The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (17 page)

As a storm forces Daland’s ship to seek shelter in a bay off the Norwegian coast, another ghostly ship looms up alongside.
Its captain, the Dutchman, has been cursed.
He is allowed on shore once every seven years to search for a woman who can lift the curse by swearing eternal fidelity.
Without explaining this to Daland, he offers him riches in return for hospitality and asks to meet his daughter, Senta.
Daland agrees, delighted at the prospect of marrying her off to a wealthy man, and a favourable wind allows both ships to sail to Daland’s home port.

Senta has long been obsessed with the legend of the Flying Dutchman and believes herself to be the one destined to redeem him.
Shunning Erik, the young man to whom she is betrothed, she is entranced when Daland introduces her to the mysterious stranger.
Both of them feel they have met the fulfilment of their dreams, and Senta vows to be true to him unto death.

The Dutchman’s ghostly ship terrifies the villagers.
Erik pleads with Senta.
The Dutchman overhears him, and decides to release Senta from her vow.
He reveals his identity – which
Senta has guessed all along – boards his ship and prepares to sets sail.
Senta despairingly flings herself into the sea, reasserting her fidelity.
The Dutchman’s ship immediately sinks, and a vision of the redeemed Dutchman embracing the transfigured Senta is seen floating above the waves.

What to listen for

Wagner wrote the opera in a single act, hoping to make it marketable as a curtain-raiser (!) to a ballet.
Later, he separated it into three acts, and made various smaller-scale revisions.
Both versions are regularly performed today, but the general feeling is that the opera works best if performed without a break (duration: about two and a half hours).

The storm-tossed overture is a showpiece of orchestral scene-painting.
The influence of Weber’s
Der
Freischütz
is evident in the ‘folk-tune’ choruses for Senta’s spinning friends and the rumbustious sailors, as well as the ballad in which Senta relates the legend of the Dutchman and the tense supernatural melodrama of the final fifteen minutes.

Wagner’s mature style is foreshadowed in the long declamatory monologue for the Dutchman (bass-baritone) in the first scene, the extended duets for the Dutchman with both Daland (bass) and Senta (soprano), and the music associated with the idea of redemption through love.

In performance

Ever since its first performance, this opera has provided designers with opportunities to devise spectacular stage effects through which to depict the Dutchman’s ship: today, film and laser projection often creates the necessary magic.
Modern productions often emphasize the contrast between the narrow bourgeois materialism of Daland, Erik and the villagers and the higher spiritual plane inhabited by Senta and the Dutchman.
Harry Kupfer at Bayreuth focused on the psychology of Senta’s obsession, suggesting that the whole story was Senta’s dream, a sort of fantasy rebellion against the pressures of a woman’s narrow lot.
Certainly nobody who saw
the startlingly intense Julia Varady as Senta could doubt that it is she, rather than the gloomy Dutchman who is the opera’s most interesting character.

Recording

CD: Hildegard Behrens (Senta); Christoph von Dohnanyi (cond.).
Decca 436 418 2

Tannhäuser‚ und der Sängerkrieg auf Wartburg
(
Tannhäuser, and the Singers’ Contest on the Wartburg
)

Three acts. First performed Dresden, 1845.

Libretto by the composer

Wagner remained dissatisfied with this opera, and periodically made changes to the original score, most notably in 1860–1, when he sanctioned a French translation and expanded the first scene with Venus in the vain hope that it could be made palatable to the sophisticated Parisians (in the event, it was greeted by ruthless booing from members of the exclusive Jockey Club infuriated at Wagner’s failure to provide a balletic interlude in its customary position half-way through the evening).
Performances today generally follow the 1875 edition of the score.

The plot conflates two medieval legends – one, the story of the crusading knight Tannhäuser; the other, the song contest held in the Wartburg palace.

Plot

Medieval Thuringia.
Within the Venusberg mountain, the knight Tannhäuser lies in the arms of Venus, surrounded by orgiastic revelry.
Tiring of such pagan pleasures, he wanders into a valley where he encounters a procession of pilgrims
and is reminded of his beloved Elisabeth, niece to the Landgrave (Duke).
Tannhäuser resolves to return to the Landgrave’s palace in the Wartburg, where he is reunited with the rapturous Elisabeth, who knows nothing of his dalliance with Venus.
The Landgrave announces a singing contest, for which the prize is Elisabeth’s hand in marriage.
The knight Wolfram sings of love in spiritual terms, but Tannhäuser is suddenly possessed, and bursts out in celebration of the carnal delight he enjoyed with Venus.
The court is scandalized.
Tannhäuser is immediately overcome with remorse, and Elisabeth dramatically intercedes to plead for mercy.
But the furious Landgrave insists that Tannhäuser leave the Wartburg, join the pilgrimage to Rome and seek absolution from the Pope.

Months later, Elisabeth is still praying patiently for Tannhäuser’s happy return from Rome.
On the road home, Tannhäuser tells Wolfram that the Pope refused to pardon him, claiming that he could no more forgive him than his staff could sprout leaves.
In despair, he plans to return to the Venusberg.
As a vision of Venus appears, Wolfram reminds Tannhäuser of Elisabeth’s devotion.
Tannhäuser manages to resist the temptation and the vision evaporates.
Elisabeth, however, has died.
As her funeral procession passes, Tannhäuser collapses.
The chorus of pilgrims tell of a miracle – the Pope’s staff has burst into leaf, confirming that Tannhäuser’s soul has been saved.

What to listen for

Few would claim that
Tannhäuser
is an immediately lovable piece.
Of all Wagner’s operas, it is the most badly dated, sinking into the quicksands of its own religiosity.
It has dull and even inept patches (such as the overlong and relentless ensemble at the end of Act II) and an overall dramatic slackness which makes Act III an anticlimax.
Wagner had still not altogether mastered the art of making dialogue musically engaging.
Tannhäuser (tenor) himself is an unsympathetic character, both as sinner and penitent.
But for the Victorians, this was
Wagner’s most popular work and a good performance will still reward the listener with much unashamedly tuneful music, notably in Elisabeth’s contrasting soprano arias, the jubilant ‘Dich, teure Halle’ at the beginning of Act II and the serene prayer to the Virgin Mary, ‘Allmächt’ge Jungfrau’, and the baritone Wolfram’s showpiece, ‘O du, mein holder Abendstern’.
Other pleasures of the score include the lusciously sensual music for the mezzo-soprano Venus (a pre-echo of Act II of
Parsifal
) and the stirring fervour of the Pilgrims’ chorus, both of which feature in the magnificent overture.

To make a dramatic point – they represent two sides of the same coin – Venus and Elisabeth are sometimes sung by the same soprano.
This is not a vocally easy task, as the two roles are pitched and coloured so differently.

In performance

A problem piece, which directors find hard to handle.
Until the 1960s, the opera was seen as pivoting on a black-and-white conflict between the profane sensuality of Venus and the sacred purity of Elisabeth.
In a controversial 1970s production at Bayreuth, however, Götz Friedrich suggested that the moral standards of the Wartburg were oppressive and coercive, and no better than the illusory fleshpots of Venusberg.
For the rebellious outsider Tannhäuser, neither environment offered the opportunity for creative self-realization and his tragedy becomes that of a man who fails to find anything positive he can commit himself to.
Younger directors have continued to question the opera’s moral stance: in Chicago, Peter Sellars updated the action to the world of corrupt American tele-evangelists, with Tannhäuser as a preacher caught up in Venusberg sleaze; in Munich, David Alden saw the opera as a parable of sexual liberation, seen against the sinister background of German nationalism.