The readiness is all Jon Fosse: The Name Everbody Indian Potential for emotions and conflict "Damnably humane" between ethos and pathos "Such great pain is worse than death" The Shades of the Heroes Ancient Greeks, too, wanted their fun High art, low motives Tristan und Isolde at the summer festival L'amour de loin Still waters are not at all murky Hounded by Freedom

Tristan und Isolde at the summer festival

Visitors to the Salzburg Festival in summer can look forward to this production, even though it will differ from the premiere last Easter.

Waltraud Meier as Isolde

On the one hand, as is usual when productions are exchanged between the Easter and summer Festivals, instead of the Berlin Philharmonic their colleagues from Vienna will be in the pit. There is also a change of cast in the female title role: instead of Deborah Polaski, who will be singing major roles in the Salzburg production of Les Troyens by Berlioz, Waltraud Meier will be singing Isolde, a role she portrayed in Bayreuth in Heiner Müller's controversial production. Correspondingly steeled by this, Waltraud Meier will hardly be surprised by Klaus Michael Grüber's production and probably feel quite at home in the sets by the Spanish painter Eduardo Arroyo. aesthetic right and wrong seemed to be wavering: some condemned Mozart for having gone off the rails and using his precious talent for a low job, others scourged the poet for having squandered his great gifts on a slapstick story that had already been squeezed out to excess.

Aspects of a non-staging

The statuesque nature of the staging is shared by Müller's and Grüber's productions, the prevailing distance between the characters, the disturbing aspects of a non-staging, typical of Grüber's style of directing, confused many visitors in Bayreuth and Salzburg. And yet the principle of the performance appears to be recognisable: Grüber consciously contrasts the highly expressive, extremely accentuated gesture of Abbado's dramatically pulsating interpretation with the tranquillity of the static scene - the stylised silhouette-outline of the ship in the first act, the entwined bare and gnarled tree branches of the "night scene", the romantic ruins in the third act - they appear to be like legendary tableaux, which the music surges up against and is then thrown back again. And the singers stand in these "pictures" like painted figures, torn between the serenity of their appearance and the movement of the music, which they vocally absorb and radiate.

Klaus Michael Grüber contrasts the dramatically pulsating music with the tranquillity of the static scene. Ben Heppner and Waltraud Meier sing the title roles. (Photo: Ruth Walz)

Besides Waltraud Meier, the cast remains the same as for the premiere last Easter: Ben Heppner as Tristan, Matti Salminen as King Mark, Falk Struckmann as Kurwenal, Marjana Lipovsek as Brangäne.