Why the Royal Opera’s New Tristan Should be Applauded, not Booed
Last night I attended the premier of the Royal Opera’s new production of Tristan und Isolde, conducted by Antonio Pappano and directed by Christof Loy. As has become routine with this most conservative of audiences, the production team was loudly, yobbishly booed.
First, it implies that Loy and his team have been less than honest in their approach to the production, that they are charlatans or impostors. But there’s nothing to support this view at all. You may disagree with their interpretation – for example you may think that Tristan is a tragic love story – but that doesn’t invalidate it.
Second, in contrast with Loy, Pappano received a standing ovation for his conducting, those cheering him conveniently overlooking that he is Artistic Director and that Loy was his own choice as director (which he acknowledges in the programme). Not only Pappano, but also Nina Stemme – the production’s Isolde – are on record as being of one mind on how Tristan should be approached from a ‘non-heroic’ point of view. So the booing of the director doesn’t make any sense. If you’re going to boo, boo the entire creative leadership of the project. (Stemme deservedly received a thunderous ovation.)
The conservative elements of the audience seem to want an entirely literal interpretation of Wagner’s stage directions, but that approach was comprehensively cast aside by his own grandson, Wieland, at Bayreuth in the 1960s. Literalism is dead, and long may it remain so.
The genius of Wagner’s work is that it can survive truly awful productions, and Loy’s is very far from that. In fact, pace the morons who booed, it is insightful and sheds new light on some important aspects of the work.
Tristan is the by far the most compact and consistent of Wagner’s works. It was conceived and composed over a comparatively short period of time, and its philosophical underpinnings are miles from the confusion of Feuerbach and Schopenhauer that plagues the Ring. It is a work of startling modernity, even to today’s ears. It is endlessly young, and as such requires a modern response. It is our duty not to allow it to become a museum piece.
John Deathridge has argued convincingly that Tristan is not a love story, but a death story. I repeat: it is not about love, but the longing for release from the torment of love. It is not about the social mores of the 19th century like some Jane Austen novel. It has universal and timeless relevance. This deserves to be brought out by the production. Strapping Tristan into some heroic plastic armour and slapping a Cornish castle on a painted backdrop are not a noble aim for a modern production.
Can we possibly imagine that if Wagner were alive today that he would have insisted on preserving his work unchanged? Wagner was more radical than perhaps any other composer in history – especially in his use of the most cutting-edge stagecraft available – and would surely have tried to bring his opera as up to date as it could possibly be. To suggest a literal interpretation is to go against the spirit of Wagner himself.
Loy’s production is minimal in the extreme. The stage is laid out exactly the same for each act. It is divided into two sections – upstage and downstage – that are separated by a large red velvet curtain. Nearly all of the singing occurs on a steeply raked grey platform downstage. Upstage, behind the curtain, there is what looks like a banqueting hall, with simple tables, chairs and candelabras. The outside world is only hinted at with large arched windows being sketched in. The walls of this part of the stage are entirely white. It is very strongly reminiscent of the designs for the Dogme film Festen.
The chorus remains in the rear half of the stage – i.e. behind the curtain – and characters only move into the front half when they enter the ‘onstage’ action. In fact, for long periods the curtain is shut, and when it is open the figures in the background are often frozen in place, as if ‘day’ has entirely stopped.
Far from being contrary modernism, this is Loy’s way of highlighting the divide between the world of day – the world that Tristan is tired of – and the world of night, the world of Tristan’s and Isolde’s love. Das Wunderreich der Nacht (roughly: “the wonder-realm of night”), as Tristan calls it.
Behind the curtain – in the world of day, where Tristan is expected to play the part of the Hero – it is boastful, egotistical, male, false. In Tristan’s world of night – in front of the curtain, where Tristan can be himself – there is only the truth of his love for Isolde and the torment it brings.
The curtain is not without unwelcome side effects. At the ‘Insight Evening’ for Tristan put on by the Royal Opera Education Department, Pappano’s musical assistant David Syrus remarked that they were having some trouble with it from an acoustic point of view (Loy didn’t look thrilled that Syrus had revealed the existence of the curtain), and this came out in particular at the start of Act III during the extended cor anglais solo which sounded like it was given from the rather cramped wings, rendering the sound rather boxy and too close to us. Consequently the joyous alarm that goes up when the shepherd sights Isolde’s ship was similarly lacking in resonance and visceral thrill.
There was also a detail which I wasn’t certain I picked up correctly: it looked as though Loy was suggesting that Brangäne failed to give the lovers enough warning of Melot’s arrival because she was having sex with Kurwenal. (Not that they give a shit; they are by that stage “consecrated to death” as Wagner has it.) An interesting idea, but the problem was that it wasn’t possible to be sure what was going on and at least half the house must have been unable to see it at all. Though how right Loy was to have Brangäne issue her warning from behind the curtain, from the world of day.
Loy’s conception of Tristan is as a high-functioning depressive. At the opening of Act III, Tristan – sung with incredibly delicacy by Ben Heppner – is slouched in his seat, mentally dead. His existential angst is the longing for death, for annihilation, oblivion.
Heppner’s performance is open to criticism, and I think most critics will say that the role – in particular in Act II – stretched him beyond his limits. His voice cracked several times – unintentionally – under the pressure of how quietly he was trying to sing. I’ve never heard an opera singer sing so quietly, and it wasn’t by accident: he did it with Pappano’s full support. For much of Acts II and III, the orchestra were often on the very edge of audibility. Heppner reserved the heldentenor voice for the moments that Tristan is playing the hero. Thrilling as Heppner’s voice is in full cry, it belongs to the world of day. In his performance, Tristan’s true voice is muted, almost internal.
This is brave singing indeed. Never has Tristan seemed more vulnerable, more on the edge of sanity. Where most tenors have Tristan tipping into madness only when on the edge of death in Act III, Heppner has him there from the very beginning. His arrogance in the face of Brangäne’s message from Isolde is mere show.
Stemme was a revelation as Isolde, her voice holding up under the intense strain of the first two acts, giving a luminous account of the part and a near ideal rendition of the Liebestod. Most important though was her acting, which was vital to Loy’s conception. Isolde is at times wrathful, haughty, sarcastic, tender, crazed, wildly in love, seductive and longing for death. To bring all these elements of the role through is an extraordinary achievement, especially when combined with vocal beauty, clear diction and highly disciplined rhythm.
Loy’s production is not just brave in stripping the staging back to the essentials – as I said before, this follows in the great tradition of Wieland Wagner’s post-war productions at Bayreuth – but also in small details.
I’ll highlight one here, from the opening of Act II. Isolde and Brangäne argue about whether the light that warns Tristan to stay away should be extinguished. Here the light is one of the candelabras from the banqueting hall. There are three candles. When Isolde puts out the light she actually only extinguishes two of the candles, and is burnt by the second of these. A telling detail: she is not yet sure of herself, and day (the light represents the last gleaming of day in their night-world) is still a part of her world. She longs for Tristan, yet an extended debate about their love is shortly to follow. Only once they have abandoned themselves to the night is the day banished. And so it is that Loy has Tristan extinguish the final candle as their argument concludes and they embark on the beautiful, ethereal duet O sink herneider. In a production of such restraint, these details are crucial.
Tristan is almost impossible to stage, so radical is its pared down dramaturgy, so challenging is the music to both audiences and performers alike. Loy and Pappano have given us a deeply intelligent and thrilling rendition of it with a brilliant cast (I’ve not mentioned how outstanding Michael Volle was as Kurwenal or how insightful John Tomlinson was as King Mark), perhaps the best Tristan cast assembled on stage in London for a generation or more. It is a triumph of thought, of singing, of orchestral playing and of staging. It deserves to be applauded and remembered. Keep your boos to yourselves.
The Wire, Season Five
This morning I finished my second complete viewing of The Wire, and I’m more strongly convinced than ever that it is the best TV ever made.
Enough has been written about how great the show is, and if you haven’t watched it, I urge you to do so immediately. It’s available from iTunes or on DVD.
What I want to write about here are some of the specific issues raised by the fifth and final season.
For me, although I’ve done so in the past, a ranking of the first four of seasons is pointless. Each of them is different, and each of them is brilliant. Taken together, they form an astonishingly moving and powerful picture of a modern city on the edge of collapse. They do it without ever resorting to the kind of flashy – or convenient – plot lines of a show like CSI. Much is left to us to imagine, and the hallmark of the show is ambiguity. Who are the good guys? Are drug dealers – like Bodie for example – necessarily evil? Are senior policemen to blame for the obsession with statistics rather than quality police work, or is it the politicians? Is it even the politicians, or is it us, the voters, who cannot see the system in the round?
For all of these reasons, The Wire is the most important piece of television I’ve ever seen.
But season 5 is nowhere near this level of quality. On the first viewing, it was a tremendous disappointment, and that feeling is only reinforced on the second go-round.
The BBC have now finished their screening of the complete show, so it seems reasonable to discuss details of the plot here. If you haven’t finished watching it yet, I should warn you that there are heavy plot spoilers in what follows. Seriously, don’t read the rest if you don’t know how the series ends.
I think it comes down to this. In the final season, the show relinquishes ambiguity and makes clear who the bad guys are. We are given at least one character – Gus Haynes, the city editor of the Baltimore Sun newspaper – who is wholly good. We are given at least four characters who are wholly bad – Scott Templeton, the Sun reporter who manufactures portions of the serial killer story, his two editors, and the Republican governor of Maryland, the last of whom we never see on screen.
None of these four characters is allowed to show why they behave the way they do. In Templeton’s case, it is overweening ambition and self-regard that makes him force the story. At no time is there ever an honest motive behind his deception. This sets him apart from McNulty and Freamon (who I’ll come to in a bit) who cross the line in the name of a perverted sense of justice. McNulty even gives voice to this plot flaw in the final episode when he confronts Templeton: “I know why I did it, but fuck if I can figure out what it gets you in the end”.
This weakness in the story inevitably comes across in the acting too. We are shown the same basic scene over and over again as Templeton petulantly reacts to Haynes’s rigour by snatching his keys and notebook and heading out of the office, leaving his swivel chair spinning. Templeton’s frustration is not justified, and so Simon can’t give him words to express it.
The Templeton problem is made worse because of the comparison with two entirely good characters: Haynes and Mike Fletcher, the young journalist who follows Bubbles around. Early on in the season, Haynes is shown waking up in the middle of the night and calling in to the paper to check that he got some minor stat the right way around in a piece he edited. He’s the uncompromisingly correct journalist. He serves his readers and the memory of his great, honest predecessors, and will not bend on anything. He has no flaws, beyond an admirable propensity to tell the management to go fuck itself.
Fletcher is a much more minor character, but again he’s given a preachy storyline. Having followed Bubbles around, he writes a highly personal story, but is reticent to publish it unless Bubbles gives his consent, much to Haynes’s approval, even though Bubbles knew that the story was the plan all along. There’s nothing wrong with this behaviour at all: it’s the right thing to do. But it feels so clunky next to Templeton’s transgressions that it feels unnecessary. Yes, there are ethical journalists, we get it, but we don’t need them to be saints. Frankly, to any British viewers of the show, the idea of a golden age of scrupulously honest journalists telling it straight is a ridiculous idea in the first place.
The problem is made still worse by the fact that we know that Templeton is making quotes and stories up all along. With what little ambiguity is left after the convenient quotes in his opening day story, we are left in no doubt at all once he manufactures a quote from Nerese Campbell on how Daniels has been sticking the knife into Burrell. We know for certain that he’s full of shit.
Templeton’s two editors are slimy, self-satisfied and amoral chasers of a Pulitzer prize, which they duly win. They are explicitly told by Haynes and the police that Templeton is a liar but they carry on regardless. Time and again, they ignore good journalistic practice for the sake of their own glory. Again, Haynes spells this out, when he explains that they’ll be gone from the Sun as soon as the prize is in their hands. While they’re at it, they let experienced reporters go in order to keep their own high-salaried jobs.
The governor is less of an issue, perhaps, but the problems Carcetti faces with funding the schools and his inability to provide adequate funding for the police are a direct result of his snub. It’s this funding gap that leads McNulty and Freamon to take the course they do.
I can’t think of a character in the preceding four series who is painted in these black and white terms. To take just one example of characters who would be painted as completely evil in any other show, Avon Barksdale and Russell “Stringer” Bell, as we are shown, are part of the drugs trade because that’s the position they’ve been forced into by their background, and it’s their only realistic chance of autonomy in their lives. They have a kind of code – one that falls apart in the denouement of season 3 – and a kind of honour. They do right by their people.
None of this is true of Templeton or the editors.
It’s perhaps idle to speculate about why this flaw exists, but I believe it’s linked to the fact that the show’s creator, David Simon, was once a Sun journalist (he makes a very brief cameo appearance in the final episode typing away at a computer). Simon’s recent pronouncements on the newspaper industry show that he is a believer in the golden age, and has a strong view of why the newspapers have come to be so weak.
Such opinion is to be expected from a longtime newspaper man, of course. But it doesn’t have a place, unless given a counterweight, in The Wire.
It doesn’t matter whether we agree with his analysis of the newspaper industry or not. His handling of the drugs business, one of the most controversial public policy issues of the day, is balanced. He does not demonise drug dealers, and he does not laud cops. In season 1 there are as many useless mope cops as there are decent ones. For every Wee-Bey there’s a D’Angelo.
He even examines the legalisation option in season 3 with ‘Hamsterdam’. But he shows us that, while it has positive aspects such as cleaned up corners, the legalisation area itself is a vision of hell. There are no easy answers, that’s what he seems to be saying. Maybe we’re stuck with the drug problem. There are people who want to get high, and there are people who will help them do so for a price. Given that fact, how is society to proceed? There are no answers in The Wire, except possibly that the war on drugs can never be won. As Carver says in a memorable line “this ain’t no war; wars end”.
Weak as the newspaper element of season 5 is, the gigantic flaw in the season is McNulty’s phantom serial killer storyline. It’s bad enough when it starts – quite abruptly, at the end of the second episode – but gets significantly worse when Freamon joins the conspiracy after a couple of minutes’ thought. He previously sat out years and years in the pawn shop unit wasting his detective’s talents, and all of a sudden he can’t hack it any more in major crimes and helps McNulty go even further over the top.
Apart from it being out of character because of his patience – think of Lester calmly looking over his half-moons with a worldly disapproval, a shot we see repeatedly throughout the series – it’s also far too dumb a thing for him to do. Lester, above all, is canny and understands how to build a careful case based on highly technical evidence. All of a sudden he’s willing to throw all of that away to make a case that he knows will be torn apart by a competent litigator, and for what?
As with Templeton and the key-clutching flounce, we’re also treated to multiple repetitions of Bunk Moreland giving Jimmy the ‘think about what you’re doing, motherfucker’ speech. Bunk is one of my favourite characters in the entire show, and it’s painful to watch him being given such flimsy material.
The difference with this storyline compared to the Templeton one is that McNulty and Freamon act out of genuine frustration. They know there’s a case to be made against Marlo, and they do the only thing they can think of to make it, even if it is completely flawed.
McNulty in particular is given a wildly incredible set of stories in season 5. He’s back on the drink again and screwing it up with Beadie, then inside an episode he’s apologetic and off the sauce even at his own “wake” at Kavanagh’s. He’s gone from being told that he doesn’t understand the implications of his fraudulent case to suddenly trying to put the breaks on it when he sees Keema and others wasting their time with his “bullshit”.
As with Freamon, McNulty is too smart not to have seen that this was the inevitable outcome of his actions. Certainly he’s been blind to consequences in his personal and professional life, but he’s never actually made it more difficult for real police to do police work.
I’ve been very critical of the season, and I think I’ve shown how I’m justified in doing so. But it’s not all bad and, even as a flawed season it is still way better than most other shows ever made. A few things save it from disaster, many of them just the little touches you come to expect from The Wire, like the FBI profile of McNulty’s make-believe serial killer that is a perfect character summary of McNulty himself. But for me the highlight of the season is in the trajectories of two characters: Duquan and Bubbles.
To me, Bubbles is the most important character in The Wire. His story affected me more than any other, from pity at his beatings in season four, to genuine horror when he attempted to hang himself after Sherrod’s accidental death, to joy as he finally walks up the staircase from his sister’s basement to share a meal with her. I think that one shot of perhaps three or four seconds in the final montage is worth everything.
Bubbles is at exactly the middle of the problem that Baltimore faces. He’s a victim of the system that has failed the city. He’s not innocent – far from it – but he’s in the position he’s in because it’s the only alternative he’s been given. That he finds a way to get clean and enjoy the semblance of a normal life is testimony to the humanity of the show, and of the characters who are trying to make a difference, no matter how small, to the lives of the victims. What hope there is in the show lies here.
Duquan is the most sympathetic of the children who appear from season four onwards. His relationship with Pryzbylewski is beautifully muted and free of schmaltz. It’s the kind of sympathy that we feel ourselves as we walk past a homeless person, or someone else we imagine ourselves helping.
The summing up at the end of season five shows us that life in Baltimore is a cycle. Michael is the new Omar, Valchek is the new Burrell, Fletcher is the new Haynes and, most affecting of all, Dukie is the new Bubbles. As our heart lifts at Bubbles ascending to normalcy, it breaks as we see Dukie injecting himself at the stables. His shy smile stays with us as we watch him resign himself to a life of scrapping and scraping his way to his next fix.
For all the faults of the final season, these two characters redeem it and round out the entire show. It’s difficult to imagine ever seeing anything as good on our screens. It’s just such a shame that the writers gave us two such comparatively weak storylines as the fake serial killer and Templeton’s creative journalism. They leave an unpleasant stain on an otherwise exemplary piece of drama.
