, there is no social or political critique, if that’s what Munich was attempting in 1980, quite as powerful as Wagner’s rejection of the entire physical world in the myth of Tristan. It is a different experience from the Ring.
Details of staging vary considerably. Must Isolde really “switch” the potion flasks on Brangäne, that Brangäne may switch them back? Will a torch be extinguished? Today’s directors will vacillate between Wagner’s original, literal instructions and Wieland’s commitment to nothingness, sometimes adding new or bizarre touches of their own. You will hardly ever see Isolde crumble on top of Tristan at the end. It just doesn’t work any more. Isolde understands that Tristan is not embodied in his corpse, so her union with him need not be a literal union on the floorboards. Expect to see her with arms outstretched, probably in a spotlight, attempting, with gestures, voice, and soul, to portray transformation.
PERFORMANCE HISTORY AND ESSENTIAL LORE OF TRISTAN
The puzzling score (1860) Wagner gave a series of orchestral concerts in the winter of 1860 to introduce his music to the Parisians. He rented the Théâtre Italien at his own expense, and, of course, ended up losing money. But the concerts were a success among audiences, which were attended by most of the musical luminaries of the time, including Meyerbeer. The Tristan Prelude, however, presented some problems. At the first rehearsal, the musicians freely confessed themselves clueless as to what was intended. Much yelling and bossing by Wagner and Bülow, who had come to assist, caused resentment among the French players, but eventually accomplished the task. The concert audiences were hardly less puzzled. At the third concert, someone actually hissed the Prelude, but this made the rest of the audience cheer so lustily that Wagner was moved to tears. Wagner’s French fans, who included so much of the progressive intelligentsia, were mostly won over by these concerts, since nobody could hear a single note of the Tannhäuser performances at the Opéra.
Yes, but can anyone sing it? (1864–65) The good French musicians of 1860 were not the last to throw their hands up over this one. The prominent tenor Alois Ander was engaged to sing Tristan at a projected Vienna production of 1861. Ander, apparently, did not rise above the usual stereotypes of tenors, and had great trouble remembering his music from one day to the next. When he asked the soprano how she managed to remember her music for the no-less-demanding role of Isolde, she replied that she hadn’t the faintest idea. Ander never did master the music, and he complained to anyone who would listen that it wasn’t his fault. The music was downright unsingable—especially the monumental Act III monologue. One day in October, Ander was touring the chilly crypt of an old cathedral, and his voice vanished. Experts examined him and found nothing at all wrong with his vocal cords, but no one could squeeze a note out of him. The fact that Ander had lost his voice in a crypt did nothing to dispel the aura of fatality that was accumulating around this opera.
Ander finally regained his voice the following September, but by then the Isolde was starting to have troubles. The Vienna Tristan was doomed.
So it can be sung, but it can kill you (1865) The story of the premiere of Tristan, with all its attendant backstage drama, has already been recounted as an inherent part of the Wagner biography. Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld sang the role, blew everybody away, and died within a week of the final performance.
Whatever the reasons for Schnorr’s death, it has remained a part of the mythos surrounding this opera. It was probably all just an unfortunate coincidence, but that doesn’t make good copy. His wife, Malvina, who was equally impressive as Isolde, didn’t escape easily either. She fell under the influence of a Fräulein von Reutter, a medium who received messages from the departed Schnorr. The gist of these communications was that Wagner should marry Malvina, should encourage King Ludwig to marry von Reutter, and, most significantly, should write easier music for the voice! Malvina was sent away empty-handed on all counts from Wagner’s house, and descended on the king telling tales of the adulterous affair with Cosima. Ludwig told his secretary he was fed up with Wagnerian intrigues, but humored the composer enough to send Malvina out of Bavaria.
Defining the style (1886) The first new production at Bayreut
h after the death of Wagner was Tristan in 1886, chosen because its small cast made it the most practical of all the operas. Much was at stake. Cosima needed to prove that she was the right person for the job—there was no shortage of candidates for the position of festival chief. Many objected to Cosima’s lack of professional experience, while another faction was appalled that this half-French, half-Hungarian woman, who even went so far as to employ Jews, should run what was becoming perceived as the shrine of German culture. (Bayreuth has always attracted a lunatic set who make even the Wagners look normal.)
Cosima, apparently, thrived on confrontations, and she had no intention of letting go. She consolidated her legal position (Wagner had died without a will), and meticulously eliminated everyone who stood in her way. She personally directed every detail of the new production, including the music, whose tempi she dictated from the piano. Her mania for micromanagement was legendary—every move, gesture, and sound had to be as she saw fit.
The new production was a critical, if not financial, success. The minimal movements, the hushed orchestra, and the supremacy of the text all became hallmarks of her somewhat stifling directing style. Many were unimpressed. The great soprano Lilli Lehmann said those who worked under Cosima developed a grotesque mannerism, while Shaw rightly complained of the lack of spontaneity from such techniques. The declamatory style that Cosima insisted on, emphasizing every word, devolved into what would be called the Bayreuth bark. And yet subsequent generations are indebted to Cosima in many ways. Although photographs of the 1886 production look typical enough, she had greatly simplified sets and costumes by the standards of her times. This, combined with the economy of expression she demanded, was very much at odds with the florid, to-hell-with-the-drama opera of that period. Although few now believe it, the process of clearing out the stage, which culminated in Wieland Wagner’s productions seventy years later, actually began with Cosima, and she was a major force in subjecting vocal histrionics to dramatic unity.
Vocal exercises (1900–13) Olive Fremsted, a great Isolde of the first decade of the twentieth century, believed in getting in shape for Isolde in a literal way. When in New York, she would run through Riverside Park—holding her breath! Fremsted measured her breath control by counting how many lampposts she could run past on a single breath.
What does it really take? (1930s) Kirsten Flagstad may have been the Isolde of the century. Her Metropolitan and Covent Garden appearances in the late 1930s are legendary. No discussion of Wagner performances can fail to mention her, or her classic secret to singing the Wagnerian heroines, particularly Isolde: “A comfortable pair of shoes.”
DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NÜRNBERG
PREMIERE: MUNICH, 1868.
THE NAME
The name means “The Mastersingers of Nuremberg.” It is generally just called Meistersinger by English-speakers. Pronouncing this is easy: MICE-ter-ZING-er. If you want to try the whole thing in German, just remember to say FUN for von, and good luck with Nürnberg.
WHAT IS MEISTERSINGER?
This is the only comic opera Wagner ever wrote, and its fans have heaped extravagant praise on it since its premiere. It has been called a masterpiece of lightness and human warmth, “the greatest smile in the German language,” and inevitably earns references to “midsummer sunshine.”
All of which is true, but this avoids a more obvious adjective you’d better know right from the start. Meistersinger is, more than anything else, long. It is the longest opera ever written, at least among those performed more than once or twice before disappearing, and has even earned a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. And only nineteenth-century Germans and their fans could have found this work light and airy. To our ears it sounds, in its texture and overall feel, as light and airy as a supper of beer and sausages.
A Mastersinger was a member of a guild who wrote poetry and songs according to a codified set of rules and standards. They were artistic descendants of the Minnesingers we met in Tannhäuser, whose art flourished in late medieval and Renaissance Germany, particularly in Nuremberg. This opera is, among many other things, a great comment on the creative process of music.
Of course, no comment on creative process could possibly last for six hours, and there are other issues at stake here as well. None of Wagner’s operas is as compromised by politics as this one. Wagner sought to identify and glorify a certain spirit, artistic and otherwise, in the very heart of the German people, creating a potential powderkeg for generations to follow. The Third Reich chose the city of Nuremberg for its rallies and congresses based largely on the mythos created by Wagner, and the Bayreuth festivals during the Second World War consisted solely of performances of Meistersinger, given for soldiers and workers on leave as invited “Guests of the Führer.” As Frederic Spotts says in his riveting history of the Bayreuth festival, the basic message was “Kill for Wagner and the Fatherland.” It has also proven the hardest Wagner opera to separate from its politicized past. Whereas Lohengrin and the Ring, for example, are easily recast within nonspecific psychological or mythological spaces, Meistersinger is ontologically rooted in questions of German identity. When Wieland Wagner was successfully and brilliantly universalizing these operas in the 1950s and 1960s, Meistersinger tripped him up on more than one occasion.
Nor did we need the Third Reich to invent problems in this opera for us. Some were there right from the start. Wagner was unable to celebrate a German national spirit without the marks of xenophobia and paranoia that have disgraced German patriotism time and again through history. Another problem is the character of Beckmesser. This role has long been identified as a caricature of the Viennese music critic Eduard Hanslick, who frequently wrote against Wagner in articles that could be lucid and insightful in one moment and prejudiced and foolish in another. Hanslick was of Jewish descent, and early listeners to this opera heard, in Beckmesser’s serenade, a satire of synagogue singing. Wagner insisted that Beckmesser was not about any one individual, but represented artistic reaction and pedantry. While one wants to believe Wagner in this case, we must bear in mind that his original name for the character of Beckmesser was Hanslick.
The political issues in Meistersinger are important and complicated, but the opera remains in the repertory, ironically, because of its fundamental humanity, expressed in an easy-to-appreciate musical idiom.
CAST OF CHARACTERS
HANS SACHS (bass) Mastersinger and shoemaker. The historical Hans Sachs wrote scores of mastersongs, many of which survive. He also married four times, and his last wife was forty-four years younger than he. At the time of the opera, our Sachs is about sixty-six years old, talented as a songwriter and shoemaker, and terribly wise.
VEIT POGNER (bass) Mastersinger and goldsmith, Sachs’s rich neighbor and fellow Mastersinger. Pogner has only one daughter and heiress, Eva. He is a typical good fellow, hard-working, neither too bright nor too dull.
SIXTUS BECKMESSER (bass-baritone) Mastersinger and town clerk, a pedant who believes in rules above spirit in art and life, although he is perfectly capable of deceit. Also referred to as the Marker, Beckmesser is the official in the guild of Mastersingers who “marks” errors in singing and composing.
WALTHER VON STOLZING (tenor) A young knight of Franconia. Walther is an orphaned country squire looking for love and adventure in Nuremberg. As a member of the minor aristocracy (called Junkers in German), he is already held with a bit of suspicion by the middle-class Mastersingers.
DAVID (tenor) Apprentice to Hans Sachs, a bumptious young man somewhere between puberty and adulthood. David is a double apprentice to Sachs, since he is apprenticing as both a shoemaker and a Mastersinger.
EVA (soprano) Pogner’s daughter. Eva is a pretty maiden and heiress with a filial affection for her neighbor Sachs that keeps threatening to overflow into something more.
MAGDALENA (soprano) Eva’s nurse. Another operatic nonbiological mother, Magdalena, called Lena or Leni for short, is a bit older than Eva, and has a “thing” for David
.
A NIGHT WATCHMAN (bass) One of the great walk-on, walk-off roles in opera. Although there’s no shortage of basses in this work, the Night Watchman should have an instantly discernible voice. Newman points out that these night watchmen were a standard feature of the smaller, more old-fashioned towns of Germany in the time of Wagner’s youth, their chief purpose being to wake people up in the middle of the night to tell them it was all right to go back to sleep.
Other Mastersingers
KUNZ VOGELGESANG (tenor) Furrier; KONRAD NACHTIGALL (bass) Buckle-maker; FRITZ KOTHNER (bass) Baker; BALTHASAR ZORN (tenor) Pewterer; ULRICH EISSLINGER (tenor) Grocer; AUGUSTIN MOSER (tenor) Tailor; HERMANN ORTEL (bass) Soap-boiler; HANS SCHWARZ (bass) Stocking-weaver; HANS FOLTZ (bass) Coppersmith.
THE OPERA
Prelude
Comment: This is perhaps the most frequently played of Wagner’s opera preludes on the radio and in the concert hall, although it has not yet made a big splash on the television and movie circuit. It draws a very detailed picture of the drama about to unfold, contrasting themes of the self-assured, affable burghers of the proud town with light love music and a stirring if slightly pompous march associated with Mastersingers themselves.
In the opera house, the Prelude leads directly into the opening act, with no break.
Wagner Without Fear Page 17