Isolde and Brangane

'[T]he story Tristan’s music tells is … overwhelmingly moving really. It’s ravishing.’ DAVID HOCKNEY

‘The fundamental reason for the extraordinary success of [Hockney’s] designs for the opera is that his passion for the music is at least as great as his passion for painting.’ STEPHEN SPENDER

‘… one of the most beautiful and original [sets] ever inspired by a Wagner opera.’ GERALD LARNER

Dramatically lit in a palette of opulent tones, David Hockney’s Isolde and Brangäne is a sumptuous vision from his celebrated body of operatic set designs. A consummate expression of his rich multi-media outlook, Hockney’s theatrical collaborations reached their pinnacle in his production of Richard Wagner’s nineteenth-century masterwork Tristan and Isolde, directed by Jonathan Miller at the Los Angeles Music Center in 1987. Inspired by the sublime chromatic range of Wagner’s music and the motif of illumination that saturated his libretto, the artist set about building a world of colour and light, channelling the language of his sun-drenched Californian landscapes into grandiose scenes of love, betrayal and death. With Wagner’s ‘ravishing’ score playing on repeat, the artist experimented obsessively with scale models in his studio, casting luminous rays upon his vast ship decks and castle walls. The present work, depicting Isolde and her maid in Act I, belongs to a group of paintings in which Hockney sought to visualise the intimate action of each scene. ‘In a sense the paintings [were] close-ups of what I thought the drama was going to look like’, he explained. ‘… I did the paintings to provide my own atmosphere’ (D. Hockney, That’s the Way I See It, London 1993, p. 178). Glowing differently under varying light conditions, the painting’s extraordinarily vivid hues witness the master colourist at the height of his powers. The deep shadows and subtle tonal variation of Isolde and Brangäne were translated to stage via pioneering use of Vari-Lite: moving coloured beams used in stadium rock concerts. The following year, the work was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in the second phase of the artist’s landmark touring retrospective. Documenting the sheer creative breadth of his practice, the exhibition truly affirmed the strains of Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk in Hockney’s aesthetic – a holistic ambition most vitally embodied in his set designs. The present owner is a Hockney collector who bought his first work by the artist in 1975. For a period of time he owned the 1980 painting Nichols Canyon; its vibrant palette influenced his acquisition of Isolde and Brangäne in 1988, and subsequently the 1990 masterpiece Pacific Coast Highway and Santa Monica.

Within a practice grounded in themes of illusionism – curtains, screens, lenses and warped perspectives – Hockney’s theatrical commissions speak to the very core of his art. The designs for Tristan and Isolde sit within a distinguished line-up of productions, beginning with Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress and Mozart’s The Magic Flute for Glyndebourne in the mid-1970s. In 1981 he designed two triple-bills for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and in 1992 conceived sets for Puccini’s Turandot at the Chicago Lyric Opera and Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. In Tristan and Isolde, however, Hockney realised a long-held dream. ‘I was deeply interested in the piece’, he recalls. ‘I felt it was the kind of music that I would choose to work with in the theatre’ (D. Hockney, That’s the Way I See It, London 1993, p. 171). He had already seen the opera a number of times, and had twice made the pilgrimage to Bayreuth for The Ring. Wagner’s music accompanied his long sunset drives along the Californian coast, ultimately inspiring his return to painting after an extensive focus on photographic collage. With its near-Fauvist palette, intuitive brushwork and hints of geometric abstraction, the present work resonates with Hockney’s mountainous landscapes and seascapes of this period: themselves Wagnerian hymns to the grandeur of nature. The rolling blue crest of the waves, combined with the perspectival sweep of the deck, may be seen to foreshadow works such as The Sea at Malibu (1988), in which the line between visceral reality and staged fantasy is characteristically blurred.

By 1987, Hockney’s international acclaim was such that AT&T – the production’s sponsors – took it upon themselves to promote the opera as Tristan and Isolde and David. Its reviews propelled his reputation to even greater heights. The critic Gerald Larner applauded ‘one of the most beautiful and original [sets] ever inspired by a Wagner opera’, whilst John Russell described the finale as being ‘as awesome a moment as we shall ever see on a stage’ (G. Larner, Guardian, 18 December 1987; J. Russell, New York Times, 8 December 1987). John Walsh, the director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, re-affirmed the shared sensibility between composer and artist, claiming that the design ‘was as close to Wagner’s music as anything visual is going to get’ (J. Walsh, letter to D. Hockney, 9 December 1987). In Isolde and Brangäne, we are made witness to the visionary artistic process that brought the opera to life in glowing, technicolour splendour.