Completing the ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’: Barry Millington is intrigued by a ‘Tristan’ with dancers in the Cotswolds

Review of Tristan und Isolde, directed Jakobi, conducted Negus, Longborough, 2015.

November 2015, Volume 9, Number 3, 75–6.

Having theorised at length about the Gesamtkunstwerk, in which all the arts would be combined in an over-arching totality, Wagner unaccountably failed to include dance when he came to compose Tristan und Isolde. It’s an omission that Carmen Jakobi, in her production for Longborough Festival Opera, has rectified. In a Jungian approach intended to represent the ‘choreography of the soul’, a female dancer embodies Tristan’s anima and a male dancer Isolde’s animus. The idea is not new: choreography and mime have been appearing in productions of the Ring for some years now, notably in Budapest, Munich and a co-production seen in Berlin and Milan. It’s a development to which I’m not unsympathetic: not only because it could be said to be in accordance with Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk principles, but also because I find the conjunction of music and choreographed movement uniquely powerful.

Everything depends, however, on its execution ...