A TRIUMPHANT `TRISTAN'.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

Thank goodness for Richard Wagner's bout of male menopause, else the world might be without ``Tristan und Isolde.''

At the time he penned his delirious love saga (around 1864), the great German composer was well past midlife and busy womanizing up a storm. He also badly needed to make a quick deutschmark or two to help subsidize his completion of the sprawling ``Ring'' cycle. But that's another story.

At the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the story is that ``Tristan und Isolde'' is back, magnificently, after a nine-year absence. So are the famous post-pop art sets that artist David Hockney designed for the Los Angeles Music Center Opera's last ``Tristan,'' in December, 1987.

This time, Hockney also gets credit for conceiving and directing the show. It's a tribute to his artistry that Hockney the designer doesn't upstage Hockney the director, and that neither of them steals the thunderbolts from Wagner's intoxicatingly irrational score or from the cast led by Renate Behle's magnetically erotic Isolde and Siegfried Jerusalem's stoically deranged Tristan. Collectively, they rise above the crushing symphonic wall of sound and make 4-1/2 hours sail by at warp speed.

Never mind that some of Wagner's feverish sentiments could've been scribbled by a lovesick Calabasas sophomore. Under Richard Armstrong's superbly flammable baton, the pagan-romantic anthems - now brooding and massive, now ethereal and discordant - are emphatic even at their most hesitant.

Based on a hoary Celtic legend, Wagner's atonal masterpiece always had a slight taste for S&M. King Marke of Cornwall (a superbly anguished Sir Donald McIntyre) sends Tristan to Ireland to retrieve his bride-to-be, Isolde, as a peace offering between warring tribes. What the king doesn't know is that the pair once had an illicit tryst.

We're in Camelot country here: an aging monarch betrayed by his queen and his most valiant knight. So who's master and who's slave in this triangle? Who holds the upper hand erotically?

Behle, a bundle of ferociously compressed energy, leaves little doubt as to the answer. Imposingly vulnerable, her Isolde is a gentle dominatrix with a dreamy, thousand-mile stare and a soprano of all-conquering passion. Very fine as they are, the other principals - Jerusalem, McIntyre, Jane Henschel as the faithful servant Brangane and Jorma Hynninen as Kurwenal - can't escape Behle's gravitational pull.

Before Wednesday night's opening, many of us knew Hockney's sets only by reputation. In 3-D reality, they're less distracting, but no less impressive, than reported. Inscribed with Celtic swirls and ablaze with hot colors (cherry red, forest green, marine blue), the sets and costumes remind us that ``Tristan'' is, after all, a fairy tale, albeit an R-rated fairy tale. Hockney's asymmetrical castles, ship decks and cliffs exist in a dimension that combines monumentality with the cockeyed intimacy of an Escher drawing.

And the stage, as steeply raked as the Wells Fargo tower, conveys a marvelous sense of unease. Those stray boulders in Act 3 look like they're one good jolt away from crashing into the orchestra pit.

Normally in ``Tristan,'' singers plant themselves like sequoias. Hockney's direction permits more range, though not too much. These characters embody forces of nature, so we expect them to move with a certain cosmic deliberation.

Nor is the staging absent of humor. When the lovesick Isolde starts waxing giddy about the Goddess of Love, Henschel's Brangane slaps her forehead as if to say, ``Oy vey! Get a reality check, your Highness!''

THE FACTS

What: Los Angeles Music Center Opera presents Richard Wagner's ``Tristan und Isolde.''

Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Music Center of Los Angeles County, 135 N. Grand Ave.

When: 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, 12:30 p.m. Saturday, 6:30 p.m. Feb. 7, 12, 15 and 18.

Tickets: $23 to $130. Call [phone].

Our rating: Four Stars.

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Photo

Photo: Renate Behle and Siegfried Jerusalem star in ``Tristan und Isolde,'' directed and designed by David Hockney.