Covent Garden

Tristan und Isolde by Richard Wagner (seen December 11)

This is a revival of the 2009 production by Christof Loy, once again starring Nina Stemme as Isolde with Stephen Gould replacing Ben Heppner as Tristan.

The visual impact of the production is extremely austere. Before the performance starts the curtain is open on a bare stage with silver-grey floor and one blank silver-grey wall angled sharply on the stage right (house left) side. A plain cane chair is set upstage against the wall. At the back, at right angles to the wall, is effectively a second proscenium closed with a curtain of dark purple, so dark that in some lights it looks black. When opened, as it occasionally is to illustrate certain key moments in the opera, it reveals what appears to be a large room with great classical windows (the central of which can be backlit but is most often black, and the others simply drawn on the wall), and with five long dining tables set end-on to the audience. This room is set on a lower level than the main acting space which is raked so that there are two or three steps down to the rear room.

The costumes are similarly stark. The men who act as sailors or courtiers are dressed in black dinner suits with white dress shirts. Tristan is dressed entirely in black. Isolde wears a frothy white bridal dress (making her look like merely an acquisition) until the Act One interview with Tristan, when she wears a tight black dress. Brangane brings on the wedding dress at the end of the act, but otherwise Isolde remains in black. Brangane is dressed in off-white but in the second act, as Isolde persuades her to signal to Tristan, she removes Brangane’s dress to reveal a black shift underneath. King Marke is also in evening dress but with a white dinner jacket.

The result of all this is that the only colour to be seen in the entire evening is that of the curtain (when it does not look black), that of the various candelabra that are in use in Act Two, and that of bloodstains on white shirts when Tristan is wounded in the climax of Act Two and when mayhem breaks out in Act Three. The general lighting is not soft, although the source of light is sometimes generalised, and sometimes deliberately directed against the silver-grey wall, either illuminating it entirely, or with a shutter casting the upper half of the wall into the shade. The dining room at the rear is illumined by candles in Act Two until Brangane methodically extinguishes them as a signal to Tristan; this is the warmest glow of the evening.

There is then no boat (Act One), no trysting place (Act Two) and no castle of Kareol (Act Three) – just the same sparse place in which Tristan and Isolde play out their drama: a chair in Act One; two chairs and a small table in Act Two; a chair (not a bed) in Act Three – and always behind the curtain that mysterious room, sometimes crowded with silent men, sometimes eerily empty, sometimes set for a feast, sometimes bare, representing the totally foreign world outside the consciousness of the protagonists.

The effect is distancing, disturbing but never distracting. The lighting cues must reflect turns of emphasis and emotional tone in the libretto and music, but it would take thorough familiarity with the text to track these movements with absolute certainty. (The surtitles are not sufficiently exact to help here, often translating only the most salient words of some extended phrases.) The movements of the characters, often slow and almost hieratic, are also highly significant; especially notable are the occasions when one or more of them stands directly against the side wall bathed in the harsh white light from the wings on the other side f the stage. This renders occasional bursts of activity problematic, especially when Isolde has to cross the entire stage quickly to get off and change out of her wedding dress in Act One (there is no prompt in the text for her to leave the stage at this point as she is supposed to be waiting in her cabin for Tristan to arrive), and when she rushes off in Act Two to bring back plates and cutlery to lay on the table for a meal that never occurs – a rather pointless piece of stage business in the larger scheme of things (why not have the table already laid?).

Everything is intended to draw attention away from the idea that this is a tragic love story, and towards the idea that it is the story of Tristan’s desire for death and Isolde’s acquiescence in following him. The absolute refusal to glamorise Tristan’s appearance – he looks something of a misfit from the beginning – is matched by the false note of Isolde’s wedding dress and the contrasting steeliness of her black costume; in neither case are these naïve young lovers. As a member of the audience in front of me remarked in the second interval, the passion was lacking and the second act was merely an analysis of love rather than a demonstration of it. She felt that this was a mistake, though I think that it was very deliberate; it is true that there was not a great variation or subtlety in the general presentation of the second act, but it worried me less than it did the lady I was speaking with. Luckily (for her) she was completely satisfied with the presentation of the third act, the most testing in dramatic terms and in the demands on the singers’ stamina.

My principal reservation about the staging is that it renders some seats in the auditorium completely unsuitable for viewing the production. The angled wall means that the sightlines from the horseshoe end of the house left galleries must be hideously compromised: without being able to see properly what people are doing against that wall there is often nothing else to look at. It was noteworthy that a number of these seats were empty and the already awful upper slips on that side were also barely in use (the other side was full). Viewed from a more central position the staging is cumulatively compelling, and I have no idea how this could have been achieved in a different configuration, but I would have been really annoyed to pay a high price for something I couldn’t properly have seen.

Tristan was very good with superb pacing over a demanding part; Brangane (Sarah Connolly) was very good; Kurwenal (Iain Paterson) was very good; King Marke (John Tomlinson) commands enormous affection, but his voice seemed to me very unsteady. The undisputed star is the Isolde of Nina Stemme, who approaches the role with enormous intelligence and a breathtaking clarity of tone and control of volume. What matter if she did not expire over the body of Tristan as she sang the Liebestod, but instead circled back to the great wall and sat in the chair immobilised in the unforgiving light? It was the climax of an unforgettable performance, underpinned by great playing from the orchestra under the sensitive direction of Antonio Pappano.

L’Elisir d’Amore by Gaetano Donizetti (seen by live streaming November 26)

This light-hearted comic romp is set in this production in vaguely 1950s rural Italy, though given the size of the Covent Garden stage one could easily mistake it for Kasas prairies apart from the fact that the building in the second scene of the first act has Italian signage. The village community looks prosperous though not wealthy – clean faces and cheerful clothing in reasonable repair, with a nod towards work-stained scruffiness. Not Calabria, then, where Christ famously stopped at Eboli – a phrase ambiguous in English, but meaning that he did not bother to go further into the benighted agricultural lands of southern Italy. Instead there was more of a whiff of the wholesomeness of Oklahoma!

The singing and characterisation were excellent – a wonderfully sleazy and opportunistic Dulcamara from Bryn Terfel, a radiantly confident Adina from Lucy Crowe, a smugly womanising Belcore from Levente Molnar and a superbly naïve and later loose-limbed drunken Nemorino from Vittorio Grigolo, whose rendering of the most famous tenor aria of the piece (‘una furtive lagrima’)was faultless.

Everyone was clearly enjoying themselves in the hay, though the stacks of bales filling the stage looked potentially hazardous to negotiate. It is not clear what two old-fashioned standing lamps were doing in a pile of hay bales in the second act, in an otherwise totally al fresco setting – but this can hardly matter in an opera where the village folk hear of the hero’s uncle’s demise before he does, and in which he is not told on stage of his good fortune (and seems to have no time off-stage to discover it), and in which the whole operation of the elixir is completely nonsensical (and indeed the version of the Tristan myth inspiring Nemorino quite garbled). As Lucy Crowe remarked in the interval interview, it is immensely refreshing to find a heroine who comes to realise her deepest feelings without having to die in the process; and by extension to find a lovesick hero with a rival who by a series of accidents finds his happiness rather than his comeuppance, with no need to kill the rival either.

I Due Foscari by Giuseppi Verdi (seen by live streaming October 27)

The principal reason for seeing this opera is that Placido Domingo is singing the role of the Doge Francesco Foscari in his reincarnation as a baritone singer. He remarked somewhat wryly in the opening interviews that unusually he is taking the part of someone older than himself (89 to his 73). Also the tenor Francesco Meli as his son Jacopo Foscari and soprano Maria Agresta as Jacopo’s wife Lucrezia Contarini sing wonderfully well.

The production team and cast were obviously enthusiastic about the event, and many tweets displayed during the interval were gushing praise for the cast – which was justified – and for the piece itself – which I think was unjustified.

The opera is based on a play by Byron which, as the TLS reviewer pointed out, is hampered by its adherence to the three unities, resulting in a curiously static treatment of a turbulent period of Venice’s political life. (One might of course say that all of Venice’s political life was turbulent in one way or another.) So many of the events pertinent to the drama have occurred before the start, or else happen off-stage, that there is little left for the singers except discussion, recrimination and soul-searching. There could have been a great trial scene, for example, when Jacopo returns to Venice at the beginning, in which the back story could have been rehearsed – but all we have is a report that the court has condemned him again.

So we have the full blast of Verdi’s dramatic style attached to a subdued and somewhat contorted drama – fine for revealing the personal agonies of the three main players, but unsatisfactory as fully dramatic opera.

The director’s solution to this problem was to introduce a great deal of stage business to intensify the atmosphere. The set was grand but gloomy, with much mist or smoke wafting through huge broken walls which could serve both for an indeterminate Venetian piazza (with suggestive duckboards to indicate a high tide) and for a claustrophobic warren of a prison. The costumes of the Venetian Council of Ten were heightened, almost nightmarish versions of Renaissance splendour, rendering them both forbidding and faceless. This was all very well for united effect, but left Jacopo Loredano, the political enemy of the Foscari, undifferentiated as a character, so that it was impossible to realise that he was most likely engineering Jacopo’s continued condemnation as part of a family vendetta.

But there was much worse. In order to ramp up the atmosphere of oppression, there was a short scene in which Jacopo was dragged in and given the Eucharist: he spat out the wine, which led the ecclesiastic to summon henchmen to hold him so that it could be forced down his throat. This is both gratuitous and ridiculous, not least because wine was not offered to lay people in the Catholic rite; and the response of a cleric to such a refusal (if for some reason the wine was offered) would be outraged contempt, not a sort of alcoholic water torture.

Later, the second act is set in the prison where Jacopo sees in his mind the ghosts of earlier prisoners. Here the director had various acts of interrogation and torture silently taking place throughout the act – suspension to dislocate the shoulders, various beatings, and even the amputation of a hand, performed apparently with a large dagger by an interrogator. Again, both gratuitous and muddled. There could of course be no sound to all of this, as it is not part of the score (unlike, for example, the off-stage torture of Cavaradossi in ‘Tosca’); and the suspension had to be fudged. So also the amputation, though that is easier to manage in the general murk. But there was always a separation of duties between interrogators and torturers; no-one taking notes for future trials or condemnations would have sullied himself with mere physical abuse. Again, the same ecclesiastic was present much of the time, looking stagily sadistic – not the Spanish Inquisition, of course, this being Venice – but did the Venetian church authorities participate in secular interrogations? And were hands amputated in prison dungeons rather than as a public spectacle? One would have thought such events would be more ritualised.

Of course there is no obligation for an operatic – or even a theatrical – production to be historically accurate at all points, especially if the actual text of the piece has already played fast and loose with historical events. (Presumably the downfall of the Foscari did not occur within the 24 hours ‘demanded’ by the three unities.) Perhaps the silent tortures were meant to represent Jacopo’s fevered imagination, though he sings of that only at one stage during the act, which is otherwise taken up with encounters with his wife and his father. However, I still think that a blurring of what were likely to have been the protocols of a Venetian prison into a generalised representation of sadistic and gratuitous torture more suited to a cod-medieval video game does no-one any favours.

Finally, in the third act as Doge Francesco expired in grief and political humiliation, the now-widowed Lucrezia drowned her eldest son in a convenient pond, supposedly in despair at the turn of events. This was completely distracting from the prime moment of drama, stupid because there were two other children on stage – would they be taking their turn? – and completely uncharacteristic of a noblewoman who would surely want to spend the rest of her eldest son’s adolescence preparing to continue the vendetta.

So – there was much to distract us from the really impressive singing and orchestral playing, which could, with a production more confident in the power of the music to carry off the awkwardnesses of the dramatic structure, have raised the whole experience to a more satisfactory level.