As with all of Wagner’s Christian manifestations, this one is Catholic because historically so (pre-Reformation); yet it feels Protestant. Usually that’s because we sense Luther et al. in the music, but in Tannhäuser we also behold a thumbnail history of the evolution of medieval Christian belief, told in the story of one man/artist. First, Mary triumphs over Venus with Tannhäuser’s return from the Venusberg. But Venus’ lure is not thereby vanquished. It intrudes at a crucial moment, and it requires Elisabeth’s intervention, possible only through faith in the moment of highest despair, to keep the hope of forgiveness alive as Tannhäuser departs for Rome with the pilgrims. When he fails to return with them and that hope seems all but lost, it is because of Elisabeth’s prayerful intercession and virtual re-enactment of the Assumption (shown with unusual specificity in this production) that a glimmer remains. Finally, when Venus resurfaces once more and all is again in peril, it is the union of Elisabeth’s intercession with Tannhäuser’s true repentance that creates the Protestant moment, for his redemption has bypassed—and thereby repudiated—Pope and priestly ministration.

With the Ring, Wagner was able to dispense with the overtly Christian framework for the telling of these stories of man-artist brought in from the cold through womanly loyalty (or returned to it through that loyalty’s weakening), and with Meistersinger he was finally able to conceive the integration of the artist and his transgressive vision into society. He isn’t trying to convert us in any churchly sense. But to those who cannot accept this plot/character conformation in any sense, or who fear that the perpetuation of its representation through the power of great music threatens their own beliefs on artistic or sexual grounds, these operas are essentially foreclosed, unless the music can somehow be drafted into the service of those beliefs. That has become Standard Operating Procedure with most of the E-19 repertory, Wagner above all. And that, at least, this old production refuses to do.

Perhaps the clearest way to convey the serial shortcomings of the performance is to take up its elements in the order of their appearance. And so:

Orchestra and conductor: It’s not merely that this was the most lightly played Tannhäuser of my experience, or that its sonorities merged into something we could call a Wagner Sound only in the big choral moments, though both those things were true. It’s simply that the playing almost never sounded committed to the beauty and drama of the writing. It was generally obedient to the letter of its law, but never to its spirit. This was patently true of the strings, and—not to overlook the placidity of the lower-voiced viols—most patently of the violins. As important as the other choirs are in our mind’s-ear evocation of a Wagnerian texture, it is the strings, led on by the violins, that carry the writing forward the largest share of the time, as in most composition for a classical orchestra. So (staying with the first couple of minutes of the Overture, one of the all-time greatest) you have only to imagine the first string entrance, in the cellos, with the Burden of Sin theme (“Ach, schwer drückt mich der Sünden Last” is your textual reference); then the violins taking up the theme, but higher, with a seraphic tint that suggests that though sin still exerts its drag, a light gleams on high—both these brief, leaning-forward statements played calmly and prettily, without the slightest hint of a counterforce, of an inner struggle; and finally, over the fortissimo entrance of the brass and percussion with the Pilgrim’s Chorus, one of the score’s most famous effects, the overlay of descending violin triplets, utterly undone by a literal picking-apart of each triplet into evenly played duplets interrupted by rests, with no sense of attack or of playing through, as if the players just didn’t know how this is supposed to go. Anyone even casually familiar with Tannhäuser will understand the implications of these failures for the score as a whole. Venus was especially poorly served, her potentially arousing stuff, in the Venusberg music of the Overture and the extended ballet music, sounding thin and trashy when so underplayed. Mary fared a little better, with some lovely woodwind playing in Act 3. But Tannhäuser’s own inner drama, brought to a head in the Act 3 Prelude and the Rome Narrative, was no more than indicated.