A replicated proscenium with red and gold Royal Opera House curtains forms the entrance to the erotic world of the Venusberg in Tim Albery’s revived production of Tannhäuser. On a chair placed to allow a glimpse of these hedonistic delights sits a succession of men formally attired as for the opera. All of us – patrons, ushers, critics – are potential clients. There’s a first time for everything. Except that in this production the surfeit of sensuality that the disenchanted knight Tannhäuser longs to escape from is rarely in evidence.
Certainly, for my money, Jasmin Vardimon’s writhing-limbed choreography offers a genuinely titillating Bacchanale – though these things are admittedly subjective. But the following scene for Venus and Tannhäuser, even in the Paris version which gives us the more voluptuous fleshing out of the love goddess that Wagner produced in the wake of Tristan und Isolde, is so lacking in passion that one can all too readily empathise with Tannhäuser’s ennui. This was only partly because Stefan Vinke had to be replaced at a few hours’ notice by Norbert Ernst, singing from the side while Vinke walked the part. All due credit to Ernst in this most taxing of roles, but he’s not the most exciting of tenors.
The problem is with Albery’s production (austerely but effectively designed by Michael Levine), conceived in 2010 for the late clarion-voiced Johan Botha, whose physical immobility required perching points around the stage. Inertness was conspicuously factored into the production. Ekaterina Gubanova is an experienced Venus but she made little impact here. Only Gerald Finley, arriving as Wolfram with fellow minstrels, injected a bit of life into it, Mika Kares contributing a sonorous Landgrave.
For the Wartburg scene in Act II we’re in an eastern European warzone, the courtly guests becoming Kalashnikov-toting patriots. Bombardment or perhaps their own religious fundamentalism has made a wreckage of the proscenium, which slightly undermines Elisabeth’s joyful paean to the hall of song. Either she’s trading in memories or she has a developed sense of irony. Vocally, Lise Davidsen doesn’t disappoint, at least, even if her intervention at the climax, when the entire community rounds on the licentious Tannhäuser, falls victim to this feeble staging.
A Wagnerian redemption at last in Act III, with Finley’s sensitive rendering of the Song to the Evening Star and Davidsen’s magnificently vocalised Prayer to the Virgin both enhanced by the sentient conducting of Sebastian Weigle which had elsewhere seemed plodding and passionless. The patriots too have abandoned their weapons and there’s a life-affirming hope for the future with a child occupying the chair and gazing not at a sordid Venusberg but at the green shoots of a new age.
With the ROH Chorus in lusty voice, it’s a moving ending but it barely makes up for the unforgivably torpid stage action of the first two acts. At the end of his life Wagner famously opined that he owed the world another Tannhäuser. The same could be said of Covent Garden.
