The Royal Opera hasn’t had a great deal of luck with Wagner’s “problem child”, Tannhäuser. None of the three productions staged at Covent Garden in the past 40 years has looked like a “stayer” — unlike, for example, Elijah Moshinky’s Lohengrin, which has trodden the boards there since 1977. In the absence of the thoroughgoing revision Wagner claimed he “owed the world”, but never lived to make, we are left with the Vienna text of 1875, the last production on which Wagner personally worked: an uneasy hybrid of the original Dresden (1845) and Paris (1861) versions. The opening bacchanale on the Venusberg, which Wagner wrote for Paris in his harmonically advanced post-Tristan style, has always sounded a carbuncle tacked onto the earlier, more straightforward “romantic opera”, with its simple, if memorable, Bellinian melodies.
And in recent decades, casting problems have dogged the work. I haven’t seen/heard a completely satisfactory Tannhäuser, certainly not at Covent Garden, in my opera-going lifetime. The strenuous title role, which I think calls for a lyric tenor of limitless stamina on the lines of the bel canto heroes of Wagner’s rival, Meyerbeer, generally falls to effortful Heldentenors. The great Canadian tenor Jon Vickers planned to do it at Covent Garden in the 1970s, but withdrew, ostensibly on religious grounds, claiming that he couldn’t reconcile Tannhäuser’s pull between the lure of sensual and spiritual love, Venus or Elisabeth.
When Tim Albery’s staging was new, it began with a thrilling Venusberg ballet, choreographed by Jasmin Vardimon, and this remains its most memorable sequence. The identification of Venus’s realm with an evening at Covent Garden — a smaller replica of the proscenium and curtain descends, through which Venus and her minions cavort — seems less compelling this time round, although the ruined theatre we see in Acts II and III remains a decent image of decadence. Yet neither the conductor, Hartmut Haenchen, a seasoned Wagnerian, nor his cast really pulled together on Tuesday’s opening night. Until the final act, the orchestral playing was ragged and the cast proved uneven.
Last time round, Christian Gerhaher’s nobly sung Wolfram won all hearts, minds and awards, but on Tuesday he seemed to be keeping his voice under wraps, as if imparting the secrets of Schubert’s Lieder to a small recital audience — although he pulled out the stops for his final confrontation with Peter Seiffert’s effortful Tannhäuser. The German tenor, 62, has been an infrequent visitor to the Royal Opera — his last appearance there was as Parsifal, in 1988 — and his Tannhäuser debuts here too late. The voice, smaller than it was in his prime 15 years ago, sounds too thin and nasal. I suppose we must be grateful that he hits most of the notes.
He eventually plumps for Emma Bell’s big-voiced, occasionally wayward Elisabeth, rather than Sophie Koch’s squally, verbally indistinct Venus. The finest Wagnerian voice on stage is Stephen Milling’s resonant Landgrave Herrmann, one of Wagner’s dullest characters, and the competing Minnesingers include a noticeable RO debut in the Biterolf of the excellent Michael Kraus. In sum, a very mixed bag.
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At the Teatro Real in Madrid, Semyon Bychkov — the RO Tannhäuser’s original conductor, and sorely missed on Tuesday — was in charge of a revival of Claus Guth’s staging of Wagner’s valedictory masterpiece, his ever-enigmatic “festival play to consecrate a stage”, Parsifal. Bychkov is undoubtedly one of the finest Wagner conductors of today, and Parsifal benefits from his preference for broadly sustained tempi, unfolding the music in long, seamless paragraphs and rich, blended orchestral and choral sonorities. The amplified (recorded?) bells in the two great transformation interludes of the outer acts made little impact, but Bychkov caught the stately tread of the music to perfection. He obtained excellent playing from the Teatro Real band, even if it isn’t one of the world’s great Wagner orchestras.
Guth is one of the German-speaking world’s most thoughtful and ingenious stage directors — he was responsible for the unforgettable Royal Opera production of Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten in 2014 — but he has a tendency to repeat himself. This Parsifal was another of his “sanatoria on a revolve” efforts, allowing him to present Parsifal’s journey to self-realisation and redemption as a quasi-Freudian psychological test case. The knights of the Grail conserve their prize object in a glass case, alongside an empty one for the spear Klingsor has snatched from the stricken Amfortas. They are war-wounded, shell-shocked, tended by uniformed nurses rather than squires. Kundry arrives with her potion from Arabia and puts on a pinny to care for the sick, robbing her of a sense of mystery.
Klingsor’s realm in the same house is decorated for a society party, with flappers for flower maidens. This seems more of a conceit than a concept, and Klingsor survives to take his place in Act III sitting beside the chastened, if cured, Amfortas, while Parsifal takes charge as a fascistic military dictator.
Franz-Josef Selig was an impressive, avuncular Gurnemanz, Anja Kampe a voluptuous Kundry, not quite in her best voice on this occasion, when she had to push for her high notes, but still one of the best around for beauty of tone and clarity of diction. Her account of laughing at Christ on the road to Calvary produced a bloodcurdling frisson.
Neither Detlef Roth’s musically wayward Amfortas nor Klaus Florian Vogt’s weedy-sounding Parsifal were in the same league. Vogt was drafted in for the filming of the production, presumably because he’s good-looking, but he continually disappoints me with his pallid tone and matter-of-fact delivery, singing “Erlösungswonne!” (“ecstasy of redemption”) as if ordering sausages and a beer. Let’s hope Andris Nelsons and Uwe Eric Laufenberg can get more from him at Bayreuth this summer.