Sheep, Goats and Metaphysics in ‘Tristan’: Mark Berry is not fully convinced by a new production in Wagner’s home city

Review of Tristan und Isolde, directed Lübbe, conducted Schirmer, Leipzig, 2019.

March 2020, Volume 14, Number 1, 63–6.

Leipzig’s relationship with its greatest son has never been easy, nor should it have been. Wagner, in all his glorious and inglorious contradictions, is too complicated, problematical and interesting to be reduced to mere hero-worship; or, as Theodor Adorno put it, ‘progress and reaction in Wagner’s music cannot be separated out like sheep and goats’. There has been – arguably, still is – enough of that complexity in Bayreuth, anyway. Many Wagner productions of what we may broadly think of as the Regietheater era have acknowledged that reality: Rings from Joachim Herz to Frank Castorf and beyond, Parsifal and Meistersinger stagings too. Of the music dramas, however, Tristan has seemed more resistant to problematisation, deconstructive or otherwise.