Wagner Without Fear

by William Berger

  The rest of the act is a breeze.

  Act III The first part of Act III is very mellow, but not boring. It is the contemplative part of the opera. Just get comfortable and listen closely.

  In Tannhäuser’s “Rome Narrative,” there is much to hear in the orchestra even if (as often happens) the tenor’s voice is wearing thin.

  PERFORMANCE HISTORY AND ESSENTIAL LORE OF TANNHÄUSER

  Rough beginnings (1845–60) Wagner started making revisions to the score of Tannhäuser after its first performance. Part of the problem was that many of his ideas were unclear in performance, and everyone was dissatisfied with the tenor. Thus, the great tradition of complaining about the incapacity of the tenor singing Tannhäuser began on opening night, and continues unabated to the present day.

  Public reaction to Tannhäuser was, predictably, varied. Some swooned in rapture, others retched, while most were plain confused. Jury-rigged performances appeared around Germany, prompting Wagner to write a pamphlet titled On Performing Tannhäuser in 1852. Excerpts were played at concerts and recitals all over Europe and, eventually, the New World. Full productions were rare and generally unsatisfying, although an important production of it in New York in 1859 did much to further the Wagner “cause” in the States. Finally, Wagner set his sights on the Paris Opéra as the best place for his Tannhäuser to conquer the world. He set about revising it again, cutting the Overture and expanding the Venusberg scene for the ballet junkies of Paris.

  Tannhäuser at the Paris Opéra (1861) What followed was one of the most famous episodes in the history of opera. It was better than a fiasco, it was a genuine riot.

  France has a long history of direct government involvement in the performing arts. To this day, managerial issues at the Opéra are cabinet-level issues. To get an opera produced there was, and remains, akin to passing a bill through a legislature. But the Paris Opéra was the apex at the time, and Wagner set his sights on it. His chief advocate with the French government was the wife of the Austrian ambassador, a Princess Metternich, who was unpopular both personally and as a representative of France’s frequent enemy. So right away there was controversy among people who had never even heard Wagner’s music. And then, of course, there was the music, always guaranteed to start a controversy.

  And finally there was a certain group of gentlemen, you should pardon the expression, known as the Jockey Club. They were members of Paris’s financial and aristocratic elite, notorious bon vivants, and a powerful bloc of boxholders at the Opéra (one can sense trouble already). The story (“legend” might be a better term) goes that they were accustomed to linger over their dinner, miss the first act of the opera entirely, and arrive for the second act. The ballet was always given during a later act of the opera so the good old boys of the Jockey Club could drool over their mistresses or prospective mistresses in the dance corps. The management tried hard to persuade Wagner to have the ballet in the second act. Since the Entrance of the Guests in Act II is something of a production number anyway, the idea was not absolutely unthinkable, but Wagner would not hear of it. In this instance, who can blame him?

  The Jockeys geared for war, uniting all the various anti-Wagner (and anti-Austrian, anti-Imperial, anti-everything) factions. The first performance was greeted with whistles, catcalls, and noisemakers of all kinds. Though much of the audience was genuinely supportive of the work, it was only with difficulty that the performance managed to stumble to its conclusion. Even the presence of the Emperor Napoleon III and his Empress Eugénie did not quell the disturbance—indeed, their presence may have even been another cause of the riot. After the demonstrations grew over the second and third performances, with fights in the audience forcing the singers to sit down on the stage for up to fifteen minutes at a time while order was restored, the work was permitted to be withdrawn.

  What exactly happened on those nights in Paris in 1861? Was it a clash of musical ideals, an antiforeign, anti-imperial expression, an assertion of power by a small faction, or a combination of all these causes? The matter remains debated to this day. Oddly, many Parisians became ardent Wagnerites as a reaction to the affaire, including such influential arbiters of the period as Baudelaire, Catulle Mendès, and Gustave Doré. We know that Wagner left Paris as soon as he could. His dislike of the French capital grew into one of his insane hatreds, and he was known to gloat gleefully and publicly when he heard the Parisians were reduced to eating rats in the siege of 1870–71. The Paris debacle was also one more clear indication that Wagner could not expect to gain fame and fortune by conventional commercial means, bringing him one step closer to creating his own universe in Bayreuth.

  This story is sure to be brought up or referred to at any performance or discussion of Tannhäuser.

  Standardizing and Mainstreaming Tannhäuser (1860–90) Meanwhile, the popularity of the opera grew, mostly through tidbits in the concert hall. Wagner himself supervised an important production in Vienna in 1875, and this is the edition we most often are presented with today. Confusingly enough, everyone persists in calling this the Paris version, but it is not. For one thing, it’s in German, whereas the Paris version was in French. The important thing is that there was, at long last, an edition of the opera that pleased Wagner, and the number of productions in Europe and America rose sharply. In the 1880s, Tannhäuser was Wagner’s most performed opera.

  Tannhäuser is “Canonized” at Bayreuth (1891) After Wagner’s death in 1883, his wife Cosima took the reins at the all-important Bayreuth festival. Her first new production, after a safe presentation of Tristan in 1886, was of Tannhäuser in 1891. This shocked many hard-core Wagnerites, who felt this opera was too traditional and conventionally operatic for Bayreuth, which should be reserved for the later “music dramas” such as the Ring. But Wagner had clearly instructed that all his works, whatever one wants to call them, from Dutchman to Parsifal, were to be duly presented at Bayreuth. He emphasized the point by telling Cosima, shortly before his death, that he “still owed the world Tannhäuser.” The 1891 production was a great success with audiences and a sort of personal vindication for Cosima. It was in this production that Cosima, who did not like the “arms out” gesture the prima donna had found so “effective” for her entrance, secretly had the sleeves of the singer’s gown sewn to the sides of her dress, thus eliminating any conventionally operatic gestures from her performance.

  Toscanini and Tannhäuser (1930–33) In 1930, Arturo Toscanini was invited to conduct the first new production of Tannhäuser at Bayreuth since 1891. The first foreigner to conduct at Bayreuth, and an Italian at that, raised some nationalist hackles, but his Tannhäuser created such a sensation that one Nazi musicologist was moved to find evidence of Aryan ancestry in Toscanini’s background. The success was repeated in 1931.

  By 1933, what was once the Nazi threat had become the German Third Reich, and Toscanini, an uncompromising antifascist, quit Bayreuth. Hitler himself wrote an extremely polite letter to Toscanini, then in New York. Toscanini’s reply (in English, no less) is priceless. He wrote what a “bitter disappointment” it would be to him if circumstances would not change sufficiently for him to return to Bayreuth. Since it was clear to all that the only change in circumstance that could mollify him would be Hitler’s abdication, the matter was dropped and Toscanini spent the war years in America. Unfortunately, this stab at the Nazi co-opting of German cultural icons was softened when the great German composer Richard Strauss agreed to take over the conductor’s podium at Bayreuth.

  Die schwarze Venus (1961) Bayreuth was the site of yet another Tannhäuser scandale in 1961, when the twenty-four-year-old American Grace Bumbry took the role of Venus for the new production. Although her performance was, by all accounts, a triumph, the sight of a black person on Wagner’s own stage was too much for certain elements of the audience to bear. Before we get too righteous about lingering effects of Nazi racial theory in modern Germany, we must remember that the Metropolitan Opera of New York only breached the color line in 1955.r />
  PRODUCTIONS: WHAT YOU MIGHT EXPECT TO SEE

  Although directors with whacked-out ideas are eventually all drawn to Wagner, the general rule is that they leave Tannhäuser alone. The work is too firmly rooted in its medieval historical setting to make a lot of sense in, say, outer space or a suburban shopping mall. It does not take place in a sealed, inner psychological world, as do Dutchman and Tristan, nor in its own mythic space, like the Ring and Parsifal. A rarity like the successful Peter Sellars production for the Chicago Lyric Opera in 1988, with Tannhäuser portrayed as a televangelist and other postmodern touches, was actually attempting to look at the same issues as the standard productions, but in a more in-your-face sort of way. Productions that aim for a completely new reassessment of the basic issues of Tannhäuser have a hard time being anything other than parody, and that gets old pretty fast. Also, this is a relatively expensive opera to produce, and there are very few opera companies that can afford to mount a new production of it for such a brief term of service.

  This still leaves a great deal of room for interpretation. For example, the Wartburg clearly stands for civilized society, with all its rules and confinements. How to represent that on stage? You can be very blunt about it, with the heralds and other lackeys in jackboots and armbands, as was trendy in Communist countries for a while, or you can drown the stage in medieval glitz and let the audience draw its own conclusions.

  For the Venusberg scene, anything goes, scenically speaking.

  There is one other aspect you may see emphasized. For some time, it has been popular to see Tannhäuser as the archetypal artist, misunderstood in all spheres of society. If the production stresses his physical isolation in respect to those around him, it may be in an attempt to follow this way of understanding the character.

  The only other issue you should be aware of in different productions is (here we go again) which edition of the work is being presented. Almost all modern productions will follow the latest edition approved by Wagner (Vienna, 1875), or one so similar that only a Doctor of Music would notice, or care about, the difference. Occasionally, the so-called Dresden version pops up (as it did in London, for example, in 1984). If so, expect a truncated and less exciting Venusberg scene with little or no ballet, a longer Song Contest, and an overall harsher and less refined score.

  LOBBY TALK FOR TANNHÄUSER (IMPOSSIBLE LOVE—SOUND FAMILIAR?)

  In many ways, Tannhäuser is Wagner’s most dated tale. There is no getting around the fact that this is Romantic in every sense of the word, and the best productions are the ones that accept this fact at face value. The portrayals of sin and salvation are laid on with a trowel, and we moderns tend to look at that in a condescending way. Yet opera is often the science of saying the subtlest things in the biggest possible way, and Tannhäuser is not so remote from us as we would like to think. There are just a couple of hurdles to get past before we can see ourselves in this story.

  The single most alienating element in the opera is the character of Tannhäuser himself. He is absolutely insufferable by any standards. Many of Wagner’s characters are difficult to warm up to (Siegfried comes to mind), but they all have their reasons to be antisocial—except this one. The great tenor Jon Vickers even avoided singing this role because of Tannhäuser’s total immorality. That’s a hard one to fathom, considering that the other Wagner roles Vickers sang are hardly moral paragons. But the fact remains that nothing a tenor can do on stage is going to make the audience like Tannhäuser as a person.

  Part of the problem in sympathizing with Tannhäuser as a person is that Wagner puts unrealistic demands on him. He must convince us that he is attractive enough to capture the hearts of both Venus and Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, which is a tall order for any man. And all this while meeting some of the hardest vocal demands ever asked of a tenor.

  And yet as a type of person he is not so distant as we may imagine. Many men suspect themselves of being so attractive, despite any external evidence, that both Venus and Saint Elizabeth would fall in love with them if they happened to meet them. This secret, inner male ego is much more at the core of the story than any specific obnoxious medieval yodeler. The question is which of these two feminine ideals a man would choose if he could, and the answer is that the choice is not easy.

  Tannhäuser is the sort of person for whom the grass is always greener elsewhere. Really, he sounds a lot like Franz Liszt, and it’s surprising that no production has yet taken this tack. But we don’t need to look so far back into history to find analogues of Tannhäuser. Don’t we all have someone in our lives who is never happy where they are? How about that cousin of yours who yearned for a family and a house in the suburbs, only to complain of the boredom and confinement once married and mortgaged? Isn’t the longing for/fear of commitment a common theme in our time? Being torn between two ideals of a perfect life is a fate that has clobbered many people.

  Elisabeth is certainly familiar to all of us once we look past her pious proclamations. All of Wagner’s heroines are interesting, and Elisabeth is no exception. Like the others, she is engaging because of her ambiguities. It is a mistake to take the connection between our heroine and the historical Saint Elizabeth too literally. This one is very earthy and full of chutzpah, a fact she establishes musically as soon as she enters and sings her rip-snorting aria “Dich, teure Halle.” Although she is a model of purity, she has some very human longings. When Tannhäuser sings his first offensive song at the contest, Wagner’s instructions for her in the libretto describe her as torn between rapture and shock. In other words, she’s quite aroused in spite of herself. And notice that Wolfram’s kind words and deeds don’t do a thing for her. She never seems to notice he’s there. Indeed, she never once addresses a single word to Wolfram, even when only the two of them are on stage. So much for her interest in what we would call “husband material.” Even though she is wiser, Elisabeth is quite analogous to Tannhäuser. The difference is that she wants both saint and profligate, so to speak, in the same person, whom she will then rescue from his lower self. We have new words for this sort of impulse today, but the dilemma is as old as people.

  Elisabeth’s piety, however, is not a facade. Her lecture to the knights at the end of Act II shows an evolved, and strikingly modern, understanding of religious principles. Elisabeth is best seen as an idealist trying to function in an imperfect world.

  The conflicted desires of Tannhäuser and Elisabeth have much to say to us. At the very least, we learn, yet again, that love (mutual admiration and attraction) is the easy part on the conceptual plane, while finding common ground for coexistence is the goal that eludes most people.

  LOHENGRIN

  PREMIERE: WEIMAR, 1850 (UNDER THE DIRECTION OF FRANZ LISZT).

  THE NAME AND HOW TO PRONOUNCE IT

  This is one of Wagner’s simplest titles, and its pronunciation has no hazards for the English-speaker. The accent is on the first syllable, and the h is barely audible. The title is the name of the opera’s hero, which, in spite of seeing this name plastered all over billboards, programs, and newspaper articles, we must make believe we do not know until the very end of the story. This is a prime example of opera’s request that we suspend belief beyond all reasonable bounds.

  WHAT IS LOHENGRIN?

  Lohengrin is an opera about an archetypal myth presented as a medieval fairy tale. At first glance, it is almost comical in its commonplaces of this genre, containing, as it does, a knight in shining armor, a damsel in distress, an evil witch, a magic swan, a good king, and no shortage of knights, soldiers, and fair ladies. All program notes will refer to this opera as the apex and grand finale of German Romantic opera. Wagner rooted his story firmly in a historical moment, a.d. 933, when King Henry the Fowler of Saxony was uniting various German states to fight against Hungarian invaders. This gives the opera fanfares, choruses, and thrilling orchestral passages, as well as a not-always-welcome militaristic aspect. Lohengrin, however, is more than all that. The knight appears and saves the lady on
the sole condition that he never has to tell his name or his story. The issue, then, becomes the nature of love and its limits. After a performance of Lohengrin, audiences can be heard discussing the politics of relationships as much as the music or the performance.

  To explore this subject, Wagner uses some very subtle techniques that were revolutionary in their time and that were to find a fuller expression in his next opera, Tristan und Isolde. In fact, many experts find more interest in Lohengrin as a transitional piece from his earlier, traditional operas to his later unique music dramas. This is a great mistake. Lohengrin has long been a favorite of audiences (perhaps Wagner’s most popular work), and few people would sit in a theater for five hours merely to study background information on Tristan. This opera, obviously, can stand on its own merits. In fact, the relative traditionalism and naiveté that many critics find in Lohengrin may account for much of its popularity with audiences. The ensembles, duets, and other features of standard opera that Wagner decided had no place in his later music dramas abound in Lohengrin, giving sheer listening pleasure to us who are less concerned with the musical controversies of the mid-nineteenth century.

  The musical vocabulary Wagner uses to express the mysticism of the story is beautiful, well constructed, and easy to love. The ritual and fanfare that punctuate the opera serve primarily as a framework for the human story. Elsa, the heroine, has a mystical side to her, allowing for much sublime music, while the role of Lohengrin, the otherworldly knight, is lyrical in the extreme and easily the least “barkable” part Wagner ever wrote for a tenor. Program notes never tire of calling the work “Italianate,” whatever that’s supposed to tell us. Lest the opera get too ethereal between calls to arms, Wagner also gives us the character of Ortrud, who chews up the scenery whenever she gets a chance. Small wonder that Lohengrin remains popular.