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THE WORK OF BILL VIOLA ON TRISTAN AND ISOLDE

Many criticize, disapprove of, or even hate Bill Viola's work on the staging of Tristan und Isolde. I loved it, and I will explain why. First, my theory is that in the 20th and 21st centuries, cinema has replaced opera in its social role. Our society has become, thanks to cinema and television, a society of images far more than it was in the 19th century. Jacques Ellul's The Humiliated Word is a book entirely dedicated to this subject. And last night at the Bastille, the initial dominance of the image was almost uncomfortable at first, because the only set consisted of a giant screen on which Viola’s images were projected. The danger of slipping into the realm of musical illustration (by Wagner!) of a long video was certainly real. But once this adjustment of perception was made, one can appreciate how bold, intelligent, and, above all, faithful Viola’s work is. Yes, faithful, because the great drama of 21st-century staging is that unknown issues, which concern the director but not the opera’s creators, are imposed on the masterpieces of the past. This is a form of betrayal, instrumentalization, and malicious diversion of the original work, the creator's initial effort. And at the same time, this updating is inevitable, as most works of the past can no longer be presented to us at face value. Their update is rendered necessary by the distance between us and the original creation. So, the most audacious, original, and demanding path—the one taken by Viola—is to serve the work, rather than using it as a tool for supposed iconoclasm to assert oneself at the expense of undeniably major works of the past. Almost at every stage (with the exception of the Third Act, which contained a few less convincing moments), Viola demonstrates his deep understanding of Wagner’s work, and his creative power unfolds in his reinterpretation. Viola clarifies the scope of Wagnerian thought by refracting it on two levels. There are two couples, one "earthly body" and the other "celestial body." Long before the consumption of the magic potion, we see the first "earthly" couple—representing Tristan and Isolde—undressing very slowly and completely, like in a ritual preparing for the consumption of the fateful brew (which the protagonists believe to be a deadly poison). Wagner plays with speed, stretching time. Viola understood this, and doubled the slowness. This results in a paradoxical perception of greater speed in music, and this invention alone is brilliant; it energizes our perception. Water, a fundamental element appearing from beginning to end, is connected to several themes, and Viola develops his own vocabulary of leitmotifs, linking the moving maritime surface at the start with the love potion—a huge cup of water, into which the two protagonists dip their faces, as if plunging them into ours. Indeed, the scenes are filmed so that the audience feels as though they are inside the cup where the earthly Tristan and Isolde drink. The final scene, with Tristan’s lifeless body on stage and the celestial Tristan in the same posture on screen, is a culmination that brings together all the themes previously explored. Water pours more and more massively over the corpse, making it levitate in a glowing state (the scenes are filmed in reverse), and this ascension of Tristan accompanies so perfectly Isolde’s majestic aria that closes the opera, affirming the sovereign transcendence of love, as a perfect illustration of this phrase from the Song of Songs: "Love is as strong as death, it is a flame of Yah."

Viola is not afraid to shift from the metaphorical to the almost illustrative register, because it reassures the viewer by providing the keys to perception over a long duration. None of the movements on screen are personal whims; everything is always done with awareness of the music’s progression, and astonishing synchronizations confirm this, also energizing the listening experience. The work on slow time, which uniquely combines symbols or known references, counterpoints Wagner’s acceleration-deceleration phenomenon, the most striking example being the tree with the famous Tristan aria. The tree is motionless on screen but is filmed over twenty-four accelerated hours, gradually revealing the sun through its branches. All of this, and countless other details, make Viola’s work an example of surprising modernity, but also of a modernity deeply enamored with Wagner’s work, which he serves by making it so poignant today.