Rest, Rest, Perturbed Spirit

We can only hope that Richard Wagner, wherever in that Eternal Night he might be, has not been so unfortunate as to get wind of this from an article by Stacey Kors for Playbill Arts on the Tristan Project, a staging of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde in a joint undertaking by conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, Eurotrash director Peter Sellars, and video artist Bill Viola, wherein Mr. Sellars's stage action (or lack of it, as the case may be) is backed by Mr. Viola's video images projected onto a 36-foot-wide screen behind the action:

Viola's gripping, slow-moving images shift back and forth from grainy black and white to vivid color, and feature everything from a lovers' watery purification ritual, to the sun rising in real time through the branches of a tree, to Tristan walking through a wall of flames before his soul is released from his body and ascends to Heaven.

If Herr Wagner has in fact been unfortunate enough to have gotten wind of this, we can say to him only, "Rest, rest, perturbed spirit. This, too, shall pass."