We soon see the set, a large room in dark wood, handsome but cold, in the old-fashioned box shape, opened out to the fourth wall. It is said to be based on a Parisian exhibition hall, but could be the basic set for an English drawing-room comedy, c. 1900, though overlarge for that purpose. There is a rim of white light around the top. So there’s our field of play. It doesn’t much resemble the ship’s deck of the original, but shortly we see a projection at the back of flying seagulls, to indicate something of a connection. This projection screen will command much of our attention, its images constantly changing and constantly in motion. Periodically, it presents sequences of black and white film from a second narrative about our protagonist couple, the most important of which shows flashes of a second act in which Tristan and Isolde meet in a hotel room with the intention of committing suicide together. And though some of these sequences attempt an illusion of depth—rolling down the hotel corridor, for instance, which we are shown quite soon (time being fragmented here and the narratives sometimes in synch, sometimes out)—the fact that they’re on a screen contributes to a feeling of flatness, of everything happening on the horizontal plane. Since we who are watching the video are already viewing a two-dimensional surface, we are double-screened and doubly flattened. It’s enervating.

Many of the limitations here are those shared by all vidops, e. g., that so much is dependent on the closeup, and that unless the conversing characters are within touching distance they cannot be shown together, but only alternately, back and forth; or that long shots that try to show the whole scene reduce it to dollhouse dimensions. Is it not wonderful, though, that we can see the play of facial expression in all its depth and nuance? Only if the face is one we want to look at, and only if there is depth and nuance in its play and these qualities seem manifestations of genuine emotion and intent. The marriage of opera and camera is a forced one, and often cruel.

I probably don’t need to note that this Tristan is set in the present. It is always one of the feral auteurs’ ambitions to eliminate any vestige of the ideal, whether it be in setting, in personal appearance, or character behavior. Commonality, to the point of schlubbiness, is a goal. With an opera whose origin is in a medieval tale whose story and characters carry the mark of legend and whose music goes as far into that as it is possible to go, the update alone accomplishes that, and sets up the incongruities, the ongoing contradictions, that guarantee the submergence of the masterwork. Beyond that, I could tell you many things of what transpires in this production, from Brangäne as nurse, bandaging the eyes of the Sailor at the Masthead, who is given a sword and a kiddie military uniform (you’re free to interpret); to the all-purpose uses of the big studded leather chairs and of the draped couch, which is copied from the famous one at No.19 Berggasse a hundred years back, and put to the same uses; T & I shooting up, then drowning on their hotel bed; to the lineup of the mannequins at a long table, each with a mug of coffee, while Tristan quaffs his (this as the Act 3 Prelude is underway); etc., etc. The point of such description would be to define the gap between such feints and the congruent moments in a “real” Tristan, like the space between paired quarks on opposite sides of the universe. But that is to imply that certain ideas are worse, more ludicrous, than others, and by extension that there are other ideas not so bad, or effects that work on their own terms—and that is not the point. The point is that as soon as the line is crossed from interpreter to auteur—to co-creator—no grounds remain for discriminations between good and bad, effective or ineffective, authentic or inauthentic. The game is over, the masterwork is gone.