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People who care about opera can't stop talking about the baby, or "that damned baby" as a disgruntled patron put it on the way out of the Metropolitan Opera last week. It's a directorial conceit in a lavish new production of Richard Wagner's opera "Tristan und Isolde," one of the most revolutionary and shattering works in the history of music. And culture.
There is no baby in Wagner's original, a three-act, five-hour, orgiastic meditation on desire and death, which ends with both its title characters embracing mutual oblivion. But director Yuval Sharon has added one in the final minutes of the work, with Isolde apparently giving birth to a child who is passed around, coddled and fussed over by the few lucky characters who survive Wagner's 1865 interlacing of Eros and Thanatos, or the death drive.
And thus, one of the darkest and most disturbing operas in the canon - a work that divided European intellectuals, artists, politicians and philosophers into vehemently pro- and anti-Wagner camps - is given a ray of light, almost a happy ending. Never lose hope, life goes on, green shoots sprout forth, shriveled hearts bloom again like flowers in spring. Blah, blah, blah.
It's absurd, of course, but it has people talking, and the Metropolitan Opera desperately needs that at the moment. The opera company is the largest classical music organization in the United States, and a giant among world opera companies, with a $326 million annual budget. But it has been hemorrhaging money recently, spending down a third of its endowment, and in January it announced painful layoffs and salary cuts. The New York Times reported that the company has sought an infusion of money from sources that would be anathema to many in its audience, including Saudi Arabia and Elon Musk.
But there were no empty seats in the house for "Tristan" last week, and the company took the unusual step of adding an extra performance to the run, which will now end on April 4. That isn't easy to do, given that there are only a handful of singers in the world who can creditably sing the two title roles and soprano Lise Davidsen, who sings Isolde, is one of the most sought-after artists working today. (For the added performance on April 4, tenor Stuart Skelton will replace the magnificent Michael Spyres, who saves everything he has for his death scene, much of the entirety of the 80-minute final act.)
So, this "Tristan" is a success by most measures that matter to an opera company: ticket sales, full houses, buzz and enthusiasm, even if Sharon has entirely subverted the emotional core and import of the opera.
It's hard to overestimate the impact of Wagner's "Tristan" on European culture when it premiered. Wagner broke off work on his gigantic, four-opera cycle, "The Ring of the Nibelung," to compose "Tristan," and with it, his music became more chromatic, restless, unstable, yearning, a seething stew of intertwined motifs that pile up tension without resolution. He also gave expression to ideas borrowed from the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, whose distinctly pessimistic world view had a profound effect on the composer.
Schopenhauer, borrowing from Eastern philosophy, had supposedly discovered the missing link in western metaphysical systems: the Will, a kind of endless striving, in all of nature and man as well, a perpetual urging forth beyond time, space and the world of appearances. It was also the source of all our unhappiness. Even happiness - a hollow idea - was merely the negation or renunciation of Will.
So, along with a lot of operatic folderol about love potions, honor, duty and revenge, Wagner's lovers seek some kind of mystical love-death in which they leave behind the sham world of day and its petty concern with life, and embrace a rapturous annihilation.
In a program note, Sharon suggests that the baby may be Tristan himself, and thus "a symbol for our participation in nature's endless cycle." But that not only makes no sense, it's a sop to the apparently bottomless need of American audiences to find something cheerfully redeeming in a work that is, in fact, dangerously toxic. In Schopenhauer, not even nature is immune to the relentlessness and misery of the perpetually striving will.
But no matter, opera directors have long since declared themselves free of any duty to the work itself, or any constraints that come from the original material, the composer's intentions or the historical context of a piece. Still, there seems to be a difference between, say, updating an opera's setting and costumes to a different era to make it more relevant, and completely obliterating the actual meaning of the drama. You can imagine a cinematic remake of "Casablanca" updated to the Vietnam War, but not with Humphrey Bogart pushing Victor Laszlo off the plane and jetting off with Ilsa.
"As much of the audience may have happily sighed with the baby solution, it seems to me to highlight just how far we have fallen from any level intelligent or imaginative assessments," one longtime operagoer griped on social media. "Tampering with Wagner's directions is like adding a kazoo to his orchestra," said another. And: "The modern audience of the Metropolitan Opera is apparently too dim, too materialistic, and too impatient to grapple with Wagner's metaphysics," wrote yet another.
Is this the beginning of a rebellion against the license and foolishness of so many stage directors, who seem to have contempt for the raw material they bring to life? That's been brewing for a long time, and there is a fascinating, nascent movement in Europe to restage old operas with the same effort at historical fidelity as the period instruments movement of the late 20th century, which transformed the way baroque and classical pieces are performed. That may gain traction as a countercultural movement against the sorry state of truth in our larger culture and politics, with social media, AI slop and the first postmodern presidency built on not an occasional obfuscation and misdirection, but a systematic undermining of the possibility of truth.
It would be easier to compile a list of 19th century artists and writers who didn't have strong feelings about "Tristan," and Wagner, than those who did. Even some of the most stridently anti-Wagnerians confessed something like a secret need for, or addiction to "Tristan." Nietzsche, who wrote two books devoted to anathematizing Wagner, said: "To this day I am still looking for a work of equally dangerous fascination, of an equally shivery and sweet infinity, as 'Tristan' - and I look in all the arts, in vain …"
The danger isn't so much the idea of a love-death, which loses any philosophical appeal with the expiration of adolescence. Rather, it's the fusion of intoxicating music to a noxious idea that makes Wagner's work so fraught with appeal and repulsion. It divides the mind, and the soul, as we learn a skill that is essential in life, and in politics too: to embrace and resist, to love with brutal caveats and exceptions.
But, with a happy ending, much of that challenge simply disappears. The freedom of directors to reinterpret a work is usually premised on the idea of making it more dangerous, more biting, more challenging to contemporary audiences. In this case it achieves just the opposite.
Let's let Schopenhauer have the last say: "I shall be told, I suppose, that my philosophy is comfortless - because I speak the truth; and people prefer to be assured that everything the Lord has made is good. Go to the priests, then, and leave philosophers in peace! At any rate, do not ask us to accommodate our doctrines to the lessons you have been taught. That is what those rascals of sham philosophers will do for you. Ask them for any doctrine you please, and you will get it."
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