Visiting Zurich earlier this week, I was eager to sample the Zurich Opera in Wagner. They are bringing the Ring to Carnegie Hall next season led by their General Music Director, Gianandrea Noseda. I found myself attending the premiere of a new Tannhäuser production. The conductor is not Noseda, but Tugan Sokhiev. The director is Thorleifur Orn Arnarsson. Would that Sokhiev and Arnarsson were conducting and directing the forthcoming Met Ring, rather than Yannick Nezet-Seguin and Yuval Sharon. The Zurich Tannhäuser is better than the Met.
Compared to Donald Runnicles’ Met Tannhäuser of 2023, compared to Nezet-Seguin’s meandering Parsifal and bland Tristan, Sokhiev is more dynamic, more purposeful. Like Noseda, he once worked under Valery Gergiev in St. Petersburg. He is about to take over the Orchestre de la Ruisse Romande. The Zurich Opera orchestra proved exceptionally alert, engaged musically, engaged operatically. Not as perfect as the Met Orchestra, but a better orchestra. The chorus is excellent.
Arnarsson, who is Icelandic, enjoys a distinguished career as a theater director. He brings to Tannhäuser a wicked intelligence kindred to Wagner’s own (but not in this particular opera). For the Entrance of the Guests in act two, every guest is individually caricatured – a ditzy spectacle that transpires while the Langdraf is silently rehearsing his windy speech to come. Because Tannhäuser is a man wholly apart – estranged from the world, estranged from himself – Arnarsson’s Wartburg is no less dissolute than the Venusberg. Here and elsewhere, the production delights and startles the eye without wasting a fortune on special effects. In fact, there’s no expensive gimmickry whatsoever.
The star of the show is not Tannhäuser or Elisabeth but Wolfram. He is the baritone Christian Gerhaher, chiefly known as a singer of Lieder, cast against type. His Wolfram (photographed above among the act two Guests) brandishes no creamy legato. At times, the delivery more resembles a parlando recitative at the softest possible dynamic. At the Met in 2023, this impersonation was merely anomalous. In Zurich – a tiny but richly decorated house with 1,100 seats – it complements Arnarsson’s meddlesome dramaturgy. Wolfram enters recklessly driving a car (never mind why), a creature of cunning intelligence. His deep affection for Elisabeth comes as a surprise.
Wagner begins the final (and best) act of Tannhäuser with Wolfram sympathetically observing Elisabeth in prayer. Gerhaher steps to the lip of the stage and addresses the audience directly – a Shakespearean move. From that point on, we are led to experience the drama through Wolfram’s eyes and ears. Wagner’s Wolfram is a bit of a milquetoast (this is early Wagner); though he laments Elisabeth’s death, he greets Tannhäuser – his rival — with utterly self-effacing compassion. When Gerhaher’s feckless Wolfram tells Tannhäuser he’s seized with empathy, he is obviously dissimulating. Tannhäuser’s ensuing Rome Narrative, the opera’s compositional high point, is an anguished plea for understanding. Wolfram first stands apart, then gradually succumbs. Gerhaher’s gripping deportment partners Tannhäuser’s soliloquy.
The Zurich Tannhäuser is an American, Eric Cutler. If he lacks the clarion heft this role requires, his hymn to Venus, in act one, artfully conveys an undercurrent of ennui. His handling of the act three narrative is more than artful – the pacing, both musical and dramatic, the verbal and expressive detail are magnificently rendered. Tannhäuser’s desperation and Wolfram’s transformation are made equally credible. I was startled to read in the program book that he is singing the role for the first time.
The opera’s third principal is Christina Nilsson, miscast as Aida at the Met a year ago. She holds her own. Like Gerhaher’s, like Cutler’s, hers is not a big voice. Perhaps all this is today what Wagner can best become. The epic performers (listen to Tannhäuser with Lauritz Melchior or Lotte Lehmann or Lawrence Tibbett) are a thing of the past. (Personally, I don’t experience Lise Davidsen as another Birgit Nilsson or – to cite an Elisabeth of electrifying nervous instability, kindred to the Dutchman’s Senta or Lohengrin’s Elsa – Leonie Rysanek.)
OK, important things are lost in the Zurich Tannhäuser. Arnarsson is no Frank Castorf, eagerly deconstructing the composer’s intentions. But not every aspect of his re-interpretation tells, at least by my reckoning. I find he underplays Elisabeth’s intensity by stressing her imposed conformity (she begins and ends the show as a statue that Tannhäuser must ultimately smash). The act one transformation scene, so magically realized by Wagner when the sulfurous Venusberg dissipates to yield a fragrant mountain valley, is in no way attempted. When Albert Niemann, the first Tannhäuser, insisted on cutting a part of the second act finale – the outburst “Erbarm dich mein, der, ach! so tief in Sünden”– in order to conserve his voice, Wagner was apoplectic. “Sing the second act finale as if you were to end the evening with it!” It is a Tristan moment of superhuman intensity.
Are superhuman Wagner tenors wholly a thing of the past? Maybe. We live in a different world today.
For a blog about the state of things at the Metropolitan Opera, click here.
