For a production of Richard Wagner’s 1865 Tristan und Isolde at the Santa Fe Opera, directed by Zack Winokur and Lisenka Heijboer Castañón, a spare set of moveable architectural components and several key props gently morph from ship to walled garden, to castle, across three acts. The world created for this epic opera based on a Celtic legend, recalls historical Wagnerian set designs and pre-Raphaelite and Neo-Gothic imagery, celebrating the tension between an ancient formal language and the eternal spirit of the story. Working closely with lighting designer John Torres and projectionist Greg Emetaz, light and shadows, both real and projected, pour out of hidden doorways and stream across the ever-shifting scenic elements in a sequence of dynamic compositions.

Approaching this set as a machine to be activated and manipulated by the directors in their staging, the designers envisioned a series of parts that are always in motion. In response to the unique condition of this open-air opera house in the New Mexican desert, the set begins tightly closed, gradually opening to reveal the night sky. In the final act, during Isolde’s famous aria, the “Liebestod,” the walls have fully unfolded, and she walks into the darkened landscape beyond, fading away. Wagner’s libretto tells us that in darkness, the mind can be liberated from the trickery of sight and the falseness of our perception. The arc of the set, as it embraces the actual nightfall around the opera house, celebrates this progression in the music.

Props were deployed when essential: a stack of felt blankets, a hand-blown glass bottle, and a plinth of shale, with the one exception being a spiraled gothic column made of ice and resin in the third act. The column, glistening and slightly melting, as the world melts away from the protagonists, is a totemic reminder of their love and the ephemerality of man-made symbols.