Two men stir up all the misery in the world in the Vienna State Opera. These are the music director of the house, Philippe Jordan, and the tenor Andreas Schager. Schager is a phenomenon. The Austrian singer, born in 1971, has consistently worked on the long and extremely difficult tenor roles with Richard Wagner over the past ten years. The conductor Daniel Barenboim was his mentor and brought him to Berlin. Schager will sing in Bayreuth in the summer. But now he is making a stop at the Vienna State Opera in Wagner’s love misfortune “Tristan und Isolde”. And proves once again that no orchestra can be too loud to sing over it, beautifully toned and somehow without any visible or audible effort.
Schager’s Tristan is an aging daredevil who likes to laugh, an overachiever and all-rounder. He has unscrupulously distinguished himself as a fighter and political advisor in particular, and the world laughs at him. He is also delightfully likeable, standing and lying on the stage in corduroy pants, a duffle coat and an open shirt. The hearts of all people fly to him. But horrible abysses rage within him, of which he has almost no idea, but which will put a decisive damper on his career.
Even jubilant joy is always just the stepping stone to the next psychosis
Against the background of murder, torture and rape in the Ukraine, “Tristan” sounds particularly gloomy, hopeless and destructive in Vienna. Philippe Jordan turns the score into the eerie evidence room of all the suppressed longings of the hero Tristan. The instruments play dark, darker, the darkest, the sounds are nightmares, the famous Tristan chord, this heavy symbol of not only sexual unredeemment, is familiar to many brothers and sisters with similarly awkward dispositions. Wagner’s music is a panopticon. No one is to be envied who is hit with such a psyche in which all security slips like in quicksand and for whom jubilant joy is only the stepping stone to the next psychosis.
In addition, Tristan has a problem with women. Isolde is probably the first woman who ever gets a little closer to him. And Martina Serafin has to act as a very self-confident woman in Vienna today in order to get the pretty boy hero, who also murdered her lover, interested in her. In the first act, the two make out long before Wagner’s score gives permission for it. But in her infatuation she doesn’t yet see the abysses in this man, whose essence beyond the radiant tones is destruction, which is increasingly directed against himself. In Schager’s case, Tristan is a man who is fundamentally incapable of love, and who then perishes from this inability to love. Someone who really wants Isolde, but only to take her with him to his death.
Schager’s Tristan is a suicide in love with death. Director Calixto Bieito, who is experienced in carnage, has him attack himself with a knife early on, so that Schager spends much of the evening bloodied and reeling. But that doesn’t detract from his singing vitality. This man never spares himself, accepts every challenge and then, unbelievably, also has enormous strength not only to endure his endless death monologues in the final act, but to shape them sovereignly. Is there a singer right now who even remotely possesses such power and fearlessness? Not in this world.
Schager shows Tristan as a hybrid. On the one hand there is a muscle man and Sunny Boy. But Schager often dismembers the vocal lines and thereby shows that it’s all just for show, that this Tristan is a man broken into the smallest pieces, who only the outer shell proves to be a self-determined human being. This Tristan should have gone into psychiatric treatment long ago or committed himself to an institution, he is a mortal danger for himself and his fellow human beings. This man cannot free himself from his compulsions and his fixation on death on his own. He can only kill himself, he can only devastate. The Viennese “Tristan” is a study on the psychopathology of love life, but far from telling anything about love in general.
Salvation is just wishful thinking here
But this image of men is back in fashion at the moment. But director Bieito, whose team has recently been booed extensively, refuses any connection to today. He also never explains how this Tristan could become this asocial incapable of love, how social success and misogyny are fundamental here and why destructiveness is the only way out for some people. All of this is disturbingly contained in Wagner’s “Tristan”. The Vienna performance limits itself to describing the final stage of such a person, and that in itself is extremely disturbing because of Andreas Schager’s brutally realistic portrayal.
But the score settles down only after Tristan’s death, after the death of the one who cannot be helped. Only then can Isolde complete the love duet that Tristan had interrupted one act earlier, and only without the great destroyer does the music find its way to redemption and satisfaction. But that seems utopian in Vienna. Also because the long evening before and the current reality brand such a redemption as pure wishful thinking.