Gazing at the installation, we picture the director’s role as no more than that of a child playing with a toy theatre, placing his figures here and there—though the child now has miniature living mannequins to order about. Yet the installation has grown out of the director’s fantasies. In his program note, Sharon, like de Rougemont, finds “three recognizable rituals” in Wagner’s three acts. But for him, these rituals are not the three “mystic moments,” but “a shared drink” (Act 1), a “communal feast” (Act 2), and “the medical procedures accompanying death and birth” (Act 3). These are quite a comedown from the mythical plane, and Sharon has attempted to show us the sequence on both that level and the quotidian one by seating the live principals at a table right at the edge of the apron, then replacing them with doubles while the singers sneak off to enter the myth, where they must contend with blown-up versions of themselves and their doubles. (They lose.) Sometimes, the goings-on down at the table are duplicated in the sprawling projections above, sometimes not. As to the stretches when they are not, I can tell you almost nothing, and that is because of a guided tourist experience of sixty years ago. In the spring of 1966, I was escorted through the under-construction Lincoln Center “new Met” several months before it opened. I was writing an article on it for High Fidelity, and my guide was Herman Krawitz, who then held the title of Business Administrator. It was a thorough tour of the building’s facilities and spaces. When we arrived at the front of the auditorium’s topmost tier, I had to imagine the view down to the stage, because a temporary wooden ceiling intervened. But as we stood there a moment, Krawitz said “Should be the best seat in the house,” and although during those years I was accustomed to orchestra-level press seats, I knew from early experience his guess could—indeed, should—be correct. So from the time my regular reviewing of the company ended, my favored seat has been Balcony, Row A, whence the angle onto the installation’s mythical plane naturally passed right over the table and whatever transactions took place around it. At times, I directed attention toward it, and sometimes, as in Marke’s complaint in Act 2, my attention was forced thither, willy-nilly. But I always shifted back as quickly as possible to the prettier blue-ish-gray sights above—the flowery mouth, closed at first (“the CBS eye!”, commented my wife), then open to a tunnel that narrows back toward the full depth of the Met stage, with ramps and moving platforms in the horizontal dimension and, needless to say, Es Devlin’s colorful fifty-four feet of filler in the vertical.

As with the performance elements, it’s of small value to argue over this or that detail of the installation, or even to contend with the “concept.” Debate makes no sense when the premises are so at odds. The hubris and arrogance of the auteurs continues to astonish even as we become habituated to it, and as I noted in Opera as Opera anent Frank Castorf’s Bayreuth Ring, “Once we have acceded to the propositions that the director is ‘equal to the playwright in shaping the theatrical experience’ and ‘may write the text anew’  . . . we have lost the ground from which to do anything other than squabble over which things we find neat and which not.” To squabble: the moment when I realized for a certainty that no deal would be possible between the installation and me was at the start of Act 1, Scene 5. Isolde has just insisted again on the “draught of death,” Brangäne has sung “O deepest woe! O highest grief!”, Isolde has asked “Art thou true to me?” and the tension between them has approached the breaking point, when Kurwenal intrudes to announce “Herr Tristan!” After a few skittery getting-it-together bars in the strings, Isolde sings “Let him approach,” and with the heavy statement of Tristan’s motive in brass and woodwind, the great motionless standoff between the lovers that leads to the Consolamentum (per de Rougemont) or “shared drink” (Sharon) begins. Except that, exquisitely timed to the peak of the orchestra’s crescendo, we jump-cut to Tristan’s face in gigantic profile, a knife to his throat (“so dangerous,” and, according to the projection designer, showing off “the epic-ness of everything,”) and, soon, little flashes that, we learn from the video designer, are starbursts (“always really important,” she says, and the projection guy adds “I love them now, too”). We continue to stare at the projected mug while the living mannequins, miniature in contrast, negotiate the ramp for most of what should have been the scene.