Without contending that this is a “right” or necessary interpretation, I see nothing in the words and music of Tristan und Isolde that definitively contradicts it, and wonder if it might it not be an aesthetically entrancing and dramatically fulfilling one, emotionally powerful and leaving an audience with much to contemplate. Given the small casts and minimal choral requirements, a modest company could do it in an austere, simple production—perhaps (a thought) in repertory with Pelléas. We’ll never know, of course, unless a musically sensitive director and some mimetically gifted singers try it. At the least, it is an interpretation of Wagner’s opera.

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That last observation is à propos, for the Met production called Tristan und Isolde is not an interpretation of Wagner’s opera. It is an installation. Although it has music, its visual sphere utterly overwhelms the aural, and within the visual, the technological overwhelms the human. The designer has taken the show away from the director, and together they have taken it away from the conductor and the hapless performers. For us onlookers, the sensory equilibrium we would employ to receive an opera is disoriented, and the incessant motion in the installation’s innards (in an opera of extended stillnesses, visually speaking) ensures that the attention necessary to follow even a few minutes’ worth of narrative is repeatedly knocked aside. Altogether, the event is the most complete realization to date of the movement away from opera to a musicalized version of what Hans-Thies Lehmann’s book on the subject calls “post-dramatic” theatre; in other words, postopera.^(I) It is important to understand this shift, especially if you are filling up the piggy bank in anticipation of Sharon’s Ring, scheduled for kickoff season after next. And I hope you will also understand that it is futile to worry over the things we would most like to discuss about a performance of any opera. The singing and acting, the conducting and playing, have been moved into a position so subsidiary that one must strain to give them attention. Since I know readers will look for evaluation of these contributions, I will provide it below, but truly, it matters very little.

Inasmuch as design is the determinative component here, I’ll start with that. In an NYT article by Elisabeth Vincentinelli that is given a full page and a third (only a fifth of which, however, is allotted to text; the rest is photos and captions), Devlin cites her exploration of the Met proscenium’s full height in her previous assignment there, during the “overture” to Verdi’s Otello. (Otello, of course, has no overture.) The theatre, she says, “seemed to be longing for that whole frame to be filled.” “Filled with what?”, we ask. “With every artwork I’ve ever looked at or made,” she rejoins, and among her influences lists a number of today’s or yesterday’s avant garde, Brancusi and Picasso the most widely known, plus a Zen master she’s worked with and the use of color in a film by Wong Kar-wai. Also, the “spiraling iris gestures” from an earlier Sharon collaboration on Meredith Monk’s Atlas, not to mention a performance piece in which Ulay is threatening Marina Abramovic with a cocked bow and arrow aimed at her heart—”what love is in this opera, which is so dangerous,” she says. She attributes herself, in other words, in a more literal sense than we usually would when speaking of an artist’s sources. Not a word about Wagner, Tristan, the legend, the music. Just Es, and her space.