Tristan is probably a little nobler than most of us but certainly the
most unlucky of all. This must be the idea behind staging the entire
opera on a fallen or sleeping or even dead angel, which Harry Kupfer
first introduced here in 2000. This season?s revival plays only three
times. I made the trek in honor of my close and recently departed
friend, Phil Raines, a noted Wagner scholar who died this July 4.

The stage is almost filled by a large, bronze sculpture, on and around
which the action takes place. It is a huge prone angel with a round
child's head, one wing ramping down to the floor of the stage and the
other arching upward as a wing might. In Act I its wings serve the
spatial needs of the ship perfectly. But paradoxically, the whole
stage is too empty to present a continuous identity of place requisite
to this end. In the present production the place Tristan died was the
same place he taught Isolde the metaphysics of love in Act II. Isolde
died exactly where she and Tristan sat at the end of Act II before
Marke?s entrance, which was the same place where Brangaene switched
the potions in Act I.

Tristan wears a full length coat and Isolde a red robe with black
brocade around a black dress. Brangaene is in blue. Katarina
Dalayman brings a Mona Lisa look to the role of Isolde and Clifton
Forbis is almost a Heldentenor.

Tristan is a man ennobled by his suffering, ultimately the suffering
of orphanhood. Once this is grasped Act III, which I have always
dreaded, it takes on the dimensionality of Sophocles' Oedipus of
Colonus and we suddenly find ourselves on a very high plane indeed.
Isolde stands over Tristan looking at the audience motionless, a
silent martyr to his nobility; in Act II she is perched upward on the
ramp of the angel's wings and watches the humiliation of Tristan,
kneeling on the ground with his head in his hands, as King Marke's
monologue pours out his disappointment over him. Her poses include an
element of Stabat Mater that reaches its culmination in the Liebestod,
where the angel on which the action takes place rotates and Isolde is
left on the stage alone, to lie down on its other side while the
lights dim to nothing.

The late Wagner scholar Phil Raines, who died this July 4, had been
asking what Tristan meant when, replying to Marke's monologue, he says
he could not answer his question and that Marke could never understand
the answer anyway. This production demonstrates that Tristan's
childhood was mangled by the death of his father the moment he
inseminated his mother, and of his mother the moment she bore him, a
degree of dismemberment others cannot understand even if they try.
This is the source of his boundless yearning, a yearning not for
Isolde?s love but a yearning much older, from a time in the gray
morning light when he first heard his father was dead. Through his
rambling autobiography, we learn from Tristan that ?The Look? that
moved Isolde so much when he "came to" in her healing cave and she
spared him was not the beginning of a life redeemed by love but only
the beginning of an eternal yearning. He had almost succeeded in
sublimating his yearning by winning her for Marke, but now, with ?The
Look,? he saw the loving face he had been denied seeing at birth, the
face whose life became dedicated to him by dint of his vulnerability.
Once he drank the potion, he became powerless to deny he had had this
experience, and he was doomed.

The solution for Tristan is to return to his mother's womb, as he says
right after Marke's monologue. But he needs Isolde at his side, to
look down at him again and at his wound, so that he can go back the
way he came, by reversing the process she began when she brought him
back to health and he looked into her eyes.

Daniel Barenboim is a great Wagner conductor. Many of the familiar
orchestral passages were deconstructed and given a new shape, and the
tonal dimensionality of the music was almost always fully represented.
The orchestra, however, was much too loud for the singers (from my
seat right under the chandelier) and tended to impose its own musical
line regardless of what they could contribute. The greatest loss was
the wandering extravagances of Isolde and Tristan's Act II scenes.
Almost no magical moment was given space to appear, though there are
several there. Even in the dramatic Liebestod the singer and the
orchestra were poorly matched. But the music here is so great and
builds so much to the same conclusion that even without coordination,
even with early entries by the horns, and even with a sluggish and
broad representation of the beat, everything was still brought in and
moved forward. Dalayman was able to trump the orchestra with sheer
power whenever she needed to, but should not have had to.

The sloping wings of the angel were hard for the singers to walk on.
Nobody slipped, but a distracting amount of care has to be taken to
balance oneself. Even in the Liebestod Isolde had to position herself
just right onto a low platform in the sculpture to make sure she could
sink without falling off.

I felt the voices of Dalayman?s Isolde and Michelle DeYoung?s
Brangaene were oddly too similar, perhaps a result of DeYoung?s
gradual movement into soprano parts (she sang a piece of Sieglinde?s
music at the Metropolitan Opera?s National Council Auditions last
February). Gerd Grochowski's Kurwenal was particularly convincing in
Act III and was justifiably applauded. Christof Fischesser's Marke
included a very moving and credible loss of temper at the end of his
monologue, when he drags Tristan part way across the stage by the arm.
Forbis reminded us that only a true Heldentenor can sing his heart
out in the way Tristan requires. It will be interesting to see what
Barenboim brings to his Met debut performances with Dalayman and Ben
Heppner later this fall.
- Ken Quandt

The saints have shown us many ways to live a perfect life. Yet somehow the lesson we tend to come away with is that it is the saints who are special rather than their lives. We know they would not have it this way, that they want us to know and to use what they have learned in our own lives rather than idolize them; and we know this because this is what their lives and actions always teach us. Saint Francis is a perfect case. As we come to know him, we idolize him for his humility not because we wish we were less proud but because his humility, as it is described by the stories of his life, is so credible.

It was just these stories that Olivier Messiaen used for his libretto to this opera, and the greatness of this opera ultimately relies on the greatness of Francis’s life. Productions of the St.-François d’Assise are seldom mounted and revived even less frequently. The newest, which premiered in Amsterdam today, is the third of this millennium, after productions in San Francisco in 2001 and Paris in 2004. The great news is that this production is at least as great as those.

The orchestra Messaien demands is so large the Netherlands Opera production has put it on stage behind the proscenium, dispensed with a curtain, and placed the action in front of it, on a platform built over the pit. The conductor’s stand is offset to the right. In front of this on the right of the semicircular platform there is a large rough icon of a tree made of black planks slapped together; in the center a heap of black crosses; and a bench and a small stepped platform on the left. Above and behind the orchestra there is a large scaffold, and scaffolds on the right and left sides of the stage, all softened by scrim. Above everything is a white ceiling with a huge oval opening showing a dark blue sky.

Francis and the brothers are dressed in traditional capucines with hoods. There is no attempt at all to represent the monastery or even the door the angel will knock on too loudly in the fourth scene, only sparse furniture and scaffolding all around on which the angel or the huge chorus (dressed in flat black hooded gowns) can appear.

In comparison with other productions this one stresses the interaction of St. Francis with the other characters rather than placing him on a pedestal. In stressing the life lived with dramaturgy, this production leaves us with a more concrete sense of personal truth. For this Rodney Gilfry did a wonderful job, and the emphasis on action took some attention away from the question whether he could succeed the voice of José van Dam. To my consternation his voice faltered six or seven times during the first act alone as he moved to upper notes. At the beginning of the second act, we had an announcement that he was singing sick and thereafter the faltering almost disappeared. By the Third Act it was clear he would have to reach beyond his own expectations to complete the piece, but he did. In the closing scene, which was made to depict not the death of Francis but Francis dying, Gilfry’s personal effort brought everything else to a climax. His final scale upward, praying that God fill him, ravish him, inebriate him with His excess of truth, came through with heart, free of straining effort though slightly clipped, and made me sob.

There were two great costumes, the Leper and the second garb of the Angel, once she revealed herself to Francis in the Fifth Scene. The latter was a close representation of the kaleidoscopic detail for which Messaien called in the libretto, rather than the plain whites and wonderful one-winged monochrome blue of previous productions. But the Leper was a new idea and a tour de force. He had a plastic scuba-like suit of lemon yellow and black irregular shapes all over and looked like a gila monster. Here the acting of Hubert Delamboye and, as everywhere else, the directing of Klaus Bertish deserves special mention.

There are many moments in this opera where the main tones being sung fall between tones you can name. One comes near the end of Scene Four when Bernard answers the question he has Jesus put to him, that face is the likeness of His (de Vous, de Vous). Several come in the Sermon to the Birds. Our Angel added a new one that I think did not belong there, a rather too sharp note when she delivered the truth to the Leper in the Third Scene. But in the purity of her delivery, Camilla Tilling held this wrong note without a slip, perfectly in tune. She is very pregnant at this time, and it affected her long notes not at all.

Everybody could see conductor Ingo Metzmacher at work throughout, and yet he was not overly conspicuous except for a moment during the scene change between the first and second scenes. The long intervals of bird music in the Sixth Scene were perfect. Though he was placed behind the singers rather than in their line of sight nobody missed a cue (there were a few monitors for the singers, including one in the front row center). Unfortunately, the piccolo part that announces the arrival of the Angel had to be brought off by a mere human: placed right in the front of the orchestra it came off too loud and shrilly out of tune. Soon enough the xylophone takes it up and covers the error; let us hope this can somehow get fixed.

The chorus was magnificent. Their last note, with orchestral tutti and gleaming white light from the rear of the stage, was louder than the last note of any Gurrelieder I have heard. As to the light, it might have been the very same one Nordey used at the Paris production in 2004: a rectangular array, ten by twenty feet, of about thirty spots that gradually brighten to a level you cannot believe you can still look at, and then black out for the end.

For me the crucial message from Francis’s life is his discovery, which Messaien places right at the beginning, that although we might be glad to have all the abilities and good things that God has given us, the only thing we can really take credit for is accepting some part of the pain of Jesus on the Cross with equanimity. This alone is perfect joy. We must not confuse this act of acceptance with self-flagellation: life inflicts enough injustice on us and it is the acts of others we must accept and forgive, not our own. The theme returns in the penultimate scene, when Francis prays that God grant him two things before he dies: to suffer the pain Jesus suffered on the Cross and to find himself in possession of the love with which Jesus was able to forgive those who inflicted this pain upon him. The fulfillment of these two wishes was emblematized in Francis receiving the stigmata, one of the fullest experiences of God’s presence an individual can imagine undergoing. It is the function of great art to remind us of these stories and show how very credible they are, how close and near at hand it is for us to bring their pattern into our own lives.

Mozart’s last opera, composed for the coronation of the short-reigned Habsburg Emperor Leopold II (1790-1792), completes the Met’s season-ending Mozart revivals.  Met music director James Levine yielded the baton for this work – only in the Met’s repertoire since he led the premiere of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s production in 1984 – to the talented early music specialist Harry Bicket.  The younger conductor may lack Levine’s methodical concentration, but he nevertheless led the orchestra with fresh, innovative verve.
            The evening belonged to the duo of Susan Graham and Heidi Grant Murphy, who have made the roles of the lovers Sesto and Servilia, respectively, their home turf (I first came across them in the roles in Paris in 1999).  Ms. Graham’s well trained mezzo overcame any difficulty detectable in this season’s new production of Gluck’s Iphigenie en Tauride to deliver a flawless performance in the trouser part of Sesto.  “Parto, ma tu, ben mio,” accompanied by a clarinet solo, won the evening’s most enthusiastic ovation.  Ms. Murphy’s lilting soprano may be small voiced for a house as big as the Met, but it delivers with delicate intricacy.  The Georgian (former Soviet, not Southern) soprano Tamar Iveri made a notable effort as the seductive Vitellia.  Anke Vondung’s Annio, another trouser part, rounded off the Roman conspirators commendably.  Ramon Vargas lacked the staid imperial presence necessary for a solid Tito, but clearly worked hard.
            Ponnelle’s production is grand and refreshingly avoids Eurotrash temptations to “enliven” the “boring” opera seria genre by updating the setting to the present day or some other time.  His reliance on decaying Roman architecture alludes effectively to Rome’s late first century A.D. political decadence and the gracious Tito’s hopeful battle against it.  Keeping the opera in its original idiom also gave tribute to the eighteenth-century convention of using antiquity to frame moral messages palatably for the rulers of the time.  Leopold II’s reign was not long enough to make a judgment, but we can hope that Tito’s clemency to the friends and courtiers who conspired against him might still resonate even today.