Waltraud Meier in Heiner Müller's Bayreuth production of Tristan und Isolde.

I’m halfway through my list of my personal nominees for a new Theatre of Revolt — Brecht, Beckett, Albee and Müller so far — and, time permitting, next week will bring the rest. For videos about Müller himself, by the way, I link again to Müller :: Kluge, an excellent collection of interviews maintained by the Cornell University Library. There is a wealth of material here — and all of the interviews have excellent subtitles.

For now, though, a musical interlude: below is an excerpt from Act Two of Heiner Müller’s  production of Tristan und Isolde, premiered in 1993 at Bayreuth. In a  28 July 1993 report about the production for the New York Times, John Rockwell quotes Müller himself on the staging, which somewhat illuminates the Romantic/Modernist tension in what I have been defining as a new Theatre of Revolt. From the article:

For [Müller], the notion of Tristan and Isolde as so deeply in love that they can only find themselves in death is “nonsense, Romanticism in the worst sense,” as he put it in a special festival magazine distributed free throughout Bayreuth. “A yearning for death is surely part of the piece,” he conceded, “but that is nothing else than a yearning for another life. Nobody really yearns for death.”

Tristan is sung by Siegfried Jerusalem, and Isolde by Waltraud Meier; the conductor is Daniel Barenboim.