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should be brought before the public not at all à la mode, for it is the baldest of the three in its presumably outdated messaging.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.