Self-loathing blends with love at Bayreuth ‘Tristan und Isolde’ by director Thorleifur Örn Arnarsson

BY  RONALD BLUM

BAYREUTH, Germany (AP) — Thorleifur Örn Arnarsson’s phone rang in his Icelandic highlands cabin back in January 2022. Katharina Wagner, the Bayreuth festival director and great-granddaughter of composer Richard Wagner, wanted to get in touch.

She invited Arnarsson to create a new production of “Tristan und Isolde” to open the 2024 festival. He listened to Carlos Kleiber’s 1982 recording on Spotify that night and accepted the next day.

“The skies are clear and stars are so bright and the northern lights are very common,” he said. “I can’t imagine a better place to sit down and close your eyes and listen to ‘Tristan und Isolde’ than in that place. I immediately had a very strong, almost visceral personal reaction because I understood their struggles so well to try to understand what was going on inside of themselves.”

Arnarsson’s staging, starring Andreas Schager and Camilla Nylund and conducted