It was the beginning of my summer wandering around Italy with a backpack. We’ve all done that, haven’t we? It began with a cheap flight to London, however, where I noticed ENO was presenting Tristan sometime around the end of August. In English, like everything at ENO. But the cast! The cast was astonishing: Linda Esther Grey (much loved but outside of England unheard), Felicity Palmer, Albert Remedios, Norman Bailey, John Tomlinson, Reginald Goodall in the pit. Well, I got a ticket high up in that strange theater ENO used to perform in. And had an end point settled to my Italian months. I bitterly regret only one thing about that summer: I came home. But I had to. There was that Tristan.
The Italian months did include a Nabucco in the Arena in Verona, when Ghena Dimitrova entered on horseback and sang the bejesus out of it. Or should I say “beyahweh”? She had not yet appeared in America, but she floored me, a quarter of a mile away up in the stands.
But in the course of time I did indeed return (via Paris — so useful to have an ex-boyfriend settled in Paris — I got nine visits out of that before he lost his flat in Montmartre) to London and that Tristan. The staging was dim and grey and Goodall was slow, but the voices! I’ve heard better singers in this part or that, but never all five of the leads as top of the line in one performance, before or since. A Tristan as ardent as his Isolde and as capable of soaring phrases, an Isolde swooning between curses, though she was (like so many) a sizable figure. They recorded this cast in German, so all the singers did KNOW the German, but on the recording they replaced Bailey with Philip Joll, who is terrible on it. I heard him as Wotan in Seattle once — terrible in that too.
The one problem with the performance was that I couldn’t understand a word anyone sang. It was in Andrew Porter‘s English translation, which is pretty reliable — but I was used (though unable to speak German) to notes and leitmotivs falling on certain syllables with certain notes and meaning just what Wagner means in his music. You don’t need surtitles for Wagner. (They hadn’t been invented yet anyway.) Wagner explains, musically, exactly what he is talking about. You just have to listen. I listened, but the words were contorted somehow, the meaning vague or distant. I had to hug the phrases to my ears and breast. English defeated the purpose, the auditory reflexes of the score.
So I departed with mixed feelings. Beautiful … but wrong.
