Author : Jos Hermans
It is a debilitating illusion to think that an avalanche of abstract video images could enter into such synergy with the swirling lava of Wagner's score of Tristan und Isolde as to allow a more immersive experience of the work in the theater. We've experienced this before, didn't we? When video artist Bill Viola delivered his installation in Paris for Gerard Mortier's Tristan und Isolde (2005), an independent video artwork emerged that stood in a kind of counterpoint to the work to be performed. Viola's images were so dominant that they absorbed all attention and reduced Wagner's text and action to a footnote. A genuinely aspired fusion of video and theater, with a Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk as the outcome, did not materialize. Viola's video art only created a separate mental space, and meanwhile the installation is experiencing its second youth at the museum. Artists who believe they can fertilize opera from other disciplines are sometimes called "Quereinsteiger" by Waltraud Meier. Gerard Mortier's list of his Quereinsteiger friends was endless. Not all of them were successful. The opera ignoramus Bill Viola was a Quereinsteiger. In Ghent today, arthouse filmmaker Philip Grandrieux is a Quereinsteiger, and Opera Vlaanderen is only repeating the experiment from 2005. With similar results.
Grandrieux's film is the backbone of the performance. A semi-transparent screen serves as the canvas for the projection of the images. It spans the entire stage and, for the sake of the immersive experience, the director does not allow the surtitles to collide with the images. All text is washed away. There is also no direction. The film is the direction. And so we find the soloists shrouded in a faint glow that painstakingly obscures them. They are reduced to unruly pixels within the frame of the video wall. They stand meters from one another, walking like penguins or throwing their arms in the air. With arms spread wide open, Tristan receives Melot's imaginary dagger thrust in the back. In other words, the elimination of the narrative context in favor of the video wall renders any theatrical act meaningless in the twilight darkness of the stage.
Of the four elements the director wishes to work with (voices, light, bodies, images), it is the last two that merge into the all-important sensory experience. Grandrieux's book of images is not illustrative: the images are chosen according to three themes, one for each act : anger (1), lust (2) and melancholy (3). Most often seen in the mix of images are the naked bodies of his three dancers. Mostly they are stills in black and white that slowly morph into each other. "I show a body that is simply alive, as a molecular element, a flux of muscles, blood, heartbeat, breath. The hair, the mouth, the eyes, the hands, the belly, the genitals, the legs: everything simply exists, without purpose or intention. Though it is naked, this body is not eroticised, not codified, not organized. You could say it is more naked than naked," the director says, and that is a correct assessment of his work.
Sometimes the rhythm of the images is jarring and then the images threaten to irritate. In the first act, the expression of the bodies is marked by ecstasy and anger. The second act shows a flower meadow next to images of a more erotic nature. The most effective images are seen in the third act. The dancer's body now floats horizontally in thin air, defying gravity, slowly rotating around the body axis, like engineers sometimes look at their designs in autocad. During his fever dreams, Tristan is absorbed into a cosmic nebula. With a bigger Tristan, this scene might have been effective, also because the flushed narrative here is little more than a monologue. Arriving at this point, the scene was very similar to what La Monnaie had done four years ago with a much better Tristan. Was Bryan Register unavailable perhaps ?
The video wall disappears after Isolde's arrival. Curiously, her transfiguration needs no visual support. The performance now becomes entirely concert-like and Isolde wraps up with a solid Liebestod. Of the assymmetrical relationship between Tristan and Isolde, the union between an erotomaniac and a suicidal melancholic, as Grandrieux describes their relationship in the program book, we ultimately find little in the end result.
Samuel Sakker does not possess a clear voice; the timbre is fairly cramped, the lyrical parts are not really beautiful and in the great dramatic outbursts he cannot convince. In this respect, he could have been helped by a less noisy conductor. Carla Filipcic Holm as Isolde could charm me a lot more. Her rendition was among the most sensuous moments of the evening. The timbre was pleasant; there were some sloppiness in the recitation as well, her German was almost incomprehensible, attention to consonants was lacking. None of that is insurmountable. The dramatic outbursts such as "Es werde nacht" she usually took well. Thanks to her, the love duet was among the best moments of the evening. Better German we got to hear from Dshamilja Kaiser as Brangäne with a slim lined voice with no real mezzo-timbre in my opinion. Vincenzo Neri was a rather unremarkable Kurwenal. Albert Dohmen was very solid but also rather routinelike in his interpretation of King Marke's monologue. His noisy friend in the orchestra, the bass clarinet, was a delight.
From the start, Alejo Pérez generously sprinkled the narcotic effect of Wagner's score over the heads of the audience present. He modeled the prelude to the third act into a chilling resonant wave. The balance with the soloists was mostly good except in the finale. The English horn and bass clarinet made a good turn. The natural trumpet with wooden cup fabricated for the occasion did not impress me very much. She did not sound brilliant, which was intentional. But then why was it played from the wings instead of from one of the side lodges as I had expected?
If the intention is to ensure that Wagner's score reaches the spectator in a more intensified way, this is only possible by focusing on whatever promotes the spectator's identification with the soloists. Abstract images create their own mental space and do not have that ability. And as for the Tristan of the third act : that problem is solvable only with a very large voice. What Wagner demands here is almost inhuman. He was very well aware of this, as evidenced by his famous letter quote that perfectly successful performances would drive people crazy. "Only when one moves along the limits of what is possible does the impossible become attainable," Tobias Staab writes in the program booklet.