BAYREUTH – Thorleifur Örn Arnarsson's phone rang in his Icelandic highlands cabin back in January 2022. Katharina Wagner, the Bayreuth festival director and great-granddaughter of composer Richard Wagner, wanted to get in touch.
She invited Arnarsson to create a new production of “Tristan und Isolde” to open the 2024 festival. He listened to Carlos Kleiber’s 1982 recording on Spotify that night and accepted the next day.
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“The skies are clear and stars are so bright and the northern lights are very common,” he said. “I can’t imagine a better place to sit down and close your eyes and listen to 'Tristan und Isolde’ than in that place. I immediately had a very strong, almost visceral personal reaction because I understood their struggles so well to try to understand what was going on inside of themselves.”
Arnarsson's staging, starring Andreas Schager and Camilla Nylund and conducted by Semyon Bychkov, opened July 25 in a run of seven performances through Aug. 26. Video from opening night can be streamed on Stage+.
Along with the traditional tragic love story, this “Tristan” is a psychoanalytic examination of self-loathing and burdensome expectations. The intellectually dense production with sets by Vytautas Narbutas and costumes by Sibylle Wallum is so layered with symbolism that a study guide would be helpful.
Nylund, who made her role debut two years ago in Zurich, said Arnarsson’s aim was to make these legendary characters “very human-like.”
“What they have gone through and what they are experiencing, what they are saying, what they are telling, that’s something that everybody can find themselves in, also in the audience,” she said. “Tristan is caught in his world. He’s quite depressed and Isolde cannot get to him in this depression.”
Nylund is in a giant white dress — think Billie Eilish's Oscar de la Renta at the 2021 Met Gala — when the curtain rises, and she scribbles the libretto on it with a quill. Tristan's garment was conceived as oxblood colored, a metaphor for dried blood and wounds.
Arnarsson jettisons the specified love potion and Tristan and Isolde obsess over a death draught — they struggle for it and it falls to the floor, she holds it up to admire and he places it at the lip of the stage. Tristan poisons himself instead of getting stabbed by Melot, who knocks the bottle away from Isolde. She will drink the elixir, too, following Tristan's death and will succumb as she concludes the Liebestod.
In Arnarrson's view, Tristan and Isolde fell in love before the opera starts, when he was wounded while killing her fiance Morold and Isolde healed him with herbs and spells. Just before the Liebesnacht duet in the second act, Tristan cuts his hand with a sword and Isolde snatches the spear, holds it to Tristan's chest and pulls back the blade.
They start singing of their ardor 20 feet apart before Tristan gets the courage to draw near for an embrace and extended kiss. He wanders away from Isolde to caress a framed photo of his mother and stare in a mirror — which he puts a fist through when Melot bursts in.
“It has to do with his loneliness that he’s felt his whole life,” Arnarsson said. “He cannot dare to meet Isolde at face level as himself but he knows that he cannot longer live as the hero.”
A ship and King Marke’s castle are replaced as settings, first by an abstract open space with 20 dangling ropes connecting contradictory worlds and hole in the stage’s center suggesting broken landscape. The second act looks like an estate sale chock-full of tchotchkes, but on closer examination it is brimming with musical instruments, clocks, electronics, gauges, statues, stuffed animals, an old globe and paintings — Caspar David Friedrich’s “The Port of Greifswald” is notable. The third act is detritus of the first two as Narbutas highlights humanity's toll on the planet.
“The set is not a ship but cosmic monster,” Narbutas wrote in an email. “Inside of it ribs are body organs, pipes, intestines, big machine — heart, wheels, lungs and etc., which devours civilization and nature, which is represented by various artifacts, tools and objects of nature.”
Sascha Zauner's stark lighting can get eerie. He illuminates the stage in a yellow glow for a portion of the third act with discontinued sodium-vapor lamps that take five minutes to reach full intensity.
Schager struggled through the third performance on Aug. 6 and wound up mouthing part of the third act while cover Tilmann Unger sang from the side of the stage. Bychkov had no advance word and noticed the change while conducting from his chair in the famous covered orchestra pit. Schager returned three days later in good voice.
Nylund's eyes were bug-eyed for much of the night Friday, emphasizing a never-ending love-hate in a captivating performance. Christa Mayer was a standout as Isolde's maid Brangäne in a cast that included Olafur Sigurdarson as Tristan's servant Kurwenal, Günther Groissböck as Marke and Birger Radde as Melot.
Bychkov conducted his first fully staged “Tristan” at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2000. He led a sumptuous performance from the intensity and spacing of the opening motif.
“In one given performance or in a in a lifetime, none of us can realize everything that there is there at once," he said. "We'll realize certain elements of it, but not the whole thing because the whole thing is unrealizable — completely.”