Let’s cut past Act 2, with the communal feast at the table, I guess, and Tristan and Isolde drifting back and forth, separately, on their moving platforms for much of the Liebesnacht, to Act 3. Several reviews I’ve seen have congratulated Sharon on bringing one of the Met orchestra’s players, Pedro R. Diaz, onstage, up in the tunnel, for the shepherd’s mournful piping that weaves in and out of the action. There is no point in objecting that though given a costume, he did not at all resemble a shepherd or show any trace of stage presence. Such expectations are long gone. But though he is of course a polished player, he didn’t play like a shepherd, either—there was not much of the open-air pungency that can add a hint of verisimilitude and an extra poignance to the tone and, in short, make of the shepherd a character for the ear if not for the eye, as one sometimes hears from the usual arrangement of player offstage and miming singer on. Toward the end of the show, Tristan  exits via the tunnel. We’ve seen Tristan in a tunnel before—the tunnel of the Paris metro, in the Aix vidop referenced above, but here the singer must proceed under his own power. And we should consider Sharon’s ending vis-a-vis the one Wagner wrote his music for. In his note, Sharon observes that poor Tristan clings to life while “brave Isolde” lets herself “go into the awesome mystery.” Per RW: yes, Tristan holds onto life until Isolde returns to him. Then, he smiles, sings her name softly once more, and lets go willingly, because he knows she will follow. She has promised that at the end of Act 2, and assured him that she is not afraid. The lovers are united in death, we hope ascended to the Light or some other happy accommodation, but in any case dead. Sharon has it another way, because he wishes us to accept that time is cyclical and that death and birth are, sort of, one. “You’re not dying, you’re being reborn,” Sharon explained to his tenor, Michael Spyres, as he headed up the tunnel in rehearsal. Now, however, he’s not there for Isolde to sing to with her Liebestod. Ah, but apparently she somehow got pregnant back there in Act 2 if not earlier, for as she stands alone near the mouth of the tunnel, singing the last soaring song, Brangäne, in the semidarkness down by the table, hands a baby over to Marke, and Isolde sings to the infant all the immortal words and music meant for Tristan. Are we to take the baby for a reincarnated Tristan? Our choice, evidently, but it looked to me an awful like a moment of de Rougemont’s “middle-class sentimentality.” It also reminded me again of Pelléas, with all its parallels to Tristan, including its claimed status as an “initiatory drama.” In the final moments of Pelléas, Mélisande, who a few minutes earlier felt so weakened she could not lift her arm to cradle her child, in dying stretches her arms outward and upward. She must be reaching for her baby, the Doctor says, but he is wrong—she is striving toward The Light, and as Arkel holds the “waxen” infant, he intones the opera’s final line: “Now it’s the turn of the poor little one.”