A New Solution to the ‘Wagner Problem’
· The Atlantic
Richard Wagner was a difficult person, to put it lightly—an infamous anti-Semite and world-historical egoist known for displaying ingratitude and duplicity toward lovers, friends, and benefactors alike. Years after the German composer died in 1883, Adolf Hitler and his followers found much to like in Wagner’s writings on national purity—and also in his music, which became tightly integrated alongside the iconography of the Third Reich. “Indisputably a genius,” the poet W. H. Auden is said to have put it, “but apart from that an absolute shit.” That first quality has usually mattered more. Since his death, his music has been generally held as too sublime—or at least too important—to set aside. His 10 operas remain core pillars of the classical repertoire (except in Israel, where his works are informally banned).
Wagner’s reputation can be both a headache and an irresistible challenge to opera directors. Though opera usually demands strict fidelity to the music as it was written, there is traditionally more leeway in staging decisions: the costumes, the sets, the way the singers embody their role. Directors have handled the “Wagner Problem,” as it’s called, with a range of artistic decisions that inevitably reflect present-day preoccupations. The 1976 100th-anniversary staging of the four-opera Ring cycle, for example, recast a mythic saga of gods and their downfall as a Marxism-tinged parable of man’s exploitation of the natural world. The production was loudly booed on opening night but has since become a road map for how Wagner’s works might be adapted for modern concerns.
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The latest entry into this lineage is under way at the Metropolitan Opera, where in mid-March the director Yuval Sharon made his company debut with a new staging of Wagner’s 1865 opera, Tristan und Isolde. His productions arrive at a crucial moment for the company, which is in an existentially precarious financial situation. As the nation’s largest performing-arts organization, the Met is under immense scrutiny at all times. The run has been promising, with overwhelming audience demand and critical acclaim. But its reception may mark an escalation of a debate about the classics—in opera, and in much else.
This staging of Tristan arrives at a moment of intense concern about the continuity of so-called Western civilization. It’s a particular preoccupation of the Trump administration; J. D. Vance, for instance, has long fretted about declining birth rates and has lectured European leaders about the supposed civilizational threat of immigration. In the humanities, these concerns crystallize around the idea that the canon is being ignored in favor of less worthy, newer texts, and that the mastery sustaining centuries-old artistic traditions has been sacrificed at the altar of diversity. Last year, employees of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency canceled a tranche of previously approved grants at the National Endowment for the Humanities by asking ChatGPT whether the projects “relate to D.E.I.”; the NEH’s new leadership then reoriented some grant making toward work on “Western civilization.” And recently, the historian James Hankins caused a stir with an essay explaining his retirement from Harvard as an escape from an academic climate of “self-hatred” that was excessively judgmental of the Western cultural inheritance.
Whatever this inheritance consists of, it surely must include Tristan und Isolde. Wagner’s opera, an adaptation of a 13th-century German courtly romance between a Cornish knight and an Irish princess, is one of the most challenging works an opera company can attempt to stage. One issue is how little happens, plot-wise, over the four hours the singers are onstage: The knight retrieves the princess, who is to marry his king. On the way, the two drink a love potion and fall into a love so total that it can be resolved only by their death.
The real drama is in the score. Tristan was a turning point in music history: Its expressive grammar upended the traditional patterns of tension and resolution to create a structure of continuous, aching suspension. After Tristan, composers of all sorts contended with Wagner’s innovations, and many nonmusical artists were directly influenced in the decades following its premiere. In Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, for example, the narrator identified the “insistent, fleeting themes” of the opera as a metaphor for the structure of memory.
Such artists heard something radically new that can be hard for some to appreciate alongside the baggage that now comes with Wagner’s music. Sharon works in the firmly interpretive tradition, one that treats an opera as a living thing rather than something to merely preserve. In recent years, he’s become one of America’s most interesting opera directors by staging adventurous work in unlikely locations: a parking garage, a train station, 24 limousines fanning out across Los Angeles. He freely updates older works to align with modern sensibilities—and sometimes, seemingly, just to stir the pot. (He staged La Bohème in reverse to give it a happy ending; in a feminist remix of Lohengrin, he spared the life of the tragic heroine.)
But unlike some directors who approach problematic older works mainly to indict them, Sharon seems to harbor real affection for the texts he’s reinterpreting. “I’m not tearing down a statue—I am using the same clay,” he told me before an early rehearsal of Tristan last month. “The greatest form of critical engagement is an act of love.”
Sharon’s partner in this Wagner project is the Met’s musical leader, Yannick Nézet-Séguin. As an opera conductor, he’s working in tandem with Sharon’s interpretation of Tristan. “What I try to do is look at the text and respect exactly what’s there,” he told me, but he added that he also tries to shake off the accumulated assumptions about how Wagner’s music should sound. In this case, he said the music should evoke “longing and desiring something only to be not quite resolved—it just reaches all of us deep down in sometimes completely subconscious ways.”
To make this a little more concrete: Try humming “Happy Birthday to You” to yourself, and notice how the final two lines (“Happy birthday, dear [insert name] / Happy birthday to you”) set up an expectation that is then immediately met. Tristan interrupts this pattern, deferring any release for hours. Dramatizing this musical effect is one of Sharon’s main tasks—and a subtler challenge than it might first appear. The intended experience of Tristan is a feeling of dissolving into something greater than yourself—a celebration of death through the renunciation of selfhood. Historically, this began to feel a little queasy after the Nazis put something similar to work in the regime’s propaganda. For a generation of postwar thinkers, the fact that Wagner’s music could so powerfully trigger involuntary emotions was deeply suspect.
[Read: A battle for the soul of the West]
Sharon’s solution is an attempt to ground the opera in cycles of death and rebirth inspired by the 19th-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s integration of Buddhist and Hindu ideas into European philosophy. Wagner himself was deeply influenced by Schopenhauer and was fascinated with Buddhism while composing the opera—he explicitly embedded its themes in the work. In his show, Sharon uses an abstract staging of continuous, dreamlike, overlapping images—video projections, slowly moving interlocking tunnels of light, ghostly doubles of the main characters—that fade away before they harden into concrete meaning, suggesting lives within lives and selves within selves.
Some of these choices go beyond what the text might support. On opening night, there were pre-curtain sound effects; an English-horn solo, moving from the orchestra pit to center stage; a childbirth scene that appears nowhere in the libretto. But his vision served the music, where the philosophical ideas of the opera are enacted. The unsettled, searching quality of Tristan would eventually inspire truly atonal music that never finds stability, but Wagner’s opera does eventually resolve, triumphantly, in the final aria, in which Isolde and the orchestra arrive at a satisfying moment of harmony as she reunites with a mortally wounded Tristan, and embraces death at his side.
Isolde is portrayed by the Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen, who is already one of opera’s brightest stars and is now, at 39, beginning to tackle Wagner’s most prominent roles. During the show I watched, she delivered a mesmerizing performance. Tristan works only with a soprano who can sing beautifully, and powerfully, over a thundering orchestra for several hours. The closest analogue might be a peak athletic performance, a glimpse of the transcendent at the absolute limit of human ability.
But description can only do so much, as Tristan und Isolde must be experienced to be fully understood. This is at the root of many of the art form’s problems—its expense, its reputation for impenetrability—but also its great strength. You really do have to show up and see for yourself. Meaning is generated anew in the moment, while the music is playing for a packed audience.
The consequences of silence are currently evident at the Kennedy Center, which the Trump administration has reshaped with an unprecedented level of interference over the past year. After promises to get rid of “woke propaganda” in favor of programming “people actually want to see,” the public has been left with almost nothing at all. The resident opera company has departed; dozens of performances have been canceled; and the building is set to close entirely for two years beginning in July. As Hankins, the former Harvard professor, put it: “Civilizations are not automatically self-replicating. They need to be studied and cultivated.” In this case, doing so means actually putting difficult masterpieces onto the stage, and figuring out how they might speak to audiences in the present tense.
If Tristan und Isolde is a physical and emotional crucible for its singers, for a director it’s a layup—at least compared with the four Ring operas, Sharon’s next task for the Met. The stagecraft challenges are formidable: They require a singing dragon and a horseback ride onto a funeral pyre alongside dozens of similar demands. But the thorniest problem might be ideological. The fundamental arc of the plot is conflict between a realm of noble gods and a scheming, subterranean underclass driven by lust for gold. Generations of critics have argued themselves hoarse over whether these themes are fundamentally racist or anti-Semitic; staging the operas means confronting those questions directly.
When I asked Sharon how he was thinking about the opera’s themes at this particular moment in American life, he laughed and said it was a problem for tomorrow. “That’s part of what makes Wagner so fascinating: This is not frictionless material,” he said. “There’s a lot there that needs to be figured out.”