The Flesh Is Weak

Sound

COMPOSER RICHARD WAGNER was forever torn between mighty polarities——the sacred and the profane. Nowhere is his struggle as blatant as in his relatively early work, Tannhäuser, the story of a medieval knight who longs to reject the sensual world of Venus, goddess of love, and return to the preternaturally virtuous Elisabeth, the pure and selfless daughter of a German duke.

After the opera’s first performance in Dresden in 1845, Wagner fiddled around with it quite a bit, and by the time of its Paris premiere in 1861, he had weighted both the music and the story so heavily in favor of Venus that poor Elizabeth was beginning to look rather drab. Musically, the Parisian Venus emanates a superheated eroticism more appropriate to the style of Tristan and Isolde (1865); for that reason, many producers prefer the more musically consistent and dramatically balanced 1845 score——the so-called Dresden version.

It’s this version that opens San Diego Opera’s 2008 season at the Civic Theatre January 26, with additional performances January 29 and February 1 and 3. This “new” production is, in fact, a re-creation of a well-known old production designed by one of the Metropolitan Opera’s famed Wagner specialists, Günther Schneider-Siemssen. Widely regarded as among the most beautiful sets ever created for an opera stage, the designs are certain to delight local audiences. The Los Angeles Opera’s recent Tannhäuser may have taken place in a sexy bump-and-grind, neon-colored postmodern Neverland, but San Diego’s Schneider-Siemssen show will give us Wagner pretty much the way the composer intended it.

“We could have created a new design based on a medieval setting, but nothing can match the grandeur and beauty of what Günther has achieved,” says San Diego Opera general director Ian Campbell. “Furthermore, I would not refer to this production as ‘old.’ Günther’s designs are ‘classic’ in the best sense of the word.”

Campbell has resisted the temptation to tinker around with the opera, making trendy and egomaniacal “director’s theater” distortions. “Perhaps we could have ‘updated’ the work,” he says, “but it is a story solidly set in its time. Updating it makes no sense at all. Perhaps today, instead of Tannhäuser’s associates accusing him of having too much of a good time with Venus and ordering him to seek forgiveness of the Pope, they would ask for her e-mail address instead.”

Stage director Michael Hampe “will direct the cast from his own viewpoint,” and choreographer Nicola Bowie “will create her own ballet,” adds Campbell. “As for the Dresden version——it suits our purposes. It gets into the action sooner, while still providing time for the ballet to establish the sensuality of Venusburg and the passion that has controlled Tannhäuser. It is also shorter, and there is no reason for anyone to feel threatened by a ‘long’ Wagner opera. Time flies by because of the power of the drama and the music.”

Campbell says that without worthy singers to perform the roles of Tannhäuser, Elisabeth and Venus, he wouldn’t have planned the production at all. “I had known tenor Robert Gambill’s work for some time,” he says. He found his Elisabeth, soprano Camilla Nylund, “in a terrible production of Tannhäuser” in a European opera house and signed her immediately. Soon after, mezzo-soprano Petra Lang agreed to sing Venus. Other members of the cast, equally impressive, will work under the baton of Hungary-born German conductor Gabor Ötvös, making his SDO debut. For details, visit sdopera.com or call 619-533-7000.

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