Herewith my thoughts on the subject of this season’s revival of Tannhäuser. Readers with an interest in the topic will be edified by the series of three (comparatively brief) articles Joseph Horowitz has posted on his own artsjournal blog. (It happens that he attended the same performance as I). As you’ll see, some of his observations are congruent with mine—in fact, he cites my article of last week on the matter of contemporary attempts to renew the repertory, which he kindly reposted. But he writes from a different angle, and extends his remarks to other Wagner stagings that in his view productively addressed the role of “Regie.” You can access all three here.

The least we can say of Richard Wagner is that he is Shakespeare’s only rival (or Shakespeare his) as greatest creator for the Western stage since antiquity. And a proof of his greatness is that an opera generally considered one of the weaker works of his maturity can register a measure of its soul-stirring power in a performance as emaciated as that of December 12, 2023 at the Metropolitan Opera. More remarkable yet is that the work did not need to overcome serious auteurial revisionism, or “concept,” to salvage what remains it could. For this was a revival of a thoroughly romantic-representational Schenck/Schneider-Siemssen production dating from 1977, which we may evaluate on the basis of how well it advocates for the work on its own terms, rather than on the merits of a corrective imposture. Thus, the event pitilessly illumines a state of performance that lends every apparent justification for the most hostile misrepresentations (or simple neglect) of the canon.

Tannhäuser completes our recent-season minitour of Wagner’s pre-Ring Romantic tales of the artist/sinner and his sufficiently-loyal-or-not co-protagonist. The other two, Der Fliegende Holländer and Lohengrin, were directed, along with Parsifal, by François Girard. Those productions have been discussed in previous posts, as has the thematically related case of Die Meistersinger. It’s a little ironic that of the pre-Ring trio,Tannhäuser should be brought before the public not at all à la mode, for it is the baldest of the three in its presumably outdated messaging. In it, the identity of the artist is not cloaked in parable, as in Lohengrin. Nor is the sinner’s blasphemous deed committed long before the start of the action, as in Holländer. Moreover, the specifically religious nature of the heroine’s sacrifice is openly declared. No parsing is required—it’s all right in front of us, in forceful, colorful, immediately apprehended music and action. The stage world’s level of reality is similar to Lohengrin‘s: a superimposition of legend onto date-stamped historical events populated by their actual participants, and of Christian piety onto the persistent presence of older, “pagan” practices. In Tannhäuser, the Christian/pagan agon focuses specifically on the sexual component of love: that’s the grotto of Venus herself, literally underground, that our hero has been dallying in at rise, and that’s a shrine to the Virgin, not a station of the cross, that Tannhäuser finds himself beneath after his cry of “Mein Heil ruht in Maria!”, and to which Elisabeth later prays. In this corner, the Cult of Venus, and in this, the Cult of the Virgin.

This year, the Metropolitan Opera is mounting six productions, among a total of eighteen, of new or recent works. Two are carried over from previous seasons; the other four are company premieres. None originates in Europe—five are by American composers (two of them black) and one by a Mexican composer. For a comparable example of attention to the contemporary in the company’s history, we would have to return to the first decades of the last century, when Puccini, Strauss, and assorted verists and post-Wagnerians were of the time, and it wasn’t unreasonable to hope that a new curiosity might turn out to be a repertory-worthy item. As for an equivalent American representation in a season’s offerings, there is no precedent. In those days of a century and more ago, the Met could lean on an audience in which large contingents of first- and second-generation Europeans, most prominently German and Italian, but all still marked by the great influence of 19th-Century Parisian grand opera, helped to fill in the old-money ranks. Opera had long been a high-class component of their home cultures, and while they naturally responded most readily to their native stories and sounds, they were also well accustomed to the interpenetration of repertories, and were assimilated into the broader European assumption of the virtues of opera and classical music. There was no perceived necessity to cater to one ethnicity or another, since opera went with the territory for all.

That assumption settled in for a good long run, and after 140 years^(I) is still the only plausible argument for the existence of a full-scale, full-season repertory opera company in an American city. It did not settle deeply enough, however, to turn opera and classical music into “public goods” in any but indirect ways; nor has it resulted in the creation of anything resembling a native American repertory that might lay the foundation for such a status. With the last influx of European emigrés now two to three generations behind us and the attentions of the rich increasingly drawn elsewhere, it has weakened, perhaps fatally. The canonical repertory is foundering, for reasons that are discussed here in post after post. So the company’s current management has undertaken a program of artificial insemination in place of what was once natural conception—hence the ethnocultural distribution noted above, to which we can add a sexual identity element, as well. This is not a program of audience integration (the management cannot be so unobservant as to suppose that will happen, except at the outermost fringe), but of audience fragmentation, in perfect synchronization with the oft-remarked silo-ing of group identities in our society as a whole. It happens that I have worked in a silo. It is not so bad in the fall, when you’re up at the top near the fresh-air source, and the silage is fresh and relatively dry. But through the winter you work your way down toward the floor, and by spring you are pitching forkfuls of sopping, matted, deeply marinated muck into baskets for trolleying back up to the top, dripping as they go, and the stench is asphyxiating. Moral: the good stuff is right near the top. Also: some silos are near-empty to begin with.