[Note: This post has been updated (4) as of 8:00 PM Eastern on 2 May. See below.]
Here's an effusive encomium for a happening titled The Tristan Project, which will make its New York debut on 2 May, by blogger George M. Wallace of A Fool In The Forest.
That a man might experience a full performance of Tristan und Isolde for the first time and emerge with his sense of life unaltered is possible, but I cannot imagine it to be common. As with Wallace Stevens' blue guitar or certain massive bodies in space, things as they are changed by being near to it, and when the performance is as fully realized as that of the Los Angeles Philharmonic last night words may be altogether inadequate to the task of expressing just what has happened — appropriately enough for a work in which words tell us almost nothing and the music tells almost everything.
We've heard nothing but raves for this enterprise conceived and put together by postmodern director Peter Sellars, videographer Bill Viola, and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen with the Los Angles Philharmonic and various soloists, but we quite frankly remain skeptical; particularly after seeing still images from Mr. Viola's video contribution to the Project that plays behind and around orchestra and singers while the opera is in progress. Not to put too fine a point on it, they're irredeemably tacky. But even were they not, we simply can't see how they could be anything but a distraction from the only thing that counts: the music-drama itself which needs no help whatsoever — could play itself out on the barest of stages — to create its own profound reality.
But we've not been in attendance (nor in future expect to be) at any performance of this happening, and unlike an unseen Eurotrash production of a Wagner opera where merely from the description of the physical realization of the work it's possible to declare the production a fraud and an outrage, this production is so novel a thing in concept and presentation (that is, novel for today, but hardly novel historically; such a concept and such presentation techniques were in use in opera as early as the second decade of the last century) that informed critical comment is impossible at a distance.
And so we shall keep our silence.
Update (11:18 PM Eastern on 25 Apr): And here's a rundown of a subsidiary series of radio programs that airs on WNYC, New York (and audio-streamed on the Web; the link to the audio stream can be found at the preceding WNYC link), 28 April - 4 May. We were made aware of this via an eMail from reader Eric Anderson several days ago (Thanks!, Eric), but forgot to include the information in the above post.
Update 2 (1:57 AM Eastern on 26 Apr): We've just finished listening to the three MP3s linked to in Mr. Wallace's above linked post which are recordings of hour-long pre-concert talks with Peter Sellars and Bill Viola speaking about Wagner's Tristan act by act, Sellars providing his interpretation of what's going on in each act, and Mr. Viola describing how he came up with the images he did for each act.
Mr. Sellars's reading of Act I is only slightly eccentric, and altogether harmless. His reading of Act II, however, is toxic beyond tolerance.
He first speaks of Tristan and Isolde working out their "issues" with each other in this act, which "issues" he then goes on to describe.
So far, so harmless. It's merely silly but not fundamentally distorting, and uses, I suppose, modern terminology and situations to describe things in such a way as to make them more "accessible" (to use the current in buzzword) for younger audiences.
But pretty soon comes the toxic stuff.
Mr. Sellars, being the leftist, avant-garde, postmodern twit that he is, concocts a perfectly imbecile postmodern tale nowhere even hinted at in Wagner's score: he tells us that King Marke and Tristan were in fact homosexual lovers ("the love that cannot speak its name," Mr. Sellars reminds us), and that's what's at the core of Marke's hurt and grief, and Tristan's distress all of which Mr. Sellars then goes on to explicate in detail in the light of this newfound reading.
That his reading makes absolutely no sense on any ground, and is, of course, nowhere even so much as hinted at in Wagner's score, as we've said, troubles Mr. Sellars not at all, his justification — the sort of justification drummed up by all postmodern vandals to justify their vandalism — being that an ancient medieval illustration unambiguously portrays Marke and Tristan as homosexual lovers.
All this goes way beyond being merely silly. It's hugely distorting, and, worse, poisons everything that Wagner's transcendent tale has to tell. We truly hope this ugly bit of rubbish didn't actually make its way to any degree whatsoever into the actual realization of The Tristan Project, for if it did it would make the Project merely another Eurotrash Tristan production of which we at present have more than sufficient.
Update 3 (10:30 AM Eastern on 1 May): More on videographer Bill Viola's contribution to the Project.
Update 4 (8:00 PM Eastern on 2 May): George M. Wallace updates his post on The Tristan Project which post we linked in our above post. Mr. Wallace's update is well worth your time reading.
Sometimes A Cigar Is Just A Cigar
The Guardian's theater critic, Lyn Gardner, in an insightful piece entitled, "In Praise Of Boring Plays", writes:
Perhaps. But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Posted by A.C. Douglas on 30 April 2007 | Permalink