The Weight

It was recently announced that Sir Donald Runnicles will be stepping down as General Music Director of the Deutsche Oper, a position he has held for over a decade and a half. For the first new production of his final season, Sir Donald conducted Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in a new staging by Michael Thalheimer (replacing the late Graham Vick’s ‘retirement-home’ production, which was, incidentally, the first new production conducted by Sir Donald at the beginning of his tenure). While the evening took a while to hit its musical stride, the fascinating staging – which stripped the action to its barest essence – offered a compellingly rigorous vision of Wagner’s greatest treatise on the relationship between love and death.

Of all Wagner’s stage works, Tristan is perhaps the one that requires the least stagecraft: there are no…