Last night Charles and I watched a 2009 video of Wagner’s Tannhäuser from the Royal Opera House in Copenhagen, Denmark (if I saw that in a movie intertitle I’d probably joke, “As opposed to Copenhagen, Manitoba” or something), which turned out to be the sort of modern-day opera production in which a supposedly “brilliant” and “innovative” director takes a piece that was dramatically fine in its original design and setting and makes post-modern hash out of it. This time the “brilliant” director was somebody named Kasper Holten, who according to the blurb on the DVD box was coming off “the triumph of The Copenhagen Ring” — note the extent of the italicization of the title, as if The Copenhagen Ring were a fundamentally different work from the Ring of the Nibelung as conceived, written, composed, designed and staged by Richard Wagner. Judging from the hatchet job he did on Tannhäuser, it probably was; though I’ve seen modern Regietheater productions that were considerably worse than this one (including the Met’s current stagings of Traviata and Parsifal), this was still pretty silly. I’d made up in my own head an idea for a modern-dress Tannhäuser in which Heinrich Tannhäuser (at least as far as I can think of at the moment, he and Cola Rienzi are the only two Wagner tenor leads who have both first and last names!) is a drugged-out rock musician — the Venusberg would be a drug den and when we first saw him he’d have a needle in his arm — the song contest would take place under a giant neon sign reading “German Idol,” and in Act III Tannhäuser would be returning not from Rome but from rehab. Mine would probably be considerably less silly than Holten’s turned out to be: even before the actual opera starts, he has his shenanigans begin during the Overture.
It
supposedly takes place in Tannhäuser’s home, which reveals him to be an
upper-middle-class German Burgher
of the 19th century (quite a few directors who don’t want to drag
Wagner’s operas whole-hog into the modern era but don’t want to leave them in
their actual historical or mythological settings either plunk them into the 19th
century because that’s when Wagner himself lived) with Elisabeth as his wife,
their two sons (the older of whom, played by Ioannis Marinos, gets to sing the
shepherd boy’s song in the middle of Act I) and various servants, guests and
whatnot cavorting around a big set representing the inside of Tannhäuser’s
home. The set itself has three levels of steeply angled staircases for the
participants to cavort on; Tannhäuser has a pen with which he is compulsively
writing on just about every surface available, ranging from paper to the
staircase to Elisabeth’s back (for a while I was wondering if this was going to
be The Pillow Book: The Musical)
to his kids’ collars. The people in Tannhäuser’s home also like to throw water,
pebbles, sand or whatever on each other. Just as a point of reference, the plot
of Tannhäuser as Wagner wrote it
is a story about a medieval Minnesinger, Tannhäuser (Stig Andersen), who before the opera begins has been
pulled away from his respectable colleagues — at least two of whom actually
existed in history, Wolfram von Eschenbach (Tommi Hakala), who wrote the epic
poem Parsifal on which Wagner
more or less based his last opera; and Walther von der Vogelweide (Peter
Lodahl) — and his nice girlfriend Elisabeth (Tina Kiberg) by the goddess Venus,
who has seduced Tannhäuser and got him to live with her in her mountain
redoubt, the Venusberg. There he pursues a life of sensual pleasure in
fantastic realms Venus has conjured up for him, sort of like Sir Basil Elton in
H. P. Lovecraft’s “The White Ship,” until he gets bored and says he wants a
normal, mortal life again, including seeing real nature, hearing real birds
(the Minnesänger, medieval
troubadours who were a generation or two before the Mastersingers Wagner wrote
a later opera about, legendarily claimed to have learned music from the birds
themselves) and hanging out with ordinary people again. Tannhäuser utters a
prayer to the Virgin Mary — and the entire Venusberg disappears and Tannhäuser
finds himself in a meadow where a shepherd boy is leading a flock of sheep and
singing a song to “Frau Holda,” which is really another name for the Norse
goddess Freia, who appears as an onstage character in Das Rheingold, two Wagner operas later. (So the plot of Tannhäuser is a Wagnerian mashup of Greco-Roman, Norse and
Christian myths.)
Elisabeth doesn’t appear on stage until the start of act two
(at least she isn’t supposed to
appear, but like most Regietheater
directors Kasper Holten thought he knew better than the original composer and
librettist — who in Wagner’s works were the same person), where she sings an
ode to the hall where the song contest is to take place, and then she confronts
Tannhäuser for an odd duet in which he’s evasive about just what he’s been
doing all the years he’s been away. The contest duly occurs and Walther von der
Vogelweide and Wolfram von Eschenbach sing deliberately dull songs about
chaste, pure love — and Tannhäuser is so pissed off at their ignorance of the
dark side and their hypocrisy about it that when it’s his turn, he scandalizes
the fellow contestants and the audience alike by singing the love song he had
sung to Venus back in Act I. The other Minnesänger draw their swords and are ready to kill him when
Elisabeth intervenes, and she and Wolfram suggest that he can redeem himself by
joining a band of pilgrims who are about to leave for Rome and asking the Pope
for forgiveness. He does so, and at the start of Act III Elisabeth and Wolfram
are waiting for him to return. When he doesn’t come back with the other
pilgrims, Elisabeth sings a prayer of hope that he’s all right and Wolfram
comforts her with the opera’s most famous excerpt, the Song to the Evening
Star. Then Tannhäuser enters and in the opera’s most emotionally wrenching
moment, he sings a scena,
“Inbrunst im Herzen,” about how he essentially used the pilgrimage as a way of
self-flagellation, walking barefooted over the rockiest routes and agreeing to
carry the other pilgrims’ burdens, just to suffer as much as possible in order
to expiate his sin of hanging out with Venus at the Venusberg. Only it didn’t
do him any good because when he finally got his audience with the Pope, the
Pope told him that no mortal who’d lived (and had sex) with Venus and been in
the Venusberg could ever be saved. The Pope specifically tells Tannhäuser that
he’s as likely to be accepted into heaven as the Pope’s staff is to sprout
leaves. Well, given that clue you can pretty much guess how it’s going to end:
Elisabeth dies of shock but her death redeems Tannhäuser, who also dies but is
now in a state of grace — a messenger or something comes in with the news that
the Pope’s staff has indeed sprouted leaves — and Wolfram is left alone, presumably
to write Parsifal.
This plot got
amended by Wagner when he got an offer to present the opera in Paris in 1861
and he ran into the Jockey Club, a group of young aristocrats who had managed
to get jobs for their ballerina girlfriends/mistresses/whatever by insisting
that every opera produced at the Opéra in Paris had to have a ballet in it.
What’s more, the ballet had to be in the second act because the Jockey Club
members always arrived fashionably late and missed the first act. Wagner
pondered this and, rather than spot the ballet in the “logical” place for it —
just before the song contest — decided to expand his musical depiction of the
Bacchanale in the Venusberg in Act I beyond what he’d written for the earlier
(1845) Dresden version of the opera and place the ballet there. Wagner also rewrote all the parts of the opera
involving Venus because, having just completed Tristan und Isolde, he was not happy with the passages about lust as
he’d been able to do them in 1845 and thought he could do better this time
around. To keep the evening relatively short despite the expansion of the dance
sequence in the Venusberg, he cut Walther’s song from the Act II contest —
leaving Walther basically little more than a comprimario role. The Royal Opera production in Copenhagen
followed the Paris version (which I generally approve of, though I’d want
Walther’s song put back in because the more boring material we hear from
singers prattling on about love without any idea of what it’s really about, the more credible Tannhäuser’s attitude
becomes and the easier it is to sympathize with his punk-like disruption of the
song contest), but Kasper Holten’s weird staging significantly compromised the
whole piece. In this version Venus becomes one of Tannhäuser’s maids, with whom
he’s presumably having an affair; there’s also a lot of business about a floppy
velvet hat (a sort of hat Wagner himself wore — most drawings, paintings and
photos of him during his lifetime show him wearing one) that gets passed from
Tannhäuser to his son during the prologue (which doesn’t have anything to do
with any of Wagner’s original
libretto) and eventually turns up on Wolfram’s head during the Song to the
Evening Star. Venus the Maid is made up to look like Nurse Diesel in Mel
Brooks’ Hitchcock spoof High Anxiety
except for her hair, which is a long wig dyed punk-red. She hardly looks like a
personification of the Goddess of Love, and why Tannhäuser would go with her when Elisabeth is far better-looking is a mystery
locked inside Holten’s head. Once Tannhäuser says his prayer to the Virgin Mary
and the entire Venusberg is supposed to disappear and deposit him on a meadow
(one of the 19th century theatrical special effects it would have
been difficult but far from impossible to do on stage), in Holten’s production
he’s still in the same house, only with a couple of prop trees dangling from
the rafters to indicate “meadowicity.” (I joked that it was in a later Wagner opera, Die Walküre, that a character was supposed to have a tree
growing through his living-room floor.)
The second and third acts aren’t as
elaborately and infuriatingly misdirected as the first — indeed, I quite liked
a lot of the “business” in Act II, particularly the behavior of the people who
are supposed to be the audience at the song concert and who act as nervously
and inappropriately as many of their real-life counterparts at a fancy musical
event) — but they both suffer from Holten’s annoying insistence at putting
people on stage who are carefully indicated as being off stage in Wagner’s libretto. Venus is shown in the
middle of the song contest, physically nudging Tannhäuser to disrupt it (in
Wagner’s original he does so on his own), and in Act III Tannhäuser is visible
on stage, compulsively writing away in his little notebook. as Wolfram and
Elisabeth are declaiming about how worried they are because they haven’t seen
or heard from him in quite a while. (If they were any closer to him they’d trip
over him!) Nor is the strictly musical end of things good enough to make up for
the silly stage production; Stig Andersen was a tenor who mightily impressed me
when the Met did Siegfried and Götterdämmerung with him in 2000, but by 2009 his voice had
developed a nasty wobble and here he’s giving one of those performances where
it’s clear the role isn’t in his voice anymore even though he’s an intelligent
enough performer and a sensitive enough actor one can’t write him off
completely. (Then again he’d probably have had an easier time portraying
Tannhäuser’s anguish in a production that stuck to Wagner’s original concept
and setting.) Overall the singers are competent enough without being truly
inspired, though since most of them have Scandinavian names I’m presuming they
are Danish opera “regulars” that work together often and thus are better able
to come together in an ensemble than international “stars” flown into town and
brought together for just one production. But they’re hamstrung not only by a
ridiculous production but by conductor Friedemann Layer, one of those
modern-day Wagner conductors who equates slow = “spiritual” and ponderous =
“profound.” Layer is actually quite good in the parts of the opera Wagner intended to be played slowly — Wolfram’s two big solos and
Elisabeth’s prayer — but “Dich, teure Halle” (Elisabeth’s ode to the Hall of
Song at the start of Act II) isn’t the energy rush it should be and
Tannhäuser’s disruption of the song contest with the Hymn to Venus doesn’t pack
the dramatic punch it’s supposed to have, and does have at a faster tempo.
As
I’ve been writing the above I’ve been playing a quite different version of Tannhäuser — the abridged recording British Columbia made at
Bayreuth in 1930 (Act I is complete but Acts II and III are each shorn to about
half their intended length), conducted by Karl Elmendorff, who wasn’t
considered one of the great Wagnerians of the 20th century but has
it all over Layer in terms of bringing dramatic power and raw emotion to the
action. It also helped Elmendorff’s cause that he had a significantly better
cast: his Tannhäuser, a Hungarian tenor named Sigismund Pilinszky, has taken
his lumps over the years from reviewers of this recording but his voice is
considerably more secure than Andersen’s c. 2009 (alas, clashing record
contracts prevented the best Tannhäusers from 1930, Lauritz Melchior, Max
Lorenz and Franz Völker, from being on these records!), and Maria Müller as
Elisabeth is so far ahead of Tina Kiberg as both vocalist and dramatic actress they practically seem
to inhabit different universes. Ditto for the Wolframs (Herbert Janssen in
1930, Tommi Hakala in 2009) and even the shepherd boys — I usually give
producers points if they can cast an actual boy in a pre-pubescent role instead
of putting in an adult woman in drag, but when the Shepherd Boy’s solo is sung
as well as Erna Berger did in 1930 (“seven minutes of sheer perfection,” said a
High Fidelity critic of a 1980
reissue), who cares that she’s an adult she instead of a pre-pubescent he?
Ultimately the 2009 Tannhäuser
makes its point more from the sheer grandeur of Wagner’s music, which overcomes
a silly production, a dull conductor and professionally competent but not
especially inspiring singing.
