Editor's Note: This is a listening guide ahead of our broadcast of Tristan und Isolde from the 2024 Bayreuth Festival on October 19 at 1PM on Opera Matinee.
When listening to opera broadcasts, you might have heard a sentence like this from the presenter: “...She has appeared on the world’s leading opera stages, including Vienna, Munich, Paris, Bayreuth, London, Berlin, and New York.” What is this locale that’s included among a litany of world-renowned cities? A Google search will reveal that Bayreuth (buy-royt) is a town about the size of Arlington, Virginia, with about one-third of its population (about 75,000). Richard Wagner chose this town, located midway between Berlin and Munich, as the site of his theater, custom-built for presenting his operas. The Bayreuth Festival opened in 1876 with Wagner’s Ring cycle and has significantly impacted the performance and reception of Wagner’s music dramas in the past century and a half. The Festival typically presents eight of Wagner’s ten mature operas each year in July and August.
As we approach the 150th anniversary of the Bayreuth Festival in 2026, we’ll share articles here on Classical Score that explore the festival's historical importance, the theater's unique qualities, and the plans for the anniversary year. We’ll also introduce you to other notable classical institutions in this small but musically significant town in Northern Bavaria.
But today, I’ll focus on the 2024 Bayreuth Festival, starting with the opera we will broadcast on WETA Classical on October 19th at 1pm: Tristan und Isolde. (Learn more ways to listen here.)
When previewing a radio broadcast, describing the dramatic concept and staging of the performance is somewhat irrelevant. Bayreuth is notorious for its outlandish productions, which I’ll comment on below. But to set the stage for the broadcast, I’ll share a few press photos: Isolde’s magnificent dress and the cluttered set, perhaps representing the state of the characters’ thoughts.
One of the great benefits of listening to a radio broadcast is the ability to pay close attention to the musical elements. And in this performance, they were spectacular. We are enjoying the happy convergence of the best Wagnerian singers (Camilla Nylund, Andreas Schager), instrumentalists (drawn from the premiere German orchestras), and a dynamic conductor (Semyon Bychkov). However, it is the acoustics of the Bayreuth Festival Theater that raise this performance to the highest level. This will be the topic of future articles, but in short, a combination of the theater's dimensions and the orchestra pit's unique layout make this space ideal for Wagner’s music dramas. Which, of course, was Wagner’s intent in creating his own theater.
The orchestra pit is entirely obscured from the audience and opens only slightly to the stage. The result is a wonderfully blended and tempered sound. The orchestra can play at full force without covering up the singers; in the quieter sections, it can engage in intimate dialogue with them. Why is this relevant? If our ears have been attuned to Wagner through recordings, we might not realize how unlike a live performance those WAV files often are. To appreciate this, one need only compare the experience of sitting in the opera house to the commercial release of that performance.
So, I invite you to listen to our broadcast of Tristan und Isolde, knowing that you’re hearing an unusually similar balance and intensity of sound to what attendees heard in the Bayreuth Festival Theater. I can attest to this since I sat a few rows from the back of the house a few weeks after the performance we’re broadcasting. (I hope you find a more comfortable seat than Bayreuth offers…) I can offer these points of interest as the broadcast unfolds from 1:00pm to 5:12pm on the 19th.
We often stereotype Wagner’s music as larger-than-life with large doses of blaring brass. But Wagner devotes plenty of time to the opposite spectrum with intimate orchestration, allowing a skilled conductor to craft wonderfully expressive moments. We notice this immediately in the prelude to the first act. Listen to the nuanced dynamics and the fluid tempo achieved by Bychkov. And remember them because these subtleties appear throughout the opera when these themes are interlaced with the singers’ melodies.
The larger-than-life Wagner first appears shortly after the prelude, with an outburst from Isolde (in her larger-than-life dress), which you’ll hear between 1:17pm and 1:20pm. Notice how every word can be heard, yet the orchestra is not holding back in its volume. It is a wonderfully thrilling interweaving of orchestra and voice that isn’t easy to replicate in most opera houses. In other locales, the orchestra often overpowers even voices larger than Nylund’s or minimizes its effectiveness by underplaying.
These two characteristics pervade the performance. Here are a few other notable sections:
- 1:26pm: the wonderfully lyrical singing of Schager. Having a Tristan with an expressive side along with the stamina and power required in the third act is a real luxury.
- 1:42pm: Isolde’s curse. Again, notice the ability to hear distinct words while the orchestra plays at full force.
- 2:20pm: the subtleties of the prelude return, with the addition of the voices. Listen for the intricate lines from the orchestra around 2:24pm, heard clearly alongside the voices, commenting on what they’re singing.
- In Act II, listen to how Bychkov masterfully gradually builds the intensity episodically to the climax at Tristan's reunion with Isolde (2:30pm - 2:50pm).
- The beautiful, intimate section of the love duet from 3:04pm – 3:09pm cannot be missed.
- The incredible stamina and intensity of Schager in the third act, especially from 4:32p-4:47p. (It was actually more impressive in the performance I attended in late August; in this July performance he was struggling in the last, grueling passage he sings.)
- Isolde’s Liebestod, beautifully melding the expressive and larger-than-life elements that we’ve experienced throughout the opera (from 5:03pm-5:09pm).
This is already a long article, so I’ll briefly mention the other operas I had the great fortune to attend at Bayreuth this summer. I’ll do so in the context of staging since that’s an important aspect of the Bayreuth experience.
Few modern-day Bayreuth productions follow the exact storylines that Wagner’s libretti indicate. The departures can be quite extreme and usually result in mixed critical reviews and plenty of boos from the audience. Here are some notable elements of this summer’s productions that might surprise those accustomed to traditional stagings. If you’re not familiar with the storylines of these operas, they’re readily available online. You’ll need that context to see how far these productions stray from the original.
- The Ring cycle. There is no ring; a child represents the ring. Nor do Wotan and Siegfried carry a spear or a sword. The Ride of the Valkyries takes place while the “warrior maidens” are in an elegant waiting room, singing through cosmetic surgery bandages. Siegfried doesn’t kill the dragon; he outsources the deed. Et cetera. The production seemed determined to highlight child exploitation, incest, dysfunctional families, weak leaders, and an obsession with youth. Fine, but the stage action often contradicted the action depicted in the music. Maybe that was part of the concept, but it flies in the face of Wagner’s ideal of perfectly integrated music, words, and actions. I’ve seen plenty of productions that dispense with the traditional props (spear, sword, ring, dragon) but did so while maintaining integrity with the music. This production’s strength rested solely on the excellent musicians, with conductor Simone Young demonstrating her internationally acclaimed command of Wagner’s demanding scores. It was a performance that deserved a much more cohesive production.
- Parsifal. This production had some extreme stage action, but it served the music and storyline wonderfully. Most notable was the video depiction of Amfortas’s bleeding wound being cleaned and sutured. It filled the back of the stage for at least fifteen minutes during the first act. The opera revolves around the wound that will not heal, and the disturbing video accentuated the suffering of Amfortas (and caused more than one attendee to faint at the extended sight of blood). The orchestra was superb under Pablo Heras-Casado, and Ekaterina Gubanova has become my all-time favorite Kundry, thanks to her moving and exciting portrayal.
- Tannhäuser. The overture sets the stage in this production with a video of Tannhäuser as a clown and Venus as his companion on a road trip in a vintage camper van. At one point, they rob a Burger King. The pilgrims in the first act are modern-day “pilgrims” to the Bayreuth Festival, and the townspeople are singers at the festival. In the second act, Venus climbs into the Festival Theater through the balcony during a traditional performance of Tannhäuser, and her presence is the cause of Tannhäuser’s irreverent song to Venus. Oh, and it also includes the drag performer Le Gateau Chocolat. It was wonderful! An extreme departure from the original medieval-period storyline, for sure, but one that matched both the music and the spirit of the libretto. Nathalie Stutzmann was the perfect conductor for this opera, showcasing the brilliance and grandeur of the score.
The next article in this series will focus on the Ring cycle, which Wagner completed 150 years ago, in November 1874, and its relation to Bayreuth, where it premiered in 1876. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions about this series, please email us classical@weta.org.
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