‘Tristan’ à la mode? Christopher Wintle ponders the achievements and intentions of Christof Loy in his new Covent Garden production
‘Tristan’ à la mode? Christopher Wintle ponders the achievements and intentions of Christof Loy in his new Covent Garden production
Review of Tristan und Isolde, directed Loy, conducted Pappano, Royal Opera House, London, 2009.
March 2010, Volume 4, Number 1, 50–60.
Hans Keller used to say – quite reasonably – that critics must judge achievements and not intentions. When a critic asks ‘what have the creators done?’, he addresses palpable achievement; when he asks ‘what is it the creators are trying to do?’, he probes mere intentions. Achievements transfigure lives; intentions that never go beyond intentions create self-consciousness, and self-consciousness is the enemy of art. Of course, all creators affirm their intentions from within the artwork in one way or another – reasoning is, after all, an Aristotelian requirement – either by standing apart from the action or by making adroit insertions into it.