My first Wagner: Tristan und Isolde

(Photo: Ken Howard/The Metropolitan Opera)

I've been afraid to approach Wagner opera and Tristan und Isolde for awhile now, and have passed up recent, fantastic opportunities to see it live (like the LA Phil's Tristan Project) for a variety of reasons: first, the sheer length. Tristan is over five hours long in performance, and other Wagner operas aren't much shorter. I also felt like I'd have to be more familiar with opera before I could really enjoy such long works, so that I could focus and get something out of them. Plus, I'm often so tired after work that the thought of plowing through a five-hour opera in the evening has always been fairly unappealing to me.

But not only did I get through all five hours and twenty minutes of today's Met broadcast of Tristan und Isolde, I also really enjoyed it. I got plenty of rest leading up to this afternoon's screening (which was actually an encore of Saturday's live broadcast - that also, incidentally, I chose because of its 12 noon start time on the West Coast... the live broadcast would have started at a too-early-for-opera time of 9:30am). And I prepped beforehand, listening to excerpts and familiarizing myself with pieces of the score. I've gotten a lot more used to opera by now, and seeing this lengthy opera in the cinema also allowed for comforts such as flip flops, jeans and major slouching in the seats.

The opera is gorgeous to listen to, particularly the stirring second act with its Love Duet that goes on for nearly half an hour but never outwears its welcome. The cast was fantastic, particularly Deborah Voigt (pictured at right) as Isolde. I don't know enough about Wagnerian voices to really be critical of her voice the way the diehard fans have been, but for me her passion and soaring, powerful sound were just spectacular. She looked good on screen too, with her beautiful expressive eyes and glamorous appearance. Michelle DeYoung was a powerful-voiced Brangäne. On stage, DeYoung towered over Voigt in stature; it looked odd in places but it barely mattered with the vocals being so good. Robert Dean Smith is the fourth Tristan in the Met's current run of Tristan, after originally cast Ben Heppner took ill and various covers and replacements have filled in until this broadcast performance. He was very strong and matched Voigt very well in the Love Duet. Probably the main reason why the opera moved along so well for me was that the singers were all so dramatically present and acted it out so well, in addition to their fine voices. The passion in the Love Duet was readily apparent, which really sent the music soaring.

The broadcast directors made a strange choice to do multiple split screens to make the cinemacast more visually interesting. I can see the logic behind doing this: Dieter Dorn's production is very static, placing singers in dramatic positions around the stage and basically leaving them there to sing for long stretches of time. With the deep colors of light on stage, the effect is meant to be striking on the stage. To keep things interesting for a film translation, broadcast director Barbara Willis Sweete split the screen into anything from two to five panels, each focusing on a different character or part of the stage; one panel - generally the center one - showed a wide shot of the stage for an overview. So, in theory, the cinema audience's eye could choose which panel to watch, wandering from detail to detail much the way a live audience member's eye can wander about the stage. But in practice, it was often more distracting than interesting, adding visual cacophony where the music was plaintive or expansive. There were moments when it worked, when they chose images intelligently and stacked the panels around the screen in an interesting way: at the close of Act 2, the boxes for five characters were laid out roughly in their pattern on the stage, showing all of their emotions simultaneously. But for the few great moments, there were more moments like Isolde's final aria, strangely shoehorned into a small square midscreen instead of filling the entire, giant HD screen with musical and visual expansiveness. The boxes kept moving and sliding around, too. All in all, a good idea but executed with mixed results - I hope they don't try it out too often.

The host for the broadcast was Susan Graham, and the intermission features for this broadcast were pretty interesting. A few amusing moments revealed the mechanics of live broadcast - Deborah Voigt walked backstage and greeted Graham with an affectionate "Susie!" but the camera catches robo-Susan Graham standing with a blank expression staring at the camera director for her cue in the split-second before she turns on her happy interview persona. Still, interviews with Voigt, Michelle DeYoung and the Met's artistic manager Sarah Billinghurst were very informative.

This Tristan definitely won me over and I'm glad I came for it. Now I'm looking forward to seeing the Met's last two broadcasts of the season, La Boheme and La Fille du Regiment.

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I also did end up driving down to San Diego two weekends ago to catch San Francisco Opera's broadcast of La Rondine, starring Angela Georghiu. There were all of 10 people in the theater that afternoon (compared to the Met's sold out cinemas), and the dingy theater's roof was leaking water on a sunny day. Still, the broadcast package on screen was pretty decent, if not as exciting as the "it's really happening now" atmosphere of the Met's broadcasts. I wasn't very into La Rondine: it's basically La Traviata with out the tuberculosis, and I didn't really like the 20s-era flapper choice for the sets and costumes. Everyone was playing up the theme as a cute choice, and it never felt organic or relevant to the piece. Georghiu was very good and has a glamorous stage presence, but she and the other principal singers looked like they were in massive amounts of pain whenever they sang big arias - I guess the camera got too close to their larger-than-life stage personas. But, it wasn't so bad to see, clocking in at just over two hours. Not as exciting as today's Tristan, though.

Upcoming on Wednesday is another Georghiu cinemacast - La Traviata from Milan's Teatro alla Scala. Violetta is one of Georghiu's signature roles, so it should hopefully be good.

There was also a live telecast of New York City Opera's Madama Butterfly on PBS' Live from Lincoln Center on Thursday. The production was kind of a bore, though it was solidly sung in any case. Shun-Yi Li was in very good voice as Cio Cio San, though she did not look fifteen years old by a long shot. James Valenti was a very handsome, lothario kind of Pinkerton, giving the character a playboy and irresponsible dimension - Pinkerton seemed even more of a cad than usual. This production was staged in a much more straightforward, fairly traditional manner than I am used to. Since I'm mostly familiar with Puccini's opera via high-concept stagings like Robert Wilson's production (which LA Opera has presented several time in the last few years), this more traditional approach gave me pause - it brought out all the queasy elements that David Henry Hwang criticizes so sharply in his play M. Butterfly. In the play, the main character positions the opera as a Western fantasy of Asian culture, with a subservient, "butterfly" of an Asian woman who will drop everything and wait longingly for her white husband to return. It made the whole thing slightly uncomfortable to watch. The other high-concept productions, like Wilson's, distracted me with the visuals and highly stylized staging - the naturalistic acting here was just so odd after Hwang's play. The live broadcast was hosted by Susan Graham, a kind of practice run for her Saturday hosting duties across the plaza at the Met? It reminded me, too, that these live broadcasts from the opera have been around for quite some time before the Met shot them into the stratosphere by distributing to movie theaters.

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American Ballet Theatre will be in town this week, performing Kevin McKenzie's production of Swan Lake at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion from Thursday to Sunday. This production is very colorful and it's short, so its particularly good for newbies to Swan Lake. All the important classical parts are there, but balletomanes will bemoan the loss of significant chunks of music and choreography. I'm seeing Michele Wiles and David Hallberg on Thursday, then Irina Dvorovenko and Maxim Beloserkovsky on Friday; won't be doing an all-casts marathon this time around like last summer's Sleeping Beauty insanity.