DThis “Tristan” smells. Not the usual odor of the Green Hill – old wood, stage dust, adrenaline of anticipation, sweat from exhaustion, naphthalene, saliva and, above all, Wagnerian happy hormones. No, “After Tristan” in Bayreuth’s “Reichshof”, a former cinema that has become a cultural playground and has been the scenic venue for the “Diskurs Bayreuth” series accompanying the festival for several years, is pervaded by the scents of marjoram and boiled potatoes. Because here a soup simmers on the stage for more than an hour on two hotplates.
And in the last 15 minutes it is also eaten, spooned slowly, enjoyable and yet casually, scraped off the plate to the last residue. Last residues, the crumbs that are left, particles of feelings, emotional micro-debris. That’s what this is about. The “Tristan and Isolde” love in the music theater temple up there in the art district is over, the passion has evaporated, the twosome in everyday life in the old town, even over – maybe.
There is no longer any singing here either, only once “Im Treibhaus” is sung: the third of the five Wesendonck songs, written by the Swiss merchant’s wife Mathilde Wesendonck during her fatal affair with Richard Wagner, which was so beneficial (platonic?) for music history.
“It’s just like that. If you can’t do anything”, the elderly Isolde begins with the kitchen work. There is talk here, but also silence. Two famous actors and a versatile organist have come together down here in the city to vary and sum up the “Tristan” theme, so to speak, as an accessory for the opera-free days on the hill.
As there are: Dagmar Manzel and Sylvester Groth, not only two of the best German actors, both from the East, both also TV inspectors. Unfortunately, Groth only had five episodes from 2013 in the Magdeburg “Police Call”. Manzel, meanwhile operetta queen at the Komische Oper, since 2015 as Paula Ringelhahn in the Franconian “Tatort”. Which, of course, has already led them to the Bayreuth festival sanctuary.
At the end of a marriage
So that always resonates here, as well as the fact that Heiner Müller, from whose nihilistic “Quartet” based on the evil epistolary novel “Gefahrliche Liaisons” is recited here, staged “Tristan und Isolde” in the Wagner Grail Temple in 1993 in a legendary way. And what else is it about in Wagner’s musical dramas other than the magic of relationships? That of the figures as well as that of the scores interwoven with suffering motifs.
A score for language, quiet, reserved, full of reference, created for “Nach Tristan” by Gerd Ahrends, a proven arranger of literary texts. And director Ingo Kerkhof has just as subtly reticently laid it out scenically. Up to the operetta duet “How are we both noble”, made famous by Gründgens and Hilde Hildebrand.
An older couple sits at the end with the soup. There is even an analogy for this: Dagmar Manzel and Sylvester Groth, both born in 1958 and from the same drama school class, shot a similar scene in the 1981 GDR feature film “Fronturlaub”. “A journey from the past backwards into the present”, is the current subtitle, this proven duo, who are close to each other, is now appearing.
And the journey through time without direction, it is linguistically measured with excerpts from “Tristan und Isolde”, August Strindberg’s “Totentanz” and Müller’s “Quartet”, which is as elegant as it is saucy, which after the Bayreuth directing experience seemed like the continuation and finale of the Wagner material , just twenty years later.
There are illuminated music stands in the semidarkness, but no one is sitting behind them. The couple put the finishing touches on their elegant evening wear, but then they sit down on the velvet sofa, as if the opera evening was only a DVD performance.
Only tiredly does the passion smolder in the corners of Manzel’s mouth, the vice of the shuffling Groth is exhausted. All room battles are over. But you can’t and don’t want to let go. One is friendly, indifferent, relaxed. Worse: emotionless.
The current Tristan couple has no chance
But the open two-person relationship is still a closed vicious circle. In which the accordionist Felix Kroll, who presses his instrument with the “Tristan” motif, squeezes it, makes it gasp and groan, even roars, makes lace making and abandons it, cannot bring any resolution, let alone salvation. Only atmospheric overtones. Sometimes loud, mostly quiet, in chromatically choking intensity.
So now we know how it would have ended if “Tristan und Isolde” had survived. A banal, sad end in the marriage dwindling. But magically refined by Manzel & Groth, who lyrically lightly and blasphemously relegate Foster & Gould, the current Tristan couple on the hill, to second place. Unconscious – highest pleasure.