Waltrud Meier as Isolde in the Heiner Müller production of Tristan und Isolde at Bayreuth.

A few years ago (in 2008 to be precise) I wrote the below essay after seeing Dieter Dorn’s production of Tristan und Isolde at the Met. A much shorter version of this essay appeared on 1 April 2008 at the Guardian theatre blog.

I’ve appended two videos to the essay — the Liebestod from the 1993 Heiner Müller Bayreuth production, sung by the extraordinary Waltrud Meier, and the first part of Samuel Beckett’s Play, as directed by Anthony Minghella for the Beckett on Film project — to offer an interesting comparison and contrast.

On the face of it, there couldn’t be two more different theatre artists than Richard Wagner and Samuel Beckett — the first the egomaniacal, nineteenth-century composer and theorist who had giants and gods banging about the stage in forests and faux-Olympias like Valhalla to thundering orchestral music in five-hour-long operas; the second the spare, self-effacing master of essences who, towards the end of his career, turned out plays — often quiet, approaching silence — that rarely exceeded twenty minutes.

Beckett himself cared very little for Wagner (or for Mahlerian histrionics for that matter; Schubert’s songs were more his style). But the production of Tristan und Isolde by Dieter Dorn which was recently restaged at New York’s Metropolitan Opera with Deborah Voigt and Ben Heppner suggests there may be more to the comparison than meets the eye. After the Ring cycle of operas and Die Meistersinger, this opera and Parsifal expressed essences of suffering, desire and renunciation — the same essences that provided the matter for Beckett’s own last plays. And, apart from the extraordinary opportunities and challenges that these works provide for their performers (Voigt and Heppner won a ten-minute standing ovation for their work), there’s just as much, if not more, to say about the theatre practice that these works represent.

Wagner was always a man of the theatre first. “Everything he did was determined by his need to create theatre,” said the editors of an anthology of Wagner’s prose work, and by the time Bayreuth was built, Wagner, like Beckett, found it necessary to direct his own music-dramas. But there was more. Both Beckett and Wagner recognized Arthur Schopenhauer’s contribution to aesthetic philosophy and exemplified this same philosophy in their stage work.

For Schopenhauer, music was the highest of the arts because it most effectively permitted the description of the ultimately indescribable Will that lay beyond the world of earthly appearances. In music’s abstraction lay its power. The words of a libretto (or, for Beckett, of a playscript) made this communication, this description, more precise, and for Schopenhauer, the lyrical, tragic drama was second only to music in its ability to communicate these descriptions.

There was, in addition, the idea of the gesamtkunstwerk: the theatre work as a distillation of all the arts. Wagner did not live to see the implementation of electric light in the theatre, which, in the hands of designers like Adolphe Appia, made abstraction tangible. Wagner’s production practice in the 1860s was heavily invested in the realistic theatre practice of the era: the naturalism of historically-accurate sets and costumes as exemplified by the work of Saxe-Meiningen. (It’s still done, as Sir Peter Hall demonstrated in his Ring cycle of several years back.) As effective as Tristan und Isolde was when it premiered in Munich in 1865, it didn’t seem to come into its own until Appia’s theory — which was heavily indebted to Wagner’s more metaphysical operas – became current in the 1920s. With the abstraction of the Impressionists, Matisse and Picasso, shape and color became more evocative of the poetic currents that lay beneath photographic realism. Appia demonstrated that this was true in the theatre just as much as on the canvas.

In the post-war era, Bayreuth’s directors Wolfgang and Wieland Wagner seized on Appia. The Tristans produced there were shorn of naturalistic and realistic costumes and sets; instead, geometrical shapes on a bare stage were flooded with electric light. At about the same time, Beckett’s first plays were being performed in Paris — plays that also depended for their effect just as much on the painterly ability of the director and designer as the performers. Here, too, there was little more than a nod to realism. For Beckett’s 1961 production of Waiting for Godot in Paris, sculptor Alberto Giacometti designed a tree that was made with wires and plaster: an obvious construct, a mere suggestion of a real tree. Even these scenic elements became less and less common in Beckett’s later work, until 1972′s Not I presented a mere pair of lips, spotlit at center stage. The theatrical event is reduced to its essence: a speaking mouth.

Dorn’s production for the Met marries Beckett’s stage practice to Wagner further. There is a nod to Beckett’s conception of colorless existence in the gray floor of the raked stage, and in the three pure-white cycloramas that are gathered into a very visible vanishing point upstage center, a vanishing point that suggests the unity and nothingness for which the two lovers yearn. (This is not unlike the “very pompier trompe-l’oeil backcloth to represent unbroken plain and sky receding to meet in far distance” that Beckett specifies in the stage directions for Happy Days.)

In the foreground of this stage image there is in Tristan, as in much of Beckett, physical stasis, a lack of physical activity. The Day/Night duet that makes up most of the second act of Tristan is performed by the characters in a deep blue light, the lovers wrapped into one seeming unified and motionless object at center stage, nearly impossible to see in the darkness – and the audience, too, is bathed in this darkness for 45 minutes, as the lovers reject day for the night which finally allows them unity. Instead, it is what we hear — the words and the music — that constitutes, for the opera, the dramatic event. As in either act of Godot, there is little more than talk for nearly an hour, but in Wagner this talk is filled with sublimely beautiful music, and in Beckett, devastatingly lyrical speech. Over a century of Tristan performances and half-a-century of Godot performances have demonstrated the profound power of such a theatrical essentialism.

Instead of working from realistic detail inward to the spirit, Wagner worked from within the spirit outward. “[In Tristan] in perfect confidence, I plunged into the inner depths of soul events, and from the innermost centre of the world, I fearlessly built up its outer form,” Wagner wrote in “The Music of the Future.” “… I have rejected the exhaustive detail which an historical poet is obliged to employ so as to clarify the outward developments of his plot, to the detriment of a lucid exposition of its inner motives, and I trusted myself to the latter alone. Life and death, the whole meaning and existence of the outer world, here hang on nothing but the inner movements of the soul.” This is a practical statement about staging as well as a statement about the aesthetics of composition. As in Wagner’s final operas, Beckett’s dramas from 1962′s Play onward also strip this exhaustive detail to allow the motives themselves expression.

Beckett and Wagner share in their theatrical aesthetics the same precision of soul. They do so through a spare essentialism: the rooted power of theatre based in simple rituals of performance. A little unexpected, perhaps. But theatre makes strange bedfellows, and not just after the opening night party.

For more about Wagner’s relationship to Schopenhauer and philosophy in general, I guide you towards Bryan Magee’s excellent The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy.

Via YouTube: Waltrud Meier sings the Liebestod at the end of Act III of Tristan und Isolde, from the Heiner Müller Bayreuth production, filmed in 1995:

And, again from YouTube, the first half of Anthony Minghella’s film of Samuel Beckett’s Play: