To get a little triangulation on my idea, I urge you to look back to The Mysteries of Pelléas et Mélisande (2/15/19). There you will find, in the second half of the article, another opera proposed as a Catharist “initiation drama,” exploring the same dualisms as does Tristan, and bearing almost exactly the same character distribution and plot. Its text is the eponymous play by Maurice Maeterlinck, who at the time was a true occultist writing in a style we call “Symbolist,” and its music is by the “Impressionist” Claude Debussy, who—as Jean Markale, the author of the Catharist interpretation, says—though “no mystic himself, found the perfect response to it.” In both operas, the ultimate effect will depend primarily on the vocal, musical, and thespic talents of highly specialized and sentient performers. But when it comes to “production,” the day/night, Darkness/Light duality is central to realization. De Rougemont’s complaints about realistic sets and costumes—equally valid when applied to Pelléas—are most powerfully justified by the problems of the second act. Act 1, as he points out, takes place very much in the world of day; its light, though changing with scenic developments (Brangäne flinging open the hangings at Isolde’s cry of “Luft! Luft!” and drawing them again when she returns despairingly from her mission to Tristan; the forceful re-opening when the ship is docking), is certainly the bright light of the everyday world, possibly subtly altered from open sea to shore, or with the time of day. But there is another light, the Light, purer, less tinted by the colors of our world. Whether a hint of it is introduced after the quaffing of the potion, as a bit of forelighting, then snuffed by the daylight for the final tableau, is a choice for director and designer to make. I’d be inclined against it, since we’re still in the day world, but it’s one of those things that need to be seen before deciding, and could set us up nicely for the climactic parallel moment in Act 2. In this world-of-day act, I see no reason why the ship cannot be shown representationally, or the performers’ behavior to be other than natural to their time-and-place stations and to the emotional content of their experiences—which, of course, are not those of our everyday lives.

Act 2 moves to the world of night. It’s a stage-night; we always cheat to see persons, buildings, natural phenomena, and when Isolde throws down the torch, we must cheat a little more. The torch extinguished, we are left with the silver light of the moon, radiant enough for us to see Tristan’s pell-mell entrance out of the wood and the lovers’ fevered embrace, set to high excitation in the music.  Their embrace, though, must be passionate without being sexual, an embrace of shared noble rapture, and as both the lovers and the music settle down, a new, strange atmosphere must reign. I’ve always felt that once Brangäne, her pleas and warnings rejected, has retreated to the battlements, the garden terrace outside Isolde’s quarters is an insufficiently intimate and concealed  spot for what follows. Something more beautiful and suggestive of another realm must enter the picture. I would be tempted to summon the Minnegrotte evoked by Gottfried, magically appearing down and farther front from the terrace, with Tristan and Isolde ensconced within it by, at the latest, “O sink’ hernieder, Nacht der Liebe.” The grotto has its own emerald glow, but as the duet slowly gains in intensity and pace, we become aware of the Light, akin to but distinct from that of the moon, gradually inundating the space, and the lovers increasingly aware of it, turning toward it, and in the final pages reaching up to it, their passion at its height, as if to be ecstatically united with it. With Kurwenal’s “Rette dich, Tristan!” the Light is instantly replaced with the orange break of dawn, the grotto vanishes in a flash, and darkness is banished. The Light will return once more, in the Liebestod, suffusing the lovers’ final, peaceful union.