Since it first came to the LA Opera in 1987, “Tristan und Isolde” has been one of the company’s most popular productions. Now Richard Wagner’s opera is returning to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for the second time since then, with newly refurbished sets by renowned artist David Hockney.
Hockney’s sets provide a fanciful backdrop to Wagner’s story of star-crossed lovers, sung in German and featuring English supertitles.
The first act opens with a ship, sculpted into three asymmetrical pieces strewn across the stage that join together in a steep incline. Flat cutouts that represent sails defy dimensions and give the impression of movement as they arch over the set.
On board the ship, an Irish princess named Isolde (Linda Watson) bitterly recounts to her handmaiden the tale of her meeting with Tristan (John Treleaven), a Cornish knight whom she nursed to health in spite of evidence that he killed her betrothed.
Although the performers flawlessly belt out arias without missing a step on the slanted stage, their characters perpetually lose their grasp on equilibrium. Feeling betrayed by Tristan’s choice to make her King Marke’s bride, Isolde plans to share a potion of death with Tristan. Isolde’s handmaiden switches the poison for a love potion, however, and this well-meant treachery sentences the princess and her knight to a lifetime of tortured passion.
Beneath a mossy green spotlight, the characters rejoice in the raptures of their newly realized love, charged with an eroticism that is punctuated by Hockney’s vibrant blues and reds.
These colors, along with the boldness of the sets’ silhouettes and the magnitude of the sets themselves, transport the audience into the fantasy constructed by Tristan and Isolde under the protection of night.
Each act begins as a black screen in front of the stage, emblazoned with the opera’s title and composer, then becomes less and less opaque, slowly revealing the dreamlike scenes behind. Perhaps most impressive is the set revealed in the second act: a romantic row of trees with curlicues of Celtic knots for foliage.
The second act gives the lighting design ample opportunity to shine as Tristan and Isolde introduce the themes of light and darkness. In a move that sets him apart from his contemporaries, Wagner marks light as the enemy to his opera’s heroes. Nestled in the arabesque shadows of the trees’ overhanging branches, warmed by twilight hues of Hockney’s signature blues, the lovers’ clandestine affair survives as it would not under the glare of day.
Closely linked with the themes of light and dark are those of life and death. When Tristan receives the fatal wound that leads into the climax of the third act, the event signals a dramatic change in lighting.
Light from behind the sharply inclined platform perforates its trees and creates elongated lines of harsh sunlight and shadows. The striking contrast mirrors Tristan’s place in limbo between life and death, the ultimate darkness. As Isolde realizes that her love is immortalized by death, the stage’s lighting deepens to a midnight blue. A single spot highlights Isolde as Watson delivers a final aria on death’s sweet beckon.
Four plaintive notes bring the opera to a tragic conclusion that, strangely enough, makes for a fairy-tale ending.
““ Colleen Koestner
E-mail Koestner at ckoestner@media.ucla.edu.