Tristan and Me; 9 December 2022 talk by Martin Handley

 

The assembled Lit. Soc. who gathered for the Wagner-themed evening in the reassuringly warm space of the Court Hall were gratified to hear our speaker, Martin Handley, approvingly liken it to the Gibechung’s Hall which received Siegfried’s corpse in the Ring Cycle. He was to regale us with the account of the role played by the eponymous hero of the opera Tristan und Isolde in his own life.   Something of a musical Renaissance man, Handley has merged his violin and piano playing, conducting and acting skills into a love of that marriage of music and theatre which is opera.  An Oxford-born, Cambridge graduate Martin started his professional musical career as a répétiteur in Germany for 6 years, following that with 3 years as Chorus Master and conductor at Australian Opera before a 6-year stint as Chorus Master with English National Opera.  This laid the foundation for a national and international career as a freelance conductor and he took his first steps on his road to broadcasting on the BBC’s World Service.  1997 saw him begin a 2-year spell as Conductor of Music for Royal Danish Opera. 

Tristan und Isolde began as light relief for Wagner from the rigours of penning both the libretto and the music for the Ring Cycle but became hugely influential; inspiring Mahler, Richard Strauss, Schoenberg and Britten and according to our speaker exerting a wider cultural influence on a par with the contemporaneous Das Kapital of Marx and Darwin’s Origin of Species. We were told the work is an inscape, a drama of the soul. The libretto was based on a 12th century account by Gottfried von Strassburg although oral versions were thought to have been around for centuries before that. The tale is set in a triangular, Celtic twilight of Ireland, Brittany and Cornwall and is a commitment to love and sexual passion with the eponymous protagonists experiencing the Liebestod or erotic death and then eternal union in death in a Valhalla of the lovestruck. The cast comprises kings, warrior knights, noble women and dynastic marriage arrangements which are strained by an emotional cocktail of revenge, atonement, duty and love all further complicated by the substitution of a potent and highly efficacious love potion for a lethal draught. These plot lines may have echoed Wagner’s own love life at the time when, in Swiss exile, his growing disenchantment with his first wife, Minna, was further fuelled by his infatuation with Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of a Zurich silk trader, and the presence of his future mistress and wife, Cosima von Bülow, in the wings. Martin interspersed music from the opera to add colour to the narrative.

We then learnt of Martin’s more personal involvement with this opera.  As an adolescent at his co-educational boarding school, his first love, Sally, and he were wont to retreat to the school’s “listening room" on Sunday afternoons to listen to a box set of Tristan und Isolde and we were treated to the pair’s favourite track from Act II:

Isolde: Herz an Herz dir, Mund an Mund      (Heart on your heart, mouth on mouth)

Tristan: eines Atems ein'ger Bund  (The single bond of a single breath)

Together: Niewiedererwachens wahnlos hold bewusster Wunsch (The sweetly conscious undeluded wish never again to waken)

At the end of this duet, Tristan and Isolde collapse onto a flowery bank but Martin did not reveal how he and Sally closed the scene.  The school clearly had an enlightened attitude to developing higher culture among the more cerebral pupils, but you have to admit the German Department must have been outstanding.   

Tristan und Isolde has a reputation in the world of opera similar to the Scottish play in the world of drama and it duly brought our speaker bad luck when he was called on at no notice at all to substitute for an indisposed Tristan on the production’s first night in Copenhagen.  He told us he managed to soldier through the ordeal and thinks he actually enjoyed about 2 minutes of the unsought assignment.  The Swedish dramatic soprano, Birgit Nilsson, has appeared in 33 productions as Isolde and admits the role made her famous, so Martin recounted how he managed to cajole her into granting him an interview when she retired to her native Skane district, north of Malmö.  Birgit had emulated another Swedish diva, Greta Garbo, in her dedication to post-retirement solitude and Handley had to follow a complex set of instructions, more like a demonstration of “tradecraft” for a le Carré novel, before finally coming face to face with his quarry.  He did learn that she felt Wagner required thoughtful, patient and methodical people and that the secret to singing Isolde was “comfortable shoes”.

As befits a Radio 3 presenter Martin wove the thoughtfully selected musical excerpts expertly into his very personal narrative leaving the audience suitably educated and entertained.

William Doherty