The Remains of Day: Barry Millington is captivated by an enthralling new ‘Tristan’ at Bayreuth

Review of Tristan und Isolde, directed Arnarsson, conducted Bychkov, Bayreuth, 2024. 

November 2024, Volume 18, Number 3, 63–5.

No reading of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde can hope to make full sense of the work without taking into account Isolde’s back-story. As we learn in the first act, Tristan, injured while butchering Isolde’s betrothed, Morold, sailed to Ireland, under the cleverly disguised name of Tantris, seeking to be healed by her. Now he’s come again to claim her as queen for his own uncle, King Mark of Cornwall. Little wonder Isolde’s so incandescent when she relives the story in Act I. The Icelandic director Thorleifur Örn Arnarsson and his designer Vytautas Narbutas use two arresting images to express the welter of emotions one can imagine such a woman might be subject to. In Act I she wears a just visible girdle over which is draped a voluminous white wedding dress that unfolds yard upon yard of material encircling her feet.