![\"Details](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/wielandtristanarrangement1.jpg?ssl=1\")
<\/a>Details of Wieland Wagner’s 1962 Bayreuth sets for Tristan und Isolde<\/p><\/div> It\u2019s the music that matters. Second-rate Wagner is worse than no Wagner at all; and Longborough has achieved the near-impossible, giving us consistently first-rate performances. Much of this distinction is owed to the conductor, Anthony Negus, who worked with Reginald Goodall and, as a student, was in the Bayreuth pit for performances conducted by Boehm, Kempe and Knappertsbusch. <\/p>\n This season\u2019s Wagner offering, Tristan und Isolde<\/em>, has the additional benefit of featuring Rachel Nicholls, the splendid Longborough Br\u00fcnnhilde, as Isolde. Small though she is of stature, her voice is now almost too big for the little auditorium; when she powers up to ff<\/em> she could easily manage to project to the gods at the London Coliseum. Even in her mightiest passages, you had the feeling she was holding a little something in reserve. The worry was could she manage a piano<\/em> legato line? She could \u2013 and did, in every posture a director could devise, from being on one knee to flat on her back, and these moments brought out the warm beauty of her voice not always evident when she was at full blast. Her final Mild und leise<\/em> was delivered with such confidence and conviction that the audience was hushed for what felt like a whole minute after the last orchestral note faded. From where I sat (in the amazing \u201cValley Box\u201d \u2013 highly recommended) Nicholl\u2019s expressions and gestures appeared subtle and appropriate.<\/p>\n Her Tristan was a triumphant Peter Wedd, whose ardent, baritonal heldentenor<\/em> was notable for the power of his lower register as well as warm sound he made in the upper part of his voice. Not only was there no break apparent between the chest and head voice, the only time I was conscious of him even using his head voice was a single falsetto note. Again, I wondered whether he was capable of projecting at anything softer than f<\/em>, but in Act III he showed what he could do. Musically this was a very rewarding performance (and the same goes for Stuart Pendred\u2019s Kurwenal and to the more lyrical aspects of Catherine Carby\u2019s Brang\u00e4ne). Wedd looks as though he\u2019s fairly tall and lanky, but in this wig-free production, his own cropped hair appeared to be grey (not the blond I\u2019m told it is), and from where I sat he was an elderly Tristan. Moreover his stage movements were ungainly and unlovely \u2013 clunky, even clumsy. <\/p>\n Perhaps this was the fault of the director, Carmen Jakobi (who is married to the conductor, Anthony Negus). If she did not intend her Tristan to lurch about the stage, she might well have told him to try for the sort of stillness and economy of motion he achieved (pre-death) in Act III. There was another, more conceptual problem: should Tristan be fondling Isolde\u2019s bottom just as they\u2019ve been (as it were) introduced over the love potion? I suppose that\u2019s one way of reading the situation; but surely the music is telling us that delay is the essence of gratification? Isn\u2019t the arrival and attitude of King Marke in Act III a clue that the relationship of Tristan and Isolde is one of non-consummation?<\/p>\n There is one dreadful error in this production \u2013 not fatal, thanks to its superb musicality, design and lighting, but painfully distracting. Jakobi says in a programme note, \u201cRichard Wagner called Tristan und Isolde<\/em> an action, not an opera. Yet there is very little stage action as such.\u201d So in the \u201clong passages in which no action seems to happen [though] there is seismic emotional activity in the music that expresses the characters\u2019 inner turbulence\u201d she has inserted a pair of dancers. She has dressed this with a peppering of Jungian terminology \u2013 but it still amounts to a failure to trust the score to tell the audience what the characters are feeling, which just is<\/em> what is going on in the opera at that point. Comely as the dancers are, they are at best redundant, and at worst, harmful to the work. I admit it, in Act III I had to look away from them, as I felt Tristan\u2019s final scene was being ruined. It is nearly always a mistake in a production to introduce new characters, whether they\u2019re meant to double existing ones or represent some aspect of them. Every director should be proficient in the use of Occam\u2019s Razor.<\/p>\n There was so much that was good and enjoyable in this production that it\u2019s a shame to have to cavil. Negus\u2019s orchestra was glorious throughout, but in the Act III prologue he brought out the detail of the bass instruments more clearly and distinctly than I have ever heard. Kimie Nakano\u2019s Act III sets were, said the distinguished critic sharing my box, an exact replica of Wieland Wagner\u2019s 1962 Bayreuth sets \u2013 though when I looked it up, the Bayreuth monolith seems to have two holes in it to Longborough\u2019s single one. (The Longborough set seemed to owe a good deal to the angular, spiky work of the post-War British sculptors such as Lynn Chadwick and Reg Butler as well as Henry Moore.) All three of Nakano\u2019s sets, one per act, were simple and dignified, with shiny reflective flooring and uncluttered \u2013 a squared-off-horseshoe bench in Act I \u2013 with a good deal of atmosphere generated by Ben Ormerod\u2019s lighting and the back-wall projections of simmering lights or colour-fields (\u00e0 la Morris Louis rather than Rothko). If only the director had gone all the way with simplicity, this would have been a Tristan<\/em> for the ages. <\/p>\n What I think she forgot was the special character of the place we were in. Any opera performed in this space is a chamber piece. The USP of Longborough is that you can see the singers\u2019 faces from every seat in the auditorium, and the singers never have to shout, not even to be heard above a Wagnerian orchestra. Everything is clearer, even the surtitles. Jakobi shares the credit for their excellent translation, which sometimes caught Wagner\u2019s poetry as well as the meaning of his weird German, with another Graham family member, Cordelia. My only query about these was the use of the term \u201catonement,\u201d especially when the surtitles have Isolde saying, \u201clet us drink atonement.\u201d You can drink \u201ca toast\u201d \u201ca health\u201d (or a beer) \u2013 but \u201catonement\u201d? It made me almost as uncomfortable as the dancers\u2019 bodystockings.<\/p>\n If Longborough can maintain the musical standard of this Tristan<\/em>, and cut the faffing about with the dancers, it will have a bankable production, capable and worthy of frequent revival.<\/p>\n [contextly_auto_sidebar id=”IKOP8LYiQqEq4BFlplmMONSYmXCS2WP4″]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Longborough Festival Opera is Bayreuth in the Cotswolds, our almost-local 500 seat auditorium, converted from a giant chicken shed, with the seats bought second-hand from Covent Garden. Its founders, Martin and Lizzie Graham, built this mini-Bayreuth in their own backyard with the inspired-lunatic idea of staging Wagner\u2019s operas in the correct grand style, but on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1069,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,36,1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1068","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-blogroll-2","8":"category-elsewhere","9":"category-uncategorized","10":"entry"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/wielandtristanarrangement1.jpg?fit=600%2C650&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbv6zV-he","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1068"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1068\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1072,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1068\/revisions\/1072"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nLongborough Festival Opera is Bayreuth in the Cotswolds, our almost-local 500 seat auditorium, converted from a giant chicken shed, with the seats bought second-hand from Covent Garden. Its founders, Martin and Lizzie Graham, built this mini-Bayreuth in their own backyard with the inspired-lunatic idea of staging Wagner\u2019s operas in the correct grand style, but on an intimate scale. They built a Bayreuth-style covered orchestra pit large enough to accommodate a 70-piece band \u2013 and there are trumpet fanfares from the balcony warning you of the end of the intervals. Even now, though the Grahams staged a complete Ring in 2013, having started with Das Rheingold<\/em> in 1998, it seems a mad thing even to want to do it. But the Ring was superlative, a production, which those lucky enough to hear, will cherish the memory of for their entire lives. <\/p>\n