Ben Heppner: Tristan und Isolde: Welsh National Opera (WNO) - 2012 Update

Update: We provide a Photo Preview here

I did say I would try to keep you updated. However, given that it is 12 months to first night, news is not "coming thick and fast" - as would be expected. Nevertheless, WNO have very kindly provided a little more detailed  information, together with some images of the 2006 revival. I have also included some reviews of the production from 2006.

Sung in German with English surtitles (Welsh in Wales Millennium Centre) First night 19 May 2012.

Photo: Bill Cooper

Tristan                                       Ben Heppner

King Marke                                Matthew Best

Isolde                                        Ann Petersen

Kurwenal                                   Phillip Joll

Melot                                         Simon Thorpe

Brangaene                                Susan Bickley

Shepherd                                  Chorus

Helmsman                                 Chorus

Sailor                                        Chorus

                                               

Conductor                                 Lothar Koenigs

                                               

Original Director                        Yannis Kokkos

Revival Director                         Peter Watson

Designer                                   Yannis Kokkos

Lighting Designer                      Guido Levi

Original Movement Director        Kate Flatt

Assistant Designer                    Muriel Trembleau

Staff Director                            Carmen Jakobi

Co-production with Scottish Opera

Reviews (2006 revival):

Rian Evans

The Guardian,  Monday 2 October 2006 

"Yannis Kokkos's 1993 staging of Tristan und Isolde for Welsh National Opera suggested an integrity of concept that would not date - and so it has proved. In Peter Watson's revival, its classic lines retained all their clarity while allowing Wagner's ecstatic poem to pervade and invade the senses."

Photo: Bill Cooper

George Hall: The Stage, Tuesday 3 October 2006

"Welsh National Opera revives Yannis Kokkos’ 1993 production of Wagner’s transcendent exploration of love and death in a distinguished performance. Kokkos’ self-designed staging is visually highly effective, presenting the opera’s narrative line with exceptional clarity and truth, and the semi-abstract sets have an aptly timeless quality.

This is another show that displays the world-class credentials of the Welsh company. Wagner fans should move heaven and earth to see this outstanding production as it tours over the next few weeks"

Neil Fisher: The Times, October 2006

"Yannis Kokkos’s production is more about suggestive abstraction. At times, the effect is striking — Tristan’s death, on a giant, protruding slab and lit by an eerie green glow, makes for a striking tableau."

Photo: Bill Cooper

More at: Welsh National Opera

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WAGNER By Peter Latham: Aesthetics and Orchestration. Gramophone 1926

An article published in Gramophone, June 1926. Latham discuss, Wagner, Gluck, Music -Drama, Aesthetics and Orchestration.

WAGNER himself never wished to be regarded as a composer pure and simple. He protested with some justice that his achievement covered many fields, and that any estimate of it must be based on a general survey and not merely on the music that constituted but one element in the complex whole. Even the modern opera-goer (andthe opera-singer, too) is far too apt to forget all other considerations in his anxiety to appreciate to the full the music that the composer puts before him ; and if this tendency is common to-day, it was almost universal when Wagner lived and wrote. For though the obvious truth that an opera is a combination of music and drama has never been entirely forgotten since it was first stated by the group of Florentines among whom this form of art originated, yet the ideal blend of the two has not proved easy to discover. Music has always had a way of asserting her pm-eminence at the expense of the plays with which she has been associated, in spite of all the efforts of theorists and reformers to keep her within legitimate bounds. Even the redoubtable Gluck himself could not always resist her imperious demand for freedom to develop unrestrained along her own lines, and during the seventy-five years or so that elapsed between Iphigenia in Tauris and The Rhine gold she succeeded in reducing the sister art to a condition of almost complete subjection. Mozart and Beethoven, it is true, never failed to give due consideration to the significance of the scene they were setting, but the bent of their minds towards purely instrumental compositions made them illfitted to continue the work of Gluck, even if the sheer splendour of their genius had not been such as to overwhelm by its very magnificence the dramas to which it lent its lustre. Their deep sense of artistic fitness did, indeed, lead to the creation of an operatic tradition that was to develop through Weber till at last it bore rich fruit in the work of Wagner himself. But before this consummation could be reached a period had to be traversed during which the original ideals of dramatic music seemed to be obliterated in a flood of lyric eloquence and vocal virtuosity. This is not the place for an estimate of the operas of Spontini, Meyerbeer, Auber, Donizetti, Bellini, and a host of others, all famous in their day and not by any means forgotten even now ; but it will be generally conceded that in their work it was the music and the singers that mattered. The very inanity of so many of their libretti is sufficient evidence of the small store they set on dramatic considerations.

Such being the operas to which audiences were accustomed when Wagner appeared upon the scene, it is not surprising that he should have decided that his theories required some explanation if they were to prove acceptable to the operatic public. His hearers, he felt, must be made to see that his mature work, however novel it might appear, contained nothing that was not perfectly logical and easily intelligible once the standpoint from which he regarded the artistic problem was properly appreciated, and consequently we find him in his writings insisting again and again on the essential unity of the true "Music-Drama," in which literature, acting, and stagecraft should all play their part with the music in achieving the desired dramatic result.

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SF Opera Ring Festival 2011: An Over-View

I was looking at the best way to give some overview of San Francisco's Ring Cycle 2011 when I came accross this. It appears that Janos Gereben at the  San Francisco Examiner has done a far better job than I might attempt

"The Ring of the Nibelung," the beloved cycle of Richard Wagner operas, is coming back to San Francisco for the first time since 1999, bringing with it all its splendor and heartbreak.

For almost a century and a half, opera audiences have flocked to any part of the globe where Richard Wagner’s “The Ring of the Nibelung” was being produced.

Now, once again, it’s San Francisco’s turn, and some 40,000 visitors from around the Bay Area and world are expected at the War Memorial Opera House between May 29 and July 3. There will be three cycles of the 17-hour colossus (15 hours of music) divided into four operas (Dates and Booking Information here.)  Including individual productions in the past three years leading up to the complete cycles, the cost of the venture is approximately $24 million.

Ticket income will not cover the cost to the opera, which relies on individual and corporate donations, but the financial, public relations and visitor attraction benefits to The City exceed the expense.

“For San Francisco, having the full ‘Ring’ cycle here is like hosting a Super Bowl or World Cup soccer for the arts,” said Kary Schulman, the director of Grants for the Arts. “We gain not just additional hotel stays, restaurant meals and shopping, but, because these are culture-goers, our other arts and visitor attractions are likely to benefit as well.”

The man responsible for the decision to produce “Ring,” opera general director David Gockley, emphasizes the size of the project, but from another angle.

“It is the most monumental piece of music theater ever conceived by the mind of man,” Gockley said. “Every rational force in our society mitigates against it being done. Yet it is done because there is an urge within us to see the truth and the fate of ourselves as humans played out on a vast, multilayered canvas. For anyone in my position, it is the dream of a career in opera to essay this Everest of challenges.”

So large is that challenge that this will be only the sixth time in the company’s 88-year history that “Ring” is presented. Previous years were 1935, 1972, 1985, 1990 and 1999. The first “Ring” came to The City in 1900, when New York’s Metropolitan Opera performed it on tour in the Grand Opera House, long before the War Memorial opened in 1932.

Beyond size, expense, tradition and fame, at the core of the “‘Ring’ experience” is the experience of basic human emotions expressed in unforgettably powerful ways. What makes it all work is as basic as the anguish of a father (Wotan) over the loss of his daughter (Brünnhilde).

This deep human sorrow hits the audience with unsurpassed impact in a combination of gorgeous music and deeply affecting drama.

“My ‘Walküre’ turns out terribly beautiful,” Wagner wrote to Franz Liszt in 1852, and the century and a half that has passed since only confirmed and amplified his judgment.

Francesca Zambello, who’s responsible for the San Francisco production, said Wagner’s vision of the world “demands a setting in which gods, goddesses, creatures, heroes and mere humans are all equally at home. Many set out on journeys that will take them through terrifying landscapes demanding courage, heart, understanding and sacrifice. As they are transformed, so are we who watch, and [we] sense their stories are also ours.”

Those journeys might sound familiar even to opera newbies: From ancient Nordic mythology to Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” to Peter Jackson’s film trilogy, there are recurring stories of the all-powerful ring and what befalls on mortals, and even gods coveting them.

“All of the great themes of the ‘Ring’ — the destruction of nature, the quest for power, corruption, the plight of the powerless — resound through the four operas,” Zambello said.

Unlike traditional staging of the Wagner operas, here “they are not bound to the 19th century’s industrial age, nor to Europe or some leafy Nordic realm of long ago,” Zambello said.

To make this happen, huge forces are coming together. World-famous Wagner specialist Donald Runnicles conducts an orchestra of more than 100. Principal roles are filled by acclaimed singers, and the rest of the cast includes some participants in the Merola Opera Program; veterans of Merola now take on major roles, and there are scores of stagehands, costumers, makeup artists, ushers and others involved.

For the months leading up to the big event in June, local arts organizations collaborate in presenting a wide range of programs centering on the “Ring.”

Zambello said in his (sic) production, American history, mythology, iconography, landscape and “dreams all filtered into our palette as we constructed our stage world.”

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A Wagnerian Thor

I like to share "odd" bits of Wagnerian miscellanea  from time to time and I thought this might be of interest - especially given the recent release of the movie "Thor" (of which I have not seen so cannot comment) . According to blogger Andrew May, in his blog Forteana  Wagner's ring - together with  Alberich, Rheinmaidens, stolen gold, et al - made an appearance in 1980 in Marvel Comics "Thor" (source of course of the recent movie).  This story arch was written by wagnerian comic book writer Roy Thomas - who would go on to write a graphic novel of Der Ring Des Nibelungen (I will discuss that at a later time).


A Wagnerian Thor

Back in 1980 I had been a fan of the Marvel comic Thor for twelve years, and of Richard Wagner's Der Ring Des Nibelungen for two years. Thus I was well-placed to appreciate the storyline that began in issue 294 of Thor (cover-dated April 1980), which bears a more-than-passing resemblance to Wagner's magnum opus (a fact heralded in the Bullpen Bulletins for that month: "Thor #294: Beginning this issue - the Quest for the Ring of the Nibelung!").

The story in question, written by Roy Thomas and illustrated by Keith Pollard and Chic Stone, is called 'New Asgards for Old', and is based on the intriguing notion that Ragnarok (the Twilight of the Gods of Norse mythology) is cyclic, occurring at the end of each astrological age of approximately 2150 years. The previous Ragnarok-cycle was the one relating to the traditional Norse gods (the Aesir) that feature in the Icelandic Eddas and in Wagner's Ring. The present cycle is the one relating to the Marvel Comics characters (Asgardians) with the same names as the old Norse gods.

The "Wagnerian" storyline actually starts on page 20 of issue 294 (see detail at left), when the dwarf Alberich steals the Rhinegold from the three Rhinemaidens. Now, you might think that this isn’t specifically Wagnerian at all... that it's just a case of Roy Thomas drawing on the same Eddaic material as Wagner. But the Rhinegold (and Alberich's theft of it from the Rhinemaidens) isn't in the Eddas -- it was invented by Wagner as a McGuffin to hold his opera cycle together! The fact was that Roy Thomas liked the story of The Ring and wanted to do a comic adaptation of it. Eventually, in 1989, he did produce a "proper" graphic novel of it: The Ring of the Nibelung, illustrated by Gil Kane. But back in 1980, graphic novels hadn't been invented, and the pages of Thor were the next best thing!

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