‘Tristan’ without Schopenhauer – or Wagner? Mark Berry discovers challenging questions in Dmitri Tcherniakov’s probing production at the Berlin Staatsoper

Review of Tristan und Isolde, directed Tcherniakov, conducted Barenboim, Berlin Staatsoper, 2018.

July 2018, Volume 12, Number 2, 74–9.

No one doubts the supreme challenge presented in performing Tristan und Isolde. After seventy-seven rehearsals, the intended 1861 Vienna premiere had to be abandoned. A work that had taken less than three years to write took more than double that, as John Deathridge has observed, to ‘overcome prejudice about its viability. […] Strasbourg, Karlsruhe, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Dresden, Hanover, Stuttgart, Prague, and Vienna: in the end none of these opera houses would touch it.’ When Munich finally did, in 1865, Wagner’s Tristan, Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, died after just four performances. Wagner’s foes, political, aesthetic, and ‘moral’, seized on the opportunity to claim, ludicrously, that Tristan rather than typhus was the agent of death. If audiences today avoid quite such high (melo)drama, more often than not they meet the curse on the other side of Wagner’s melodramatic coin: ‘only mediocre performances can save me! Perfectly good ones will be bound to drive people mad, – I cannot imagine it otherwise. This is how far I have gone!! Oh dear! – I was just in full career! Adieu!’