Tucked away in the Cotswolds is Longborough Festival Opera (LFO) – but please don’t think of it as a backwater. It is a source of opera of a very high standard, particularly for the music dramas of Wagner. Their revival of Carmen Jacobi’s 2015 production of Tristan und Isolde is entirely worth the odyssey down country lanes required to reach it. Once again, Anthony Negus’ command of the ebb and flow of Wagner’s extraordinary score is exemplary. The long silence in the audience at curtain down – before a storm of applause – was a fitting tribute to a memorable performance.
Tristan, nephew of King Marke of Cornwall, is sent to Ireland to fetch the princess Isolde, who is to be the bride of the ageing king. When Tristan arrives, Isolde realises that he is the wounded man whom, some years earlier, she had nursed back to health, despite the fact that he had killed her betrothed, Morold. She determines to kill both Tristan and herself with poison during the sea journey back to Cornwall, but her maid Brangane substitutes a love potion for the poison. Back in Cornwall, while Marke is away hunting, the two meet at night and make love, but they are betrayed to the king. There is a fight and Tristan allows himself to be wounded. In the final act, Tristan is dying in his castle in Brittany, dreaming of the arrival of Isolde, whom he imagines will be able to save him. She arrives, but Tristan dies at the ecstatic moment of their reunion. King Marke then appears, telling Isolde that he had intended to forgive the lovers and allow them to marry. Isolde chooses oblivion in order to rejoin Tristan in the endless night of death.
Catherine Woodward sang the immensely demanding role of Isolde – and was superb. No surprise, really: she has an impressive track record, including a 2024 debut at Bayreuth. In Act 1, as she worked herself into a fury over the ways in which Tristan had slighted her, I worried that she might ‘run out of voice’ before Act 3. I am glad to say I was wrong – her delivery of the climactic Liebestod was both gripping and beautiful. Her Tristan, the tried-and-tested tenor Peter Wedd, clearly knows the role inside out, yet still found new insights in unexpected places; his duet with Kurwenal in the final scene was heart-rending. However, the voice is no longer the fresh, bright instrument of previous years, and there were moments of strain.
The other roles were well sung and portrayed in keeping with the director’s vision. The focus was so unrelentingly on the passion of the two principals that Marke, Kurwenal and Melot sometimes seemed shadowy figures, only moving fully into the foreground during the crisis of Act 3, where both Alastair Miles as Marke and Robert Hayward as Kurwenal excelled. The exception was Catherine Carby as Isolde’s maid Brangane. She possesses an exceptional mezzo voice, with beauty at both ends of its range, and her affection for the increasingly unbalanced Isolde was finely drawn and evident throughout the opera.
Anthony Negus, in his final year as music director at Longborough, is masterly in his shaping of this famous and perplexing score. His rapport with both the musicians of the LFO and his singers is palpable. This will be a hard act to follow, but the skill and cohesiveness of the core team of musicians, some of whom play with other opera orchestras outside the summer season, will surely prevail.
Thanks to director Carmen Jacobi, the ‘hate-to-love-to-obsession’ story remains at the forefront of the drama throughout. The staging is simple, with bright, strong colours in both the costumes and the backdrops – hinted seascapes in Act 1, a castle with dark windows in Act 2, and a coastal lookout tower in Act 3. The long love duet in Act 2 was well structured, though perhaps less erotic than it can sometimes seem – possibly because of a vocal mismatch between Woodward and Wedd. Yet the musical virtues of Negus and his team, together with the outstanding performance of the formidable Catherine Woodward, make for a special evening at Longborough. What a pleasure it was to be part of an audience that rightly greeted the final chords of the Liebestod with a few moments of reflective silence before the applause began.
Longborough Festival Opera
Music and Words: Richard Wagner
Conductor: Anthony Negus
Director: Carmen Jacobi
Performers: Peter Wedd, Catherine Woodward, Catherine Carby, Robert Hayward
Running time: 6 hours (including two long intervals)
Dates: until 18 July
Photos: Matthew Williams-Ellis.