Tristan und Isolde

Patrick Nolan

Company: Opera Queensland
Venue: Queensland Performing Arts Centre​​​​​​​

Year the project commenced:  2017
Year it became impossible: 2020 
Audience not reached: 3000​​​​​​​
The third production in Opera Queensland's 2020 season was to be a performance of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. It would have been performed in the Concert Hall of the Queensland Performing Arts Centre. For many of the artists involved, it was going to be their first attempt at bringing the opera alive. There was great anticipation around what we might create. Focusing on the deep poetry and romanticism of the story, the costumes were simple, modern, refined, allowing the performers plenty of scope to give themselves to the drama and the music.
Like several operas the action takes place on and beside the ocean and the completed, but not yet built design was one that wrapped around the orchestra and would act as the outline of a boat or the edge, where the land meets the sea. While a stage design based on a boat might have been possible; in 2020 when all international travel (by boat or plane) was halted by the pandemic, an opera where several of the artists lived abroad was not. Although they explored all options, the cost of bringing artists to Australia and quarantining them for weeks proved too expensive even though, by the last quarter of 2020, Queensland theatres reopened. To make it more difficult, even if the funds were available, they were informed that it may prove impossible to get permission to bring the two USA-based artist to Australia at all. - They hope that they will have the chance to try again in 2023.
Set and Costume Design - Dale Ferguson 

Lighting and Video - Mark Howett 

Conductor - Pietari Inkinen

Isolde - Meagan Miller

Tristan - Simon O'Neill

Performers - Brangäne Anna Werle 
Kurwenal James Roser 
King Marke Paul Whelan   
 and the Queensland Symphony Orchestra

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