Tannhäuser
MUNICH
Bavarian State Opera
5/28/17
Harteros, Bavarian State Opera’s Elisabeth
© Wilfried Hösl |
ANY NEW PRODUCTION of an opera by Richard Wagner in Munich—a city with a nearly existential association with the composer—is a very special occasion, as witness the Bavarian State Opera’s superbly cast Tannhäuser (seen May 28), led by the company’s general music director, Kirill Petrenko. Petrenko has a Midas touch with every piece of music he presents, be it symphonic or operatic; on this occasion, he once again drew sheer perfection from his orchestra, maximizing the players’ concentration on each detail while evoking a luxurious, velvety sound. Petrenko’s is not a “fire and brimstone” interpretation of Tannhäuser. His tempos were generally slower than one expects from him: the first pages of the overture sounded highly contemplative, and most of the score was delivered free of bombast.
With her Elisabeth, Anja Harteros added another sublime interpretation to her ever-growing list of successes at this house. Now at the peak of her vocal prowess, Harteros sang a noble, deeply felt Elisabeth, her gorgeous tone flowing easily over the orchestra in the arching line of “Dich, teure Halle” as well as the heartfelt introspection of “Allmächt’ge Jungfrau.” As is the case with most Tannhäusers, tenor Klaus Florian Vogt saved his best work for his Rome narration, which was immaculately sung and interpreted. At other times, Vogt seemed to be marshaling his strength; given the difficulty of the role, one cannot blame him. Venus might well have been written for Elena Pankratova: the role of the goddess shows off her substantial soprano to great advantage, whether in lyrically cajoling soft phrases or when the voice is opened up at full throttle. Bass Georg Zeppenfeld’s silky-toned voice, ease of range and wonderful projection of text made his Landgraf Hermann a revelation. Dean Power was a ravishing Walther, Peter Lobert an appropriately forceful Biterolf. Particular praise is due the Chorus of the Bavarian State Opera under Sören Eckhoff.
Christian Gerhaher, justifiably and positively compared to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, turned Wolfram’s “Blick’ ich umher” in Act II and “O du, mein holder Abendstern” in Act III into extreme combat art songs, sung with hyper-sensitive attention to detail. Every phrase was superbly articulated and sung with hypnotically captivating tone, but all forward motion was stalled, drowned by self-conscious artistry. At these moments, Tannhäuser came to a standstill, despite the perfection of Petrenko’s orchestral accompaniment. When Gerhaher simply sang out, his voice soared, and he brought the necessary drama back both to his character and to the opera itself.
Romeo Castellucci was responsible for stage direction, set, costumes and lighting. Castellucci seems to understand that the central drama of the story is that Tannhäuser is always in the wrong place at the wrong time, fitting in nowhere. But Castellucci’s staging is ineffectual and does not do the work justice; the production, which received some boos at the final curtain, is a series of beautifully evocative but static pictures that do little to capture the essence of either the story or any individual character. The overture, for example, is acted out by several dozen bare-breasted women who shoot arrows at the appropriate musical moments into a circular white target hung above the stage. Still, this Tannhäuser was formidably sung and played, and the sold-out house showed its appreciation in ovations of considerable length and volume. —Jeffrey A. Leipsic
Review: Opera Lovers, Make a Pilgrimage to Munich for ‘Tannhäuser’
MUNICH — “Nach Rom!” the cast of Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” cries at the end of that opera’s second act, pressing the title character to make the Catholic pilgrimage to Rome and save his troubled soul.
I’d give it a new spin: “Nach München!” Opera lovers, get thee to Munich. Listening to “Tannhäuser,” which opened at the Bavarian State Opera here on Sunday, in a new production directed and designed by the provocative theater artist Romeo Castellucci, will convince you that you’ve verily been saved. I can’t say whether hearing this performance — and I mean hearingit, since the staging adds little to the purely musical experience — will secure your place in heaven, but I guarantee your faith in opera’s vitality will be renewed.
No better cast is possible in this work today, and the high priest of the podium for this production, to be webcast live at staatsoper.de on July 9, is the dazzling Kirill Petrenko. “Tannhäuser” is no easy feat to conduct: Revised again and again by Wagner — whose wife reported, three weeks before he died, that he said he “still owes the world a ‘Tannhäuser’” — it is a sometimes awkward amalgam of that master’s early and late styles.
The Bavarian State Opera’s music director and the next chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, Mr. Petrenko embraces the awkwardness, and blazes through it. At the start, Tannhäuser, a chronically dissatisfied medieval knight and troubadour, has abandoned both his home and the virginal (O.K., perhaps a bit boring) Elisabeth for the sensual pleasures of Venus. The rushing lushness of the opening bacchanal music here had the complex, dizzying fervor of “Parsifal,” Wagner’s final completed opera.
But in that second-act finale — when Tannhäuser, back at court in Wartburg but disgraced once his venture to Venus’ lair has been revealed, resolves to travel to Rome — Mr. Petrenko builds the scene with a steadiness and patience that shows the music’s debt to the early 19th century and the grand finales of Rossini and Bellini.
What unites these two sides of Wagner, the early and late, here is Mr. Petrenko’s unshowy energy, which emerges from the root of the orchestra: Listen closely, and there’s always warm, full, rounded precision in the low brasses and low strings. The music down there may not be the tune you end up whistling, but it’s the scaffolding of that tune that gives intensity and purpose to the melodic lines layered on top of it.
Mr. Petrenko brings fresh vigor to this score — not the superficial verve of loudness or fastness, but a more elusive grandeur and dignity — and his cast does, too, including the earthy Elena Pankratova (Venus) and authoritative Georg Zeppenfeld (Hermann, Elisabeth’s uncle).
As Wolfram, the stable, upstanding counterweight to Tannhäuser’s tortured confusion, Christian Gerhaher faded the end of his great “Hymn to the Evening Star” almost beyond audibility. Yet his scrupulous attention to the text kept the line vividly present, a ghost whose contours you could somehow see and feel.
A serene, queenly presence as Elisabeth, Anja Harteros focused her emotions in her attractively unsettled voice, practically vibrating with feeling. Her choices of tone color constantly surprised: Describing Tannhäuser’s disappearance, her sound palpably grayed; later, a single word, “jähen,” was a memorably sour sneer as she told how his betrayal had destroyed her. Klaus Florian Vogt, singing the title role for the first time, united his pure, boyish tone with heldentenor weight.
What convinced me to make my own Munich pilgrimage was the promise of these peerless musical forces being set in motion by Mr. Castellucci, whose enigmatic, elegant, calmly brutal theater works have brought him avant-garde acclaim since the 1980s.
Who, on paper, would take to “Tannhäuser” better than this practiced guide to dark nights of the soul? (His “Divine Comedy,” from 2008, reflected on Dante in moody, indelible images, like that of an elderly woman gnawing on a basketball.) Who could enact a more striking battle between Venusberg and Wartburg than this purveyor of gorgeous visual responses to spiritual conflict? (His 2016 staging of Bach’s “Matthew Passion” was an eerily poignant pageant of blood, bodies, nature and science, conducted in a clinic-white box.)
This time, the result is disappointingly bland. No one wants or expects clear answers from a Castellucci production, but I wanted more suggestive images, a more charged mood.
There are ideas, particularly in the first act. During the overture, a troupe of bare-breasted Amazons shoots arrows toward a gigantic image of an eye looming at the back of the stage. (Much is made of the similar construction of an archery bow and Tannhäuser’s harp.) The eye is later replaced by a slowly rotating circular panel; when a thin stream of blood leaks onto it, it becomes a mesmerizing exercise in slow-motion spin art. Venus’s realm is a platform full of lethargically, primordially pulsing heaps of flesh — sensuality’s nightmarish overkill.
But the second act, at the Wartburg court, is slack, framed by endlessly shifting sheer, silky curtains, perhaps meant to contrast Venus’s viscous ooze. It’s a handsome set but it doesn’t quite work: Mr. Castellucci seems to have conceived Elisabeth as chilly and detached, a kind of Hitchcockian heroine, which doesn’t fit the sensitive, easily emotive Ms. Harteros. The staging isn’t so much cool as dull; the singers seem game but at sea.
The final act — in which Elisabeth dies, still praying for Tannhäuser’s redemption, and he returns from Rome, rejected, before a last-minute miracle of salvation — elicits a bit of Castelluccian meta-theater. The dead characters are placed on plinths inscribed with “Klaus” and “Anja,” the star singers’ first names, and their bodies are then replaced — and replaced, and replaced — with progressively rotting versions to simulate the process of decomposition. All that’s eventually left is two piles of dust, bits of which are sprinkled together for a cloying ending.
What wasn’t cloying in that finale on Sunday was the music — the orchestra swirling and shining, the chorus rich and full-bodied. Mr. Petrenko and the forces of the Bavarian State Opera will perform Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” in concert at Carnegie Hall next season. See you there.
MUNICH — The joy of Elisabeth’s entrance aria in Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” recedes for a line of sadness as she recalls her beloved’s departure. The soprano Anja Harteros, whose performance of the role at the Bayerische Staatsoper here will be streamed at staatsoper.tv on Sunday, July 9, makes of that passing moment an entire anatomy of melancholy.
Her voice suddenly turns gray and hazy, without losing its steely core. Sinking to its depths, its texture is like weathered velvet. She transforms before our eyes from a cheerful girl into a woman who’s peered into the heart of grief. The conductor Christian Thielemann put it simply: “The voice is one of the most beautiful which has been ever around.”
In the great operas of Verdi, Puccini, Strauss and Wagner, Ms. Harteros is as good — as powerful yet lyrical in her singing, as sensitive in her acting — as anyone in the world. Nikolaus Bachler, the Staatsoper’s director, called her “one of the major singers of our time.”
“I always compare her to a river, in her clearness and her purity,” Mr. Bachler said in an interview. “But she can grow, like rivers can grow, in a second — and go back, in a second, to a calm, shining beauty.”
Why, then, have her appearances outside of a small circle of theaters in and near Germany been so limited over the past decade? Why has she developed a reputation for cancellations? Why has she not performed since 2008 at the Metropolitan Opera, where she had acclaimed runs over several seasons?
“I’ve told her this: I would turn the schedule inside out to make it possible, even on short notice,” said Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. “Because I think it would be a great artistic event to have her back on the Met stage.”
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Speaking in May over lunch at a restaurant here, Ms. Harteros, 44, politely but firmly deflected certain questions about her personal life. “These are private reasons,” she said, “that I didn’t want such big travel, with big distance from home.”
But interviews with past and present collaborators point to a major reason for the unusual limitations on her dazzling career: Her husband, who is also an artistic mentor of hers, has been ailing for some time, so she is unwilling to venture far from where they live, outside Cologne, Germany.
This commitment to her family has earned Ms. Harteros the admiration of many in the opera world, even as they regret the performances they and their audiences are missing. “She’s a very responsible person, and she has a responsibility: end of story,” said Antonio Pappano, the music director of the Royal Opera in London. “It doesn’t make me feel wonderful. But it is what it is.”
Mr. Thielemann, one of the world’s leading Strauss and Wagner conductors, expressed similar feelings: “If you have somebody at home you want to take care of, and need to,” he said, “it’s more than logical that you do it.”
Her restrictions on her travel, along with her lack of a large body of recordings — a deal with Sony fizzled out years ago — have made Ms. Harteros perhaps the most elusive important singer in the world, a star who can seem like a secret.
Born in 1972 near Cologne, the middle of three children of a Greek father and German mother, Ms. Harteros grew up playing the violin. But from early on, she was encouraged to explore her voice. She sang Zerlina in a school production of “Don Giovanni” when she was just 13, and while she made a mistake — the performance even needed to be briefly stopped — it was ineffably right.
“I felt that even if I failed,” she said, “it was not like playing violin in front of an audience. It was a free feeling.”
She entered the conservatory in Cologne, and in her early 20s joined the ensemble at the theater in nearby Gelsenkirchen, before moving on to a larger house in Bonn. In 1999, though she didn’t much like stilted aria contests, she entered the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition and won a surprising victory.
“She was an artist that did not arrive at the competition with a kind of buzz around her,” said Anthony Freud, one of the jurors that year and now the general director of the Lyric Opera of Chicago.
A young lyric soprano, Ms. Harteros was at that point concentrating on Mozart and the lighter Verdi; one of the things she sang in the final round in Cardiff was the famous “Sempre libera” from “La Traviata,” with its insouciant coloratura. Her voice was full and creamy, but it didn’t give away the dramatic depths it would be plumbing a decade or two hence.
“I can’t honestly say I was sitting there saying, ‘This lady is going to become a great Elsa or Leonora or Elisabetta di Valois,” Mr. Freud recalled, referring to some heavier Wagner and Verdi roles in which Ms. Harteros has recently triumphed.
Winning the Cardiff competition “was like a passport,” opening her international career, Ms. Harteros said. She rarely faltered in those early years as she traveled from San Diego to New York to Tokyo to Vienna. “Her singing was beautifully cool, clear-toned and full bodied,” Anthony Tommasini wrote in The New York Times of a Met “Don Giovanni” in 2004.
But she recalled the tension of making tough choices as a newcomer. She turned down a prestigious offer to sing Musetta, a supporting part in “La Bohème,” in London; the lead, Mimì, was already in her repertory. She rejected major theaters that wanted to build her up in uncongenial minor roles, preferring to sing the characters she loved in smaller houses.
“That’s the hardest part of the career,” she said. “You have sleepless nights. I needed to learn to say no and to stay with my no.”
Her most important debut came just months after the Cardiff competition here in Munich, where Peter Jonas, who had also been on the Cardiff jury, was the Bayerische Staatsoper’s artistic leader and Zubin Mehta was music director. They embraced her, and the theater quickly became her home base, though she feared her secure position would be threatened when the administration changed in 2008.
“When Herr Bachler began, I was so frightened,” she said. “But he said, ‘You are a wonderful singer and so important to this house, and we want to continue this work and deepen it.’”
A turning point, when you could say she went from house soprano to house star, came in 2009, when she was paired with the galvanizing tenor Jonas Kaufmann in a new production of Wagner’s “Lohengrin.” (“A Hollywood moment,” Mr. Bachler called it.) It was part of Ms. Harteros’s careful pivot from the light, agile heroines of Mozart to Wagner’s Sieglinde, Puccini’s Tosca and Verdi’s Aida.
“It’s mainly a lyric voice that slowly is gaining in power and in potential for bigger and bigger dramatic roles,” said Mr. Pappano, who cast her, alongside Mr. Kaufmann, in an atmospheric recent recording of “Aida.”
Donald Runnicles, the music director of the Deutsche Oper in Berlin, called her embrace of this repertory “a door you can ecstatically walk through — but can you walk back? You can become typecast, or take on roles that are too big for you. And you can’t find your way back. I think that is why Anja is prudent.”
Her performances of these queenly characters are memorable because of the passion quaking beneath her serene, regal bearing. Her big blue eyes are full of what the stage director Christof Loy called in an interview “something fragile always.” Singing “Tu che le vanità,” Elisabetta’s climactic aria near the end of Verdi’s “Don Carlo,” Ms. Harteros makes sensational drama out of balancing almost martial control with an undercurrent of rhythmic freedom, her pianissimos seeming to hold back floods of forte.
“From the outside there is purity,” Mr. Bachler said. “But in the inside, you can feel the volcano, and the fire that she doesn’t live, really, or let out, really. And this makes the personality so rich.”
There are not terribly many more major roles for her to explore; no one expects her essentially lyric instrument to push much further, into dramatic parts like Salome or Isolde. Mr. Thielemann said that he had recommended Puccini’s Madama Butterfly to her and thinks that her interpretations of the mature, subtle women of Strauss — the title character in “Ariadne auf Naxos,” the Marschallin in “Der Rosenkavalier,” the Countess in “Capriccio” — will be touchstones in the years to come.
“You need someone with experience,” he said of these characters, “who dominates the scene without doing too much.”
The question, of course, is how widely Ms. Harteros will be able to range in the time she has left, given her personal circumstances. She recalled a rare visit to London, for Verdi’s “Otello” in 2012, a period she called “maybe the hardest or second-hardest time of my life.”
“I went onstage and did Desdemona,” she said. “And the feeling I had when I did ‘Ave Maria,’ that was so special. I put it into the music, and something really special happened with the audience. I don’t want to live that again, but it makes me strong, to know that in difficult times you can reach very high points.”
The opera world, for its part, seems to have tacitly agreed to be patient.
“I have not lost hope, and I believe she will come back to the Met,” Mr. Gelb said. “For her, I would make it work.”
