Part One: A Night at the Opera

'In These Stones Horizons Sing' .  Interior view of calligraphy.

It’s a couple of hours’ drive, at best, from here to the Millennium Centre in Cardiff, but since that pretty much takes us from door to door, it’s worth the occasional marathon for a good night’s entertainment. Tonight, however, in addition to the journey, we have a marathon opera; five and a half hours of Tristan und Isolde… although that does, thank goodness, include two intervals!

I fear, as we take our seats, that it’s also five and half hours of adjusting to the ablutionary habits of the man to my left, suggestive of a rather ‘stuff and nonsense’ approach to fancy shampoo. However, as the show begins and the exchange between Isolde and her maid, Brangaene, goes on at length, I get rather comfortable and enjoy a little power napette which refreshes me nicely for the rest of the performance.

The wooden curves of the concourse galleries.

I’ve come in the hope of being converted to Wagner, but by the end of Act One there’s some way to go. My younger daughter, Rose, played the French horn at school and when we heard that her teacher was performing in the orchestra accompanying an am dram production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore, we felt we ought to show solidarity and buy tickets. ‘Buy an interesting ice cream too,’ was his prophetic advice then, and indeed, I’m finding my first interval ice cream particularly interesting this evening.

Act Two hits the spot for me with beautiful music and a truly towering performance from Ann Petersen as Isolde. Whilst others make a second interval dash for theatre meals, Tom and I eat our smoked salmon bagels in the car watching the rain. It’s quite cosy and romantic actually.

And the band played on.  And on.

There’s an inordinate amount of shepherd-playing-sad-tunes in Act Three which has me wishing Wagner had killed a few of his darlings. He does, however, kill off quite a few of the cast; the man to my left gets the giggles as another large body hits the deck, whilst Tom to my right, is having trouble with Tristan’s professed desire to take his beloved to ‘a place where the sun doesn’t shine’. Still, all comes good eventually, winding up with a belter of a finale. ‘The ending was good,’ Tom observes. ‘That,’ I reply, ‘after five and a half hours, is the least we deserved.’

So, no, I’m still no closer to liking Wagner, but the extraordinary performance from cast and orchestra demonstrates once again that a night at the Welsh National Opera is well worth the drive.

Tomorrow I’ll be talking about my day at the Hay Festival.