Viola Violation: Mark Berry is unconvinced by the visual element of the Peter Sellars ‘Tristan’

The third outing for Peter Sellars’s Paris production of Tristan und Isolde was billed as its last. This collaboration with the video artist Bill Viola has attracted a great deal of attention, so I was more than a little curious to catch it before it expired – süß in Düften, or otherwise. Most of that attention has centred upon the production rather than upon the music, and understandably so. Therein lies the problem, for it is Viola’s video images that dominate everything else. This, I suppose, is fine if you are not a devotee of Tristan, of Wagner, nor indeed of great musical drama. As one who, by contrast, would place Tristan second only to Bach’s St Matthew Passion in the musico-dramatic pantheon, I found the result to be fatally compromised.