Transfigured Night: Barry Millington is swept away by a revived ‘Tristan’ at Longborough

Review of Tristan und Isolde, directed Jakobi, conducted Negus, Longborough, 2026. 

November 2026, Volume 20, Number 3, 71–3.

It’s a cliché of Wagner criticism that the action of Tristan und Isolde is vestigial, to the point that the primary interest lies in the music: any staging is therefore at best otiose, at worst a distraction. Wagner’s phrase ‘deeds of music made visible’ (ersichtlich gewordene Thaten der Musik) is invariably invoked to support this contention. It’s a point of view, but it wasn’t one held by Wagner. A glance at the context in which the phrase occurs (in the 1872 essay ‘On the Term “Music Drama”’), makes it clear that Wagner is being ironic and actually means the precise opposite: it is the making visible that is important to him, not the ‘deeds of music’ per se.