Is 'Tristan' the hardest opera to stage? This director thinks so, and signed on at the Met

NEW YORK (AP) — In his book on reinventing opera, director Yuval Sharon describes “Tristan und Isolde” as “the single hardest work in the traditional repertoire to stage.”

Yet here he is, about to make his Metropolitan Opera debut at the helm of a new production of Richard Wagner’s epic love story.

“It’s something I wrote before I got the job, and it’s part of why I took the job,” said Sharon, author of 2024's “A New Philosophy of Opera.” “Because I knew it was the hardest, and I love impossible challenges.”

Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said he has admired Sharon’s work “since he was an enfant terrible” known for innovative productions in Los Angeles and Detroit.

“I think it was inevitable … that he would end up eventually at the Met,” Gelb said. “It was just a matter of finding the right project. It’s finally landed in this production.”

Anticipation among opera lovers has run so high — in part because the great Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen is cast as Isolde — that most of the seven scheduled performances sold out the 3,800-seat house even before the March 9 opening, In a rare move, the Met announced Friday it was adding an eighth performance at the end of the run.

And such is Gelb’s confidence that he’s also entrusted Sharon with a new production of Wagner’s four-part “Ring” cycle, set to launch in two years.

Spanning the two worlds of ‘Tristan’

What makes “Tristan” so daunting to stage, according to Sharon, is the philosophical underpinning that Wagner gives to a tale of passion, betrayal and death.

The composer, who wrote his own librettos, uses the story as a framework for his characters to ruminate at length about what Sharon calls “images of polarity: day and night, male and female, body and spirit, life and death.” The opera is “an encounter with the unknown and the inexpressible. It’s both oceanic in scope and completely intimate in its perception,” he says.

Or as Gelb put it: “It’s a story that is short on plot and very big on the mythological and metaphysical aspects of the relationship between Tristan and Isolde. This isn’t ‘La Boheme.’’’

Sharon's production opens with the two lead singers in contemporary dress seated at a table near the front of the stage.

“We first see them as the singers who will be singing their roles,” said Es Devlin, the set designer. “And they’re a bridge between you and me and the work.”

During the orchestral prelude, the singers find themselves drawn into the story of the doomed lovers. They eventually leave the table and reappear costumed as Tristan and Isolde inside an oval-shaped opening in a wooden wall that spans the Met proscenium.

“They’re almost like shamanic figures who are about to take us into another world,” Sharon said. Shamans "go to a very risky place. They touch this other world but they stay in our world and they help communicate between them.”

A tunnel that's both symbolic and practical

By the third act, when Tristan has been mortally wounded, the opening deepens into a tunnel with a light at the end.

For Sharon, that tunnel evokes the way some people have described near-death experiences. It also suggests the act of a child entering the world from the womb, a process Tristan describes in the text.

And the tunnel provides a benefit for the singers: The set serves as a kind of megaphone that helps carry their voices out into the hall.

“It’s a really practical consideration which comes back to this opera being barely performable,” Devlin said. “You are designing a musical instrument to support those voices.”

As the two singers disappear into the drama, two actors wearing costumes similar to theirs replace them at the table, and the two pairs switch places intermittently throughout the story.

Ordinary objects on the table also become “portals into another dimension,” Sharon said, like a water jug that is magnified by projections until it turns into the Celtic Sea that Isolde crosses on her voyage to Cornwall.

The biggest opera set in Met history

If the staging concept is ambitious, the set itself may be even more so.

“This is physically the first production in the history of the Met that actually fills the proscenium not only from side to side but top to bottom,” Gelb said.

John Sellars, assistant general manager for production, said that when the set was delivered by Hudson Scenic Studios in Yonkers, New York, it filled 42 large shipping containers. The Met’s second biggest production, Puccini's "Il Trittico,’” requires 27 containers, he said.

The vocal challenges of ‘Tristan’

For the singers charged with negotiating this enormous set and bringing Sharon’s concept to dramatic life, there are extraordinary musical challenges as well.

The title roles here are among the most difficult in all of opera because they require the vocal power to penetrate Wagner’s huge orchestra, and the stamina to survive four hours of singing. The Met’s cast will be headed by soprano Lise Davidsen, fresh off a triumph in her role debut in Barcelona, and tenor Michael Spyres, who is taking on the complete opera for the first time.

The title roles here are among the most difficult in all of opera because they require the vocal power to penetrate Wagner’s huge orchestra, and the stamina to survive four hours of singing. Joining Davidsen is tenor Michael Spyres, who is taking on the complete role of Tristan for the first time.

Mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Gubanova and bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny portray Brangäne and Kurwenal, the lovers’ faithful servants, while bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green is the cuckolded King Marke. For that added performance on April 4 Stuart Skelton will sing Tristan and Stephen Milling will be King Marke. Yannick Nezet-Seguin, the Met’s music director, conducts the entire run.

The March 21 matinee will be televised live in HD to movie theaters around the world.

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Mike Silverman writes frequently about opera for The Associated Press.