Redemption in love's death
Geneva is a Wagner city with an old tradition, within whose walls the composer retreated when his influence on King Ludwig II became so costly for the Bavarian state that a broad resistance formed in Munich against the monarch's close relationship with the highly ingenious but completely egomaniacal Wagner in the pursuit of his artistic goals. The ground in Munich therefore became hot, and the patrician metropolis in French-speaking Switzerland was an ideal refuge. Reading Arthur Schopenhauer's "The World as Will and Representation" laid the seeds for Tristan and Isolde. Wagner was immediately under the spell of Schopenhauer's work, which he described as a "gift from heaven". Freshly scarred by "love as a terrible torment", this time for Mathilde Wesendonck, Schopenhauer's nihilism gave him deep comfort. He interrupted his work on his magnum opus Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung) in order to express his artistic treatment of the great philosopher's ideas in the "musical action in three acts", which deals with Eros, love and redemption through death. The French director Olivier Py, born in 1965 in the perfume town of Grasse, has given Richard Wagner's perhaps most personal dramatic creation an inner tension with his production that turns the work into a brand new experience, without the fashionable gimmicks that often spoil the enjoyment of great musical dramas today. An excellent cast and Armin Jordan's inspired baton conducting further intensify the musical experience of this extraordinary production by the Geneva Grand Théâtre.