“You are not his judges!” exclaims Elisabeth of Thuringia—history’s St. Elisabeth of Hungary—when assembled courtiers of her uncle, Landgrave Hermann, condemn the minstrel knight Tannhäuser for having whiled away time in the realm of the pagan goddess Venus. Elisabeth’s mercy is all the more poignant since Tannhäuser’s confession comes in a song contest for her hand in marriage. Challenged to explain the nature of love in song, a succession of knights deliver unmoving ballads until Tannhäuser bursts out in ecstasy over the carnal delights of Venus’s realm, which medieval German lore held to have found a home after antiquity in a grotto under the Hörselberg. That storied mountain—identified with witchcraft and other manifestations of the supernatural—lies not far from Brocken, the highest peak of Germany’s Harz mountain range, where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe set the witches’ sabbath scene in Faust. It is also close to the famous Wartburg castle, dramatically built on a high cliff, where the medieval court of the story met in the 13th century and where, three centuries later, Martin Luther hid out under the Elector of Saxony’s protection while translating the New Testament into German. The song contest is the stuff of legend.
Cast out of the Wartburg’s courtly surroundings, Tannhäuser is sent to Rome, where he must seek the Pope’s forgiveness. The Pope finds his sin too terrible to shrive, however, and tells the wayward knight that green sprouts will spring from his barren staff before he will be forgiven. Tannhäuser returns to Thuringia in disappointment. Telling his fellow bard Wolfram von Eschenbach of his woe, he learns that Elisabeth prayed for him before dying. Resisting a chance to go back to the Venusberg, Tannhäuser, too, dies as pilgrims enter bearing the Pope’s staff, which has indeed sprung green sprouts.
Probably derived from an Italian tale of a chaste knight seduced by a sybil, the legend we identify with Tannhäuser traversed Western Europe before its codification in the tales of the Brothers Grimm and other German Romantics of the 19th century. The introduction of the Pope’s role, in which it is revealed that the pontiff is wrong in applying forgiveness, a basic tenet of Christianity, was certainly an innovation of Reformation Europe, which believed the Papacy to be wrong about a great many things.
The tale drew the interest of the young composer Richard Wagner, who knew the legend from the stories of Ludwig Tieck and E.T.A. Hoffmann and who himself disdained Catholicism while living an impoverished artist’s life in Paris. Wagner’s failure to establish himself in the French capital eventually led him to abandon his squalid life there, but he credited closer study of the Tannhäuser legend with his final decision to leave. As he crossed Germany on his way to become the court conductor for the King of Saxony, he sketched the Wartburg and later used his illustrations in the set designs of an opera on the story’s theme.
Composing Tannhäuser, in Wagner’s admittedly not very reliable memoirs, drove him to nervous exhaustion. The frenzied overture drew from musical innovations in French grand opera, which Wagner professed to hate, but contained enough of the erotic that he claimed to have been confined to bed for days at a time. The opera succeeded in what came to be known as its ‘Dresden version.’ Wagner himself conducted, while the role of Elisabeth was performed by his nineteen-year-old niece Johanna. After participating in the Revolution of 1848, which swept Dresden in a violent uprising, Wagner had to flee Saxony and leave Germany altogether. His opera remained popular, however, and as he returned to respectability, he tried to produce it in Paris.
Tannhäuser’s Paris production in 1861 was an utter disaster. In order to secure his opera’s performance at the Paris Opera, Wagner was obliged to add a ballet—a lusty bacchanale—which he injudiciously placed in the first act without knowing, or perhaps not caring, that members of the influential Jockey Club dined through the early part of the performance and arrived late to admire the ballerinas. Here they missed their chance and infamously took it out on Wagner, who withdrew the work after just three performances and beat a hasty retreat to Germany.
Despite the setback, the Paris version of Tannhäuser became the standard, though one occasionally still sees performances of the Dresden version in German theaters. The Metropolitan Opera used the Dresden incarnation when it first performed Wagner’s opera in 1884 but abandoned it for the Paris version only a few years later. The company’s current production, by the late and much-lamented Otto Schenk, premiered in 1977. Schenk produced most of the Met’s other Wagner productions through the 1980s and 1990s, and they were as beloved as they are well remembered. Were the company not suffering from such terrible finances, it is conceivable that general manager Peter Gelb’s unpopular regime would have replaced it rather than reviving a 46-year-old warhorse. But for better or worse it has not, and what we see is a remarkably traditional production of Tannhäuser.
As the decades go by, that is getting to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the opera looks exactly as it should, with goddesses and nymphs, knights and rulers, pilgrims and penitents all playing out our story in its original milieu. On the other hand, the production (seen up close for this account) looks tired and worn. Günther Schneider-Siemssen’s storybook sets look dusty and old, reminding one that the Met’s iconic Franco Zeffirelli production of Puccini’s La Bohème, which is nearly as old, just received a $1 million refurbishment, courtesy of a generous donor.
Brilliant soloists were cast. Andreas Schager has taken the lead as the heldentenor of the moment in opera houses around the world. He brought to Tannhäuser the same clarion bloom and roundness of tone he has devoted to Siegfried, Parsifal, and other more challenging Wagner parts. Elza van den Heever’s Elisabeth matched him note for note in a stellar performance. As Venus, Ekaterina Gubanova steadily navigated her part’s alluringly low tessitura. The steady German bass Georg Zeppenfeld combined a reliable legato with uncommonly clear diction to deliver Landgrave Hermann. Only Christian Gerhaher sounded out of place. A talented baritone and superb recital singer, his voice seemed misplaced for an operatic stage, beautiful but somehow too weak and too lyric to meet Wagner’s musical demands.
Unlike later Wagner operas, Tannhäuser offers great opportunities for chorus and ballet. Unhappily, the Met seems to have cut down on these fresh and entertaining performers. There seemed to be fewer dancers, choristers, and supernumeraries than had been on stage in the production’s most recent revivals, in 2004 and 2015, giving important scenes—and of course the bacchanale—diminished effect. Sir Donald Runnicles’s conducting was proficient, but his glacial tempi and frequent failure to connect the orchestral performance with what was happening on stage underserved the performance and dragged out the evening to nearly five hours—a Bayreuth Festival duration.
