Buddhist Opera Tech

Operatic fire and water
Friday, April 27, 2007

Photo courtesy of Lincoln Center

By EVELYN SHIH
STAFF WRITER

The Tristan Project, a new multimedia take on Richard Wagner's classic opera "Tristan und Isolde," has already debuted in Los Angeles and Paris. But at its New York debut, which hits Lincoln Center next week, the work will be at its most intense yet.That's all thanks to the Barco HD18 projector, a cutting-edge model that projects the work of video artist Bill Viola onto center stage. The technology used was unavailable at the time of the Los Angeles debut, upping the ante on clarity and visual impact.

But what does technology have to do with opera?

In this case, everything.

The Tristan Project began as a collaboration between Viola, Los Angeles Philharmonic conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, and stage director Peter Sellars, who has a long-standing relationship with Lincoln Center. Sellars' spare directing spotlights Viola's art as a symbolic enactment of Wagner's magnum opus.

Photo courtesy of Lincoln Center

"They say about Beethoven that he wrote for a piano that did not yet exist. One could also say the same thing about Richard Wagner," said Jane Moss, Lincoln Center vice president of programming. Moss initiated the collaboration of the three artists and commissioned the work along with her counterparts at the Philharmonic and the Paris Opera.

"In a way, the new media developments realize his ideas about the ultimate transcendent fusion of theater and music, music and imagery," she said. "Wagner would be thrilled."

"Tristan and Isolde" is an Arthurian "Romeo and Juliet": Forbidden love leads the two young protagonists to their inevitable death. But Viola doesn't illustrate the convoluted plot so much as work through the themes with his carefully calibrated art.
One of his trademark devices is to slow images, stretching out a meticulously framed sequence to maximize the effect of his human subjects. For "Tristan," Viola uses elemental images of fire and water to match the famously grand music with a cosmic sense of Zen.

"It turned out to be the perfect collaboration and a perfect subject," said Moss, who was astonished when she heard that the three artistic collaborators picked a traditional opera like "Tristan" for their project. "There are so many aspects in the theme of 'Tristan and Isolde' that tap into the center of Bill Viola's work: transcendence, hope, transforming power of love, and spirituality. But he wouldn't have necessarily identified that opera as having that material in it."

Viola had never heard the opera when the collaboration began, but quickly identified the parallels between the 19th-century German music and the Buddhist qualities of his own work.

Photo courtesy of Lincoln Center.

As our ability to project intense, commanding images in the theater improves, will this become the wave of the future for opera performance?

"The word 'trend' is dangerous," warned Moss. "But the world of multimedia has exploded. Do I think some of those things are making their way into the world of theater?

"Yes," she said.

E-mail: shih@northjersey.com

Copyright © 2007 North Jersey Media Group Inc.