Bill Viola, a video artist who combined with director Peter Sellars on a ground-breaking production of Wagner’s Tristan Und Isolde originally seen in Los Angeles, Paris and New York, has died aged 73. He died on Friday at his home in Long Beach, California, of Alzheimer’s disease, his website announced. What was called The Tristan Project opened in concert form at Los Angeles’ Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2004, premiered on stage at the Paris Opera the following year and was presented in concert at Lincoln Centre’s Avery Fisher Hall in 2007.
His staging has been revived several times in Paris, as recently as 2023, and versions have been presented in Finland, Japan, the UK, Spain, the Netherlands, Russia, Sweden and Canada. Videos were exhibited at New York’s James Cohan gallery in 2007. “I hope that the audience will leave the theatre having a deeper understanding of the nature of our short time here on Earth and the importance and power of love and any kind of relationship we’re in really with the things and people in the world,” Viola said in a 2013 interview with the Canadian Opera Company.
Bill Viola’s Michelangelo Life Death Rebirth at the Royal Academy of Arts (Alamy/PA) His technique included Viola filming in Vermont woods for a week alone with a camcorder, building a waterfall on a soundstage and lowering an actor on a wire, then using the video in reverse during the performance to make the actor appear to rise, and a crew of 70 in an airplane hangar .
