‘Tristan’: A Bourgeois Drama ... Mark Berry laments the loss of metaphysics in a musically sumptuous ‘Tristan’ from Zurich

Review of Tristan und Isolde, directed Guth, conducted Haitink, Zurich, 2010.

March 2011, Volume 5, Number 1, 88–90.

It is not often with a work such as Tristan und Isolde that I read the synopsis. I flatter myself that I know the plot inside out and it is anyway hardly the thing. Wagner acknowledged this when providing his own summary in 1859. He did not even mention King Mark’s forgiveness: the action, he seems to claim, is not really of this phenomenal world at all, but metaphysical. Even Tristan’s agonies go unmentioned on the way to ‘redemption: death, dying, destruction, never more to waken!’. I happened, however, to glance at the programme synopsis afterwards. The production made more sense, at least on its own terms, for the recounting was of Claus Guth’s Tristan, not Richard Wagner’s.