This weekend I’ll be gazing into the abyss, even as I’m lifted to Parnassus!
It’s not like I planned it this way. Sometimes things just turn out like that.
A couple of months ago, I reserved a seat for Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” with The Philadelphia Orchestra on Sunday afternoon. The opera is being performed complete in a concert setting – 4 and ½ to 5 hours, with two intermissions – with Nina Stemme, one of the world’s foremost Isoldes, still reportedly in fantastic voice, bidding farewell to the role, and heldentenor Stuart Skelton as Tristan. This is the first time the work is being presented complete in Philadelphia since the orchestra gave it its U.S. debut in 1934. An event, for sure, and scheduled for only two performances. Reviews for last Sunday’s concert have been ecstatic, with a critic in The Washington Post calling it “one of the greatest things I have ever heard.” It’s a 2 p.m. curtain, and I’ll likely have lunch plans beforehand, which means I’ll have to be ready to go and out the door on Sunday morning. On its own, certainly doable…
However, I have also been offered a ticket to hear a concert performance of Richard Strauss’ “Guntram” – also reportedly Wagnerian, in language if not length – at Carnegie Hall on Friday night. The work, Strauss’ first opera, seldom done, is quoted in the composer’s “Ein Heldenleben,” but beyond that, I have never heard it. So of course I’m in! Angela Meade will sing Freihild and Leon Botstein will conduct the American Symphony Orchestra. It’s an 8:00 curtain, which means by the time it lets out and I catch the train, it will be well after midnight by the time I get home. Then I’ll be wound up from the trip, so I’m not anticipating turning out the bedside lamp much before 2:00. For ordinary human beings, this might not pose a problem, since the next day is Saturday, but perhaps attributable to the early radio schedule I kept for a couple of decades, I have been conditioned to being a morning person. And I mean it. If I drank a bottle of scotch, my eyes would still shoot open with the first rays of the sun. So I’m anticipating not getting very much shut-eye after the Carnegie concert.
In the meantime, I’ve had a seat reserved to hear Renée Fleming at The Princeton Festival on Saturday evening. So while Saturday will undoubtedly be a day of bountiful coffee, so that I can be alert for the performance (which is at least close to home, thankfully), I will have to be mindful of the timing of my caffeine intake as I mustn’t overshoot the mark and destroy my chance at getting a full night’s sleep before “Tristan.” There will be wags among you, I’m sure, who will observe that I can just catch up on my sleep during the opera!
Fleming’s program will be a light one, accompanied by Rossen Milanov and the Princeton Symphony Orchestra, with arias, art songs, and musical theater selections punctuated by applause, so no danger of nodding for that. But droop during “Tristan,” and I’ll be swallowed beneath the brine of the Irish Sea.
If I do stay awake, and alert, may my ears remain supple!
“Coffee…” (“The Death of Tristan” by Harry Robert Mileham, 1902)
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