What Do You Do When Your Opinion Differs from the Norm?

Source: Paul Ross, with permission

Have you ever read a book, gone to a movie, concert, or play, or watched a film or TV series at home and your reaction to it is different from others? Maybe your friends, family, co-workers, and critics point their thumbs downward, but for you it’s way up. Or they all love it, and you are indifferent to it or dislike it and can’t see what they are raving about. Perhaps you travel to a much-touted destination or eat in a trendy restaurant and you’re disappointed. In all of the above instances, do you hide your feelings, express them, become oppositional, or use your reactions to start a conversation?

Recently, I attended the final dress rehearsal for the opera Tristan and Isolde at the Santa Fe Opera. The medieval story about a forbidden love was possibly based on a Celtic legend, and it has been re-told in almost every medium, including opera. In 1859, Richard Wagner, one of the world’s most important and influential composers, who had a transformative impact on Western music, wrote the opera I saw.

At the time, Wagner was involved in an illicit romance in his own life. He was, by all accounts, a pretty awful human being, and this was just one instance of his birddogging the hand that fed him. Otto Wesendonck was a generous patron of the composer, and the latter became passionately involved with his wife Mathilde. Since no one was holding the candle, it’s not certain that the passion was physically consummated, but Wagner’s wife Minna intercepted one of his steamy letters to Mathilde and he was outed.

The affair eventually wound down, but by then it had inspired Wagner to compose a four-hour opera that is short on plot and action and long on protestations of fire-hot love that would never burn out, and would last beyond death and into eternity.

At the end of Act III, when Tristan is murdered and Isolde approaches his body, she sings what many tearful fans consider to be the most glorious and moving seven-to-eight-minute song ever written: the Liebestod, or Love-Death. Through soaring music and vocal power, Isolde rises up to spiritual, physical, and emotional union with her Tristan, transcending life, into the ecstasy of a heavenly eternity in death.

As the stage went black, I looked around me. Nine-tenths of the audience had departed long before. Those of us who were left leapt to our feet, yelling bravi to the performers, conductor and musicians in the orchestra.

In the past, I had only seen a filmed version of a Tristan and Isolde performance, and I was bored to the point of irritability. How could anyone sit through four hours of expository declarations of love while performers flopped meaninglessly and aimlessly around the stage in a cringey attempt to enhance the bare bones of a largely static story? Couldn’t Wagner have embellished the plot a little to keep an audience engaged? I vowed never, ever to sit through it again.

And then there was the staging at the Santa Fe Opera. The two directors — Zack Winikur and Lisenka Heijboer Castañon — have done the opposite of embellishment. They have stripped the story and characters down to their bare essence. Every gesture, step, change of lighting, use of shadows, color, costuming, shift in the scenery is imbued with significance. Nothing is superficial or superfluous. You are drawn into a world of intense, passionate, emotion that swirls with eroticism, violence, death, love, longing, loyalty, betrayal. Long after the opera ends, the feelings it has stirred remain with you. That is, if you remain with it.

During the two intermissions, some audience members were giggling and others were complaining about how bored they were, as I had once been. The singer who played Tristan had sung in an almost whisper, as he was saving his full voice for opening night. I, on the other hand, was silent in my admiration for the brilliant spectacle, and the hints I had of the singer’s full voice and perfect diction. I was speechless about the quality of the voices I heard at full throttle; after each intermission, I could hardly wait for the next act.

When I came home, I wanted to talk to someone about the experience I had just had. I had no desire to argue with anyone or defend my position. And so, I share it with you, in the hopes that you will see the production while it lasts.

I have a stage background as a writer, actor, and director. I accept fully that my reactions and opinions may not conform to the mainstream audience reaction. That doesn’t make me right or wrong. Ultimately, one’s response to an artistic work is personal, and valid. I think the only bad response is to have no response at all.