Lyon Opera's Tristan und Isolde: Dorny wants to stand out from crowd

(Reuters) - It's not often that an opera house has to scramble around last minute to find a new director for the biggest production of the year, but Opera de Lyon's general director Serge Dorny did, and came up trumps.

Less than a year ago -- which is microseconds in opera time -- Dorny said he was told by German-born director Jossi Wieler he would be unable to do a new production of Richard Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde," which had its premiere last Saturday, because he was taking over the Stuttgart opera.

"I was upset," the 49-year-old, Belgium-born Dorny told Reuters.

"Why was I upset? Because it was 'Tristan' and finding a new director for 'Tristan' is not like finding a new director for (Mozart's) 'Cosi fan Tutte'. It is a very complicated opera and as intendant (general director) you do it once in a mandate...it takes time to get into it and it is something that is part of your legacy, something you will leave behind."

As it turned out, the production that Dorny has provided is every bit the winner he will be proud to leave behind.

The French newspaper Le Monde said it was a "Tristan" that "reached almost to the heavens" while Le Temps said that Danish soprano Ann Petersen, singing the fiendishly challenging role of Isolde for the first time, was "a revelation."

They are the kind of rave reviews and it was the kind of production that should help Dorny in his goal of assuring Opera de Lyon is implanted on the world opera map so there is as much interest in its season as there is in London's Covent Garden, New York's Metropolitan Opera or that bigger, better-funded operation just up the road in a city called Paris.

Here's what else he had to say about the opera's links to Lyon and the underprivileged parts of the city, its budget and the scene outside the opera doors, where hip-hop dancers meet the opening night audience dressed for the opera:

Q: So what is different about Opera de Lyon?

A: "What's important for me is that an opera house should have a kind of identity and here it is the idea of a contemporary repertoire where the element of choice is far more important. A big proportion of our repertoire is either rarely performed or is being rediscovered...In the history of music and opera there are some 50-60,000 titles...and between 50 and 100 get performed over and over again. So I choose a theme which, rather than saying we need a Wagner, a Mozart or a Verdi...allows me to come up with an interesting mix.

Q: These are tough times for cultural institutions, particularly expensive operations like an opera house, due to budget cuts. How are you making out?

A: "We have a budget of roughly 40 million euros (£35.5 million) and of this about 79 percent is public spending and of that 60 percent is from the city. The thing is that for Lyon, the opera is a very important ambassador, a very important protagonist in cultural life. Lyon is a 'second city', like Birmingham or Frankfurt and therefore they want to manifest themselves and one of the ways they do it is they invest in the arts.

Q: There are a lot of people in this city -- like the hip-hop dancers practicing on the sidewalks surrounding the building -- who will never see an opera. How do you connect?

A: "Community outreach didn't exist before 2003 when I came here but we now invest an enormous amount of time and work in the local community, in deprived areas. We have a 'maitrise' (training program) for students to come eight hours a week for opera singing or piano lessons and now 30 of the 110 children are from two very deprived areas -- and they are some of the best students.

"For the hip-hop dancers, we've created an association for them and we give them space so they can come here day and night to practice. It helps build a relationship between the population of the city and the opera. It doesn't mean everybody will come to the opera, but it makes everybody feel they have some kind of ownership of the opera, and this is important."

Opera de Lyon

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Tristan und Isolde - Opera de Lyon - Alex Olle - now through 22 June 2011.

By Michael Roddy
LYON, France 


 Richard Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" is a notoriously static opera whose two central characters mostly stand on stage singing for almost four hours.

In a new production at the Opera de Lyon that had its premiere on Saturday, they do it on a set that does the moving for them, and over the course of the evening they and the audience are transported to a Wagnerian heaven.

Director Alex Olle of the Catalan stagecraft-and-spectacle collective "La Fura dels Baus," which leapt to world renown with the opening ceremonies of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and has since branched out into opera, has found a way to give Wagner's famously inert work legs in a production that runs through June 22.

His staging of the tale of the doomed love between the Irish king's daughter Isolde and the knight Tristan is not an unqualified success, as even Olle volunteered.

"Maybe I put in a few too many things, but this is my first Wagner (opera), and for me it is all about the passage of time," Olle, who stepped in to do the production on short notice when a previous director withdrew, told Reuters after the premiere.

One of those few things too many is a ring of fire encircling the doomed lovers. It's Wagner, yes, but wrong opera.

The opening night audience nevertheless was spellbound as Olle deployed one visual effect after another, many of them video projections, all tending to trick the mind into overlooking that this is indeed what opera skeptics fear most -- two people standing and singing for hours on end.

TWO STRONG SINGERS

One device is a revolving platform bearing the singers while above them looms a huge sphere that eventually becomes perhaps the biggest moon ever seen in an opera house. It descends slowly toward the stage and later, having descended to earth, opens up to become the interior of a castle -- and the lovers' bedroom.

As the curtain rises, Isolde, in what probably counts as one of the few sight gags ever attempted in this moody work, is retching with sea-sickness -- motion, again -- over the side of the boat skippered by Tristan to take her to Cornwall.

Although they are in love, as a faithful servant to his king, Tristan has promised to deliver her as bride to his sovereign, King Mark. A love potion they both unwittingly drink later makes him realize his fatal mistake.

As the shoreline recedes, the sea becomes turbulent while the platform representing the ship -- a stage within a stage -- turns slowly clockwise and the huge moon of love that will be the main characters' undoing creeps down on them oppressively, like a white death star.

What could better underscore Wagner's theme that love is more powerful than life or death, but time moves on, inexorably?

It takes two strong singers to make it work and Danish soprano Ann Petersen, (Ed: listen to  her here on her website here with an albums worth of free music) tackling for the first time one of the hardest of all soprano roles, and American tenor Clifton Forbis (Ed: Tristan at Dallas Operas next T&I) rose to the challenge, though in different ways.

Forbis, whose voice has a husky quality that makes him a man's man of a Tristan, seemed to come alive in the third act when, in fact, he is at death's door after receiving a fatal wound at the end of Act Two from one of King Mark's henchmen, who has unmasked the cheating lovers.

The weapons used are rifles rather than swords, which is not particularly Wagnerian but if anyone was sleeping through the lush, rich orchestral playing led by the Russian conductor Kirill Petrenko, the shots woke them up.


Tristan would be dead from the wound but for his love of Isolde, and Wagner gives him a lot to sing in order to demonstrate the power of love over death.

"The third act is notoriously a killer for all tenors," Forbis said. "But I think it's one of those things you just have to throw yourself into because if you try to observe it from afar it defeats you."

For Petersen, the challenge was keeping enough energy in reserve to tackle the work's most famous aria, the final "Liebestod," roughly "love death," in which Wagner seals the two protagonists' fate and sends them into an afterlife where their erotic love becomes eternal in death.

"I love singing it when I haven't done the first or the second acts," Petersen said after the final curtain.

(Richard Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" at the Opera de Lyon through June 22. www.opera-lyon.com)

Source: Reuters.

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