Some comments about the recent Tannhäuser at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Although I have spent, throughout my long life, a very considerable effort to learn all I could about Wagner (I have been to Bayreuth six times, once at the invitation of Herr Wolfgang and have even met Gottfried Wagner who disagreed strongly with my meek suggestion that Wagner would have had some trouble with Goebbels), a most well-informed article by Tim Ashley in the Guardian about Tannhäuser taught me a great deal. Freud was enthusiastic about Wagner and spent hours with Mahler talking about their mutual addiction. My late brother happened to be the doyen of the Hungarian psychoanalytical movement and his last work, which was not completed, would have been an analysis of the Ring protagonists.

I considered last December’s ROH Tannhäuser, from the points of view of orchestra, conductor, chorus and much of the singing, and the particularly fine and striking performance of Christian Gerhaher as Wolfram, up to the now, usual, high ROH standard.
 On the other hand, I found the staging, lighting, costumes, set design and the entire – in my view, fatuous “Regietheater” concept, appalling, and kept my eyes closed most of the time so as not to get too upset.

While I thoroughly enjoyed the superb orchestral performance under Semyon Bychkov and the exceptionally fine and striking singing of Gerhaher, I found Johan Botha’s performance, for all his vocal splendour, rather wooden. His passionate and deeply studied, but stationary and rather uninvolved performance, appearing to use every opportunity to sit on the chairs thoughtfully spread around the stage, would have been more impressive in a concert performance.


As Andrew Clements in his review rightly observed, much of the singing was addressed to the audience. This came from the two acoustically favoured corners of the stage, (from conveniently placed chairs). The alternative could have been the presentation of dramatic encounters between fundamentally differing characters.


For my taste, the inept and often appalling direction, stage "design", costumes, lighting – in short, the entire concept, reminiscent of a performance of Katja Kabanová in Novosibirsk, cancelled out my pleasurable anticipation of hearing this wonderful, last romantic Weberian scream, in a production not having to rely on the legacy of Ruth Berghaus to make it a self-seeking, Regietheater plaything. I was expecting a fearless presentation of the opera as it was meant to have been performed, with all its clumsiness and yet heroic stature and scenic splendour!


As for the Venusberg scene being so "sexy", by the way, it made me think of an 
extended gym session at a secondary school in the said Novosibirsk, with the girls, instead of undressing to tempt Tannhäuser, cavorting in their underwear on an enormous white table, offering no more suggestion to a somewhat bored Botha, sitting brooding on the only furniture offered for more sexually explicit exploits, than a chair borrowed from the ROH’s own Hamlyn Hall bar. These chairs and 34 endlessly and individually lit candles were the only items to evoke the glory of the radiant and noble Hall that Elisabeth was supposed to greet with rapture.

The protagonists were dressed in dinner jackets, some with machetes dangling at their sides. Chorus members, dressed as early 20th Century kitchen porters or members of the cleaning staff of a village near Munkacevo, carried Kalashnikovs. The Markgraf seemed to be dressed as a 19th Century Premysl horse trader. All this, submerged in a mercilessly and continuously underlit dark stage, in which one could hardly make out who was singing, contributed to an almost constant urge for me to close my eyes and just drink in those superb and inspiring cadences that Wagner, even at a relatively early stage in his career could conjure up.


Please give us opera as it was presented only a few days earlier in a superb and enchanting production of Adriana Lecouvreur - without machetes and Kalashnikovs.