Word: tristans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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There is no doubt that Wagner's Tristan und Isolde is an opera about sex. But how sexy it is depends on whether the audience relies more on its eyes or its ears. While the score throbs with passion, most of the dramatic action takes place in the souls of the title characters, with very little left for the stage...
...result is that in most productions, Tristan and Isolde are lovers who seem to forget that they have bodies. Sometimes the audience wishes it could forget too, in view of the age and bulk of most singers who are up to the demands of the vocal score. Not even the composer's innovation-minded grandson, Wieland Wagner, could change this. His productions introduced heavy hints of Freudian psychology, but the lovers' bond remained shrouded in symbolism. It all seemed to bear out Wagner's advice to Nietzsche that to get the most out of the opera...
BAYREUTH (July 25-Aug. 28) offers a new production by Wolfgang Wagner of Die Meistersinger under Karl Böhm's baton, a Ring cycle conducted by Lorin Maazel, Parsifal under Pierre Boulez's musical direction, plus a Lohengrin and Tristan und Isolde...
SPOLETO (June 27-July 14). The eleventh season of the Festival of Two Worlds in the Umbrian hills opens with a new production of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde staged by Gian Carlo Menotti, whose approach to the opera is "romantic," and who intends to stress its "erotic and youthful theme." Other highlights: noon chamber music, a triple bill of Avant-Garde Composer Luciano Berio's Laborintus II, Goffredo Petrassi's Estri and Henry Pousseur's Response...
...Bomarzo at its premiere, wrote that by the government's standards, "Dante's Divine Comedy would have to be considered a political libel and Hamlet an incitement to matricide." Composer Ginastera, pointing to the libertine antics of such operatic heroes as Don Juan, the unmarried exploits of Tristan and Isolde, and the sadism of Salome, suggested tartly that the government should have done with it and suppress all operas. Which it might well do if Ongania ever got hold of the librettos...