The Metropolitan Opera’s 2026 Production of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde
Reviewed by Kathleen Coyne Kelly
Northeastern University
Dare I plunge into their aroma and breathe my last?
Into the surging swell, into the ringing sound into the waves of the universal breath!
Subtitles. Isolde (Lise Davidsen) singing the Liebestod in the Met’s 2026 Tristan und Isolde
Timothée Chalamet, in a March 2026 CNN and Variety town hall with Matthew McConaughey, declared: “I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera, or, you know, things where it’s like, Hey, keep this thing alive, even though it’s like, no one cares about this anymore. All respect to the ballet and opera people out there.” A vigorous backlash immediately followed. The Metropolitan Opera responded on Tiktok by showing a montage of workers employed by the company—painters, lighting crew, scenic carpenters, set designers, costume makers, and, finally, and rather waggishly, musicians, singers, and the conductor (“This one’s for you, Timothée Chalamet . . . 👀”). Boundary-pushing Misty Copeland came out of retirement to crash the Oscars during the rendition of the Best Original Song nominee, “I Lied to You” from Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025)— challenging Chalamet, perhaps, who was sitting in the audience. In the film (as in the Oscars performance), as Sammie (Miles Caton) plays the blues, the scene becomes hallucinatory as Black dancers and musicians—West African dancers, a banjo player, a rapper, breakdancers, Crip-walkers—and a ballerina—mirror the rhythms of the song in their different ways.
To reference Chalamet when writing about the ballet or the opera is about to become a trope.
One opera that is being kept alive is Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, which premiered in 1865, and has been performed thousands of times since. Some classics endure because of the weight of tradition, and simply cannot be abandoned. Tristan und Isolde falls into this category—and believe me, I do not want to see it sink into oblivion and be forgotten. Yet I want something more from this Gesamtkunstwerk (a “total, or integrated, work of art” to which Wagner aspired)—and something that it chooses not to offer. Unsophisticated as I am when it comes to opera, I want a hummable aria or two, a bravura performance to be lifted out of the opera and enjoyed, rather than the unendliche Melodie that Wagner actually wrote, resisting what he saw as the staleness of Grand Opera. What I am denied is precisely the point: Wagner never resolves his harmonies, literally; rather, he counts on dissonance—in Tristan und Isolde, this phenomenon is known as “Tristan’s chord”—leaving us hung up, waiting for resolution, which we do not get until the very end, in Act III, when Isolde sings her celebrated aria. The most famous fan of Wagner captures the essence of Wagner’s Tristan: “Powerful waves of tone flood the room, and the murmur of the wind gives way to a terrible roaring frenzy of sound.” So wrote Adolf Hitler, aged seventeen, after seeing a performance at the Vienna Opera House.
And thus I invoke another trope: one cannot write about Wagner without pulling in Nazis.
Tristan und Isolde, this Musikdrama (a term Wagner detested, but was burdened with because he insisted that he was not writing opera), is one thing in its score, not to be deviated from by the faithful (or, at least, not by much), and quite another in its staging, where directors can innovate, making that “terrible roaring frenzy of sound” visible in their own idiom. One can interpret the music, but one can go further and invent the staging. This practice has come to be called Regieoper (“director’s opera”), a mode very much embraced by Wagner’s grandson Wieland, who directed Wagner’s operas in the 50s and 60s at Bayreuth (and was influenced by Wagner’s own set designer, Adolphe Appia). Staging thus becomes the site of the supplement, if not that of fan fiction.
In the Metropolitan Opera’s recent production of Tristan und Isolde (March 9-April 4, 2026; I watched it streaming in a movie theatre in Massachusetts), director Yuval Sharon explores the opera’s obsession with the mystical and eros and thanatos (the spectre of death makes possible love and passion; love and passion transcend death) by creating a set that makes the mystical legible. The music remains untampered with (but perhaps over-conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin), but the spectacle is a very twenty-first century Regieoper—spare, tonal, and wholly dependent on technology. And Sharon put a baby in it. I’ll get to that. First, let me describe the set.
The Met stage is enormous. It is 80 feet deep, 103 feet wide, and 54 feet high. Sharon exploits this scale by creating two horizontal planes, one at the level of the stage, which takes up about one quarter of the space, and another that fills the rest of the expanse above it. Act I opens with a woman and a man sitting across from each other at a table—a prop repeated and repurposed throughout the opera—at stage level. Something is obviously not right between them: they look as if they desire to speak, to bridge the gulf across the table, but they hesitate, pull back. This scene is duplicated above them, projected on an enormous screen. At first, this feels disorienting, but soon resolves into recognizable allegory: Sharon wants to contrast “this world of the table and this world of the fable” (as he said in an interview given during one of the streaming intermissions). The earthly versus the mythical. At stage level, mere humans reside, playing out the short span of their lives; above them, legend endures, is amplified. Larger than life, as the cliché goes. (See Figure 1.) This is a trick that Sharon uses throughout. Moreover, Tristan (heroic tenor Michael Spyres) and Isolde (dramatic soprano Lise Davidsen) are given body doubles with whom they exchange places, moving from the stage to the set of circles and ellipses above, which slide in and out of one another, sometimes creating a Venn diagram, sometimes a crescent, sometime a full circle. (These circles may well have been borrowed from a previous production; see here.)
Figure 1. A scene from Act II of Tristan und Isolde (courtesy Karen Almond)
In Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan (c. 1210), Wagner’s ostensible source, the giant Morgold demands tribute from King Mark, and is killed by Tristan. Wounded, he can only be cured by Queen Isolde of Ireland, mother to Isolde. When Isolde discovers that she has helped heal her uncle’s murderer, she seeks vengeance. (Gottfried died before finishing his poem, stopping at around 19,000 lines; it breaks off as Tristan is debating whether to marry Isolde of the White Hands. The poem was then continued by Ulrich von Türheim [1235] and Heinrich von Freiburg [1290]). Wagner heightens the drama by betrothing Isolde to Morgold. Isolde’s desire thus shifts from revenging an uncle to revenging the man she loves—and the only thing that remains of her love is rage. She had faltered once, in Ireland, when she lifted her sword to kill Tristan as he lay recovering—but as their eyes met, she dropped the sword. Isolde has regrets. As the pair sail to Cornwall, Isolde plans to kill Tristan and then herself. She sings of her anguish and pain and persuades Tristan that he must atone for killing Morgold. Tristan acquiesces in her plan for them to drink poison together. (In Gottfried’s telling, the two drink the potion accidentally.) But Brangäne (mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Gubanova), knowing Isolde’s intention, intervenes, and gives Isolde the love potion intended for King Marke instead of the poison. (At stage level, the table is now set with an array of glass bottles filled with elixirs of various colors.) Isolde’s frustrated fury is now turned into desire for her enemy. Tristan’s homosocial bonds with his King cannot withstand newly-aroused passion. We have reached the end of Act I.
In Act II, Tristan and Isolde tryst while the King is away hunting. The scheming courtier Melot (Thomas Glass) has set a trap, as Brangäne had warned Isolde, who ignores her. The lovers sing their ecstatic and despairing Love Duet. (“Tristan is Isolde, Isolde is Tristan,” they sing; listen to part of it here.) They are caught, and King Marke (bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green) is heartsick and bewildered. (Listen to an excerpt here.) On the stage level, the table holds the remains of a feast, and above, magnified, hands attempt to piece back together a broken plate on the table. Marke asks, how can there be anything like truth if Tristan is capable of betrayal? And Isolde? Marke may have owned her, but he never possessed her, he realizes. Melot wounds Tristan, and the curtain falls as Tristan’s loyal companion Kurwenal (bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny) catches Tristan as he falls.
Act III demonstrates just how long a death scene can be drawn out. At stage level, the table is transformed into the operating table on which Tristan lies. Surgical instruments are laid out on a cloth. Kurwenal anxiously wonders if Tristan is sleeping or dead. Tristan repeatedly revives, asking after Isolde. Kurwenal wonders again, is given hope again. Tristan moves from the plane of the stage to the circle above, accompanied by dancers in white (which I found unnecessary and distracting) whose ghostly presence makes it clear that this iteration of the circle is a threshold—heaven, or perhaps a blissful nothingness, lies beyond. Does Kurwenal see the white sails? Each time that Kurwenal answers no, but soon, Tristan falls back as if dead, and then revives to ask again. Isolde is too late, of course. Tristan dies on the table as she bends over him.
Throughout the opera, Isolde has worn green; Tristan, blue. The costumes are medievalish; they register as mere costumes, and deliberately so, I think: the fabric is too shiny, the trim seems cheaply made, as if to remind us that what we see are people in dress-up. In this final act, Isolde wear a voluminous, rather shapeless, green satin gown, and as she enters the scene, the audience immediately sees that she is pregnant. She crawls onto the table on which Tristan lies and gives birth. Marke enters, and explains that Brangäne has confessed to administering the love potion, and Marke now forgives Isolde and Tristan. Who can be faulted for the compulsions of rapturous desire?
Isolde moves from the plane of the stage where humans dwell to the circle above, the plane of the eternal (where the dancers in white annoyingly return, making their Alvin Ailey moves). Her green dress has been exchanged for a simple white shift. A light grows behind her, into which she will soon walk. But first, she sings a final aria, familiarly known as the Liebestod (“love-death” song—though Wagner preferred Verklärung, “transfiguration”). This aria is intended to release the disharmonic tension built up over the four and a half hours of the opera. Isolde sings of watching Tristan rise, radiant, to dwell on an even higher plane than the stage can offer. Is it only she who can hear him singing? She finds herself rushing upwards to meet him. The narrative arc of this aria, as some critics have ventured to suggest, seems to move from initial arousal through to orgasm. (Slavoj Zižek called it “orgasmic self-extinction.”) The love in “love-death” is as physical as it is numinous. She dies. Marke takes the baby and, with Brangäne, exits the stage. The opera is over.
In this final act, the table seems to gesture toward the ending of Jean Delannoy and Jean Cocteau’s L’éternel Retour (1943). Tristan/Patrice (Jean Marais) and Isolde/Natalie (Madeleine Sologne) lie in death side by side on an upturned boat that transforms into a gisant, a tomb effigy. The baby in Sharon’s adaptation of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde might be read as a materialization of l’éternel retour, a concept Cocteau introduces in the opening crawl in the film, here translated: Eternal Return—a title borrowed from Nietzsche—means that the same legends are reborn again and again without the heroes’ knowledge. Eternal return of simple circumstances is the base of all great love stories. This registers as an exquisite tautology, given that Nietzsche was so taken with Wagner’s opera. If the allusion to L’éternel Retour is deliberate, it is rather obscure. (How many medievalists and cinephiles are in the audience each night at the Met or in the movie theatre?) It doesn’t really help us understand why Sharon put a baby where there has never been one. It undermines Cocteau’s (mis)reading of Nietzsche’s point, that some of us are caught in an endless cycle of destructive passion from which we cannot escape—and the only (Wagnerian) response is amor fati.
Or perhaps Sharon wanted to give us a comfortable ending; new life traditionally signifies hope. Or is the baby a booby prize for Marke?
But there is yet another possibility, one that suggests that Sharon was not willfully rewriting Wagner through staging. Perhaps Sharon understands something about Wagner’s psychology, his apparent fervid and overripe romanticization of eros as Woman, capital W. In 1854, as Wagner first began thinking about Tristan und Isolde, he wrote to Franz Liszt, and declared a desire for “a female spirit in which I could completely submerge myself, that would hold me entire—how little would I then need of this world” (as quoted in Eva Rieger, Richard Wagner’s Women). At the time, Wagner (then married to Minna Planer) was caught up in what we would today call a head affair—in this case, an all-consuming, obsessive affair—with the married Mathilde Wesendonck. Sexual consummation was out of the question. Tristan und Isolde, it could be argued, became the sublimated substitute. What could be more of a tribute to Woman than highlighting the most transcendent expression of her essence—birthing a baby?
Given all the controversy and provocations that Wagner and his operas have caused, given the debates about how to make sense of Tristan und Isolde, we might read the baby in yet another way: its presence on stage deconstructs the entire opera so that it goes poof. Es verschwindet. This creates the necessary space for the next production. Thus the opera (writ large) is kept alive.
