The Tristan installation is an apt symbolic representation of humanity’s present predicament—a technologically determined world in constant motion for its own sake, broken free of focus or continuity, therefore of history and memory, circling about, often feverishly, without getting anywhere except to an unearned pretense of renewal. It’s as if Sharon has mistaken the pickle we’ve put ourselves in for a law of the universe. If you would prefer yet another description of our situation to the realization of a profound artwork, you might like it. And there is every reason to be skeptical of de Rougement’s four-centuries-long chain of connections, and to favor an interpretation of Tristan und Isolde more closely based on internal evidence. But as between Es with her “endless artists that have all gone to make me what I am” and Yuval’s three rituals and time going in circles on the one hand, and the Cathars on the other, I’ll take the Cathars.

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So to the performers, who as often nowadays were game and to all appearances unaware of their lack of agency. About the star attraction, Lise Davidsen, I have written a number of times, and do not have much further to report. She remains in possession of a free, full upper segment of range that is unique among contemporary sopranos and is always a pleasure to hear. She soared up over the Act 2 high Cs cleanly, the only soprano in my recollection other than Nilsson to do so, though without Nilsson’s brilliance and penetration of tone. For the first time, I detected flickers of impurity in this upper fifth. She has undergone pregnancy and childbirth since last heard here; that often changes things. A colleague who saw several performances tells me that after the premiere of the installation, she was holding back on the top in Act 2 so as not to embarrassingly outgun her partner. That comports with what I heard, though she’s also often simply been shy about cutting loose. The remainder of her range is as before, audible and untroubled but plain in timbre, deficient in body and quality; the drop-off is shocking at times, and the role is so dependent on a filled-in lower and middle range that it suffers grievously from the imbalance. She dealt professionally with the frequently awkward poses Sharon placed her in, and as always sang musically in a general sense, but not in an interpretively specific or emotionally engaged one. In another NYT piece, an interview with the paper’s rarely visible former chief music critic, Zachary Woolfe, she spoke of the pull toward her motherly responsibilities, and sounded like an altogether sensible person with her priorities in place. I wonder if she’ll actually stick out those Brünnhildes.

I had a hopeful curiosity about Michael Spyres in the long, challenging Heldentenor part of Tristan. He, I figured, would truly sing the music. And so he did, with listenable tone, a maintenance of line and phrasing, and an Act 3 survival ratio superior to all but the greatest of heroic tenors. However, he is not a heroic tenor. He likes to bill himself as a “baritenor” (see Tenors, Bari and Others, Who Don’t Sound like Tenors, 11/22/22), and what we hear in the Tristan context is a pleasingly warm lyric baritone suited to a role like Mercutio in the Gounod Roméo in the lower three-quarters of the role’s range, and on the few but incessantly taxed pitches above the passaggio (F to A, where the compass tops off), a reliable but often constricted tone that never opens out or takes on an exciting ring. The lightness of calibre is one thing, the absence of the slightest dramatic or heroic quality in the voice another, more damaging, one. Of the ecstasy and agony, the struggle, of this character’s journey, there was almost nothing. But then, when you’re just a living mannequin in someone’s toy theatre, there’s not a lot you can do, even if inclined to do it.