Tannhäuser

99 Pages·2011·23.495 MB·English

by  Richard Wagner

Opera Guides
Jose/Tichatchek, the first Tannhiiuser (Royal Opera House Archives)
Preface
This series, published under the auspices ofEnglish National Opera
and The Royal Opera, aims to prepare audiences to evaluate and enjoy
opera in performance. Each book contains the complete text, set out in
this case in transliteration, beside a modern English performing
translation. The introductory essays, illustrations and musical
analysis have been chosen to focus attention on some of the points of
special interest in each work. We hope that, as companions to the
opera should be, they are well-informed, witty and attractive.
Nicholas John
Series Editor
Tannhäuser
Richard Wagner
Opera Guides
Series Editor
Nicholas John
OP
OVERTURE
Overture Publishing
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oneworld classics
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This Opera Guide first published by John Calder (Publishers) Ltd in 1988
This new edition of Tannhäuser Opera Guide first published by Overture
Publishing, an imprint of Oneworld Classics Ltd, in 2011
Articles © the authors
© Oneworld Classics Ltd, 2011
English translation of the Tannhäuser libretto © Rodney Blumer, 1988
isbn: 978-0-7145-4440-3
All the pictures in this volume are reprinted with permission or presumed to be in the public
domain. Every effort has been made to ascertain and acknowledge their copyright status,
.
but should there have been any unwitting oversight on our part, we would be happy to
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Printed in the United Kingdom
Contents
List of illustrations vi
'Tannhauser' --· an Obsession Mike Ashman 7
Tanhusrere, Danheuser and Tannhauser Stewart Spencer 17
Wagner's Most Medieval Opera Timothy McFarland 25
Orpheus and the lJnderworld: The Music ofWagner's
'Tannhauser' Carolyn Abbate 33
Thematic Guide 51
'Tannhauser' poem by Richard Wagner 57
'Tannhauser' English translation by Rodney Blumer 61
Act One 61
Act Two 73
Act Three 85
Discography Robert Seeley 94
Bibliography Stewart Spencer 95
Contributors 96
List of Illustrations
Cover design: Anita Boyd
Frontispiece: Joseph Tichatchek, the first Tannhauser (Royai Opera House Archives)
p. 9 Heinrich Knote, 1908 (photo: Royal Opera House Archives)
p. 11 Milka Ternina, 1901 (photo: Royal Opera House Archives)
p. 12 The Hall of Song, Bayreuth, 1987 (photo: Lauterwasser, Festspielleitung
Bayreuth)
p. 13 The Hall of Song, Munich, 1970 (photo: RudolfBetz)
p. 16 Lauritz Melchior and Elisabeth Rethberg, San Francisco, 1934 (photo:
Morton)
p. 18 The Heidelberg Codex illustration of 'Der Tanhuser'
p. 19 Costume designs by Alfred Albert, Paris, 1861 (Bibliothi:que Nationale)
p. 21 Act Two in the 1861 Paris production (Bibliotheque Nationale)
p. 23 Act Three in Frankfurt, 1934 and Act One in Cologne in the 1930s
p. 27 Friedrich Storr, San Francisco, 1931 (photo: Morton)
p. 30 Nelson Eddy, San Francisco, 1934 (photo: Morton)
p. 32 Leonie Rysanck, San Francisco, 1973 (photo: Ron Scher!)
p. 35 The Venusberg, Bayreuth, 1977 (photo: Wilhelm Rauh, Festspiclleitung
Bayreuth)
p. 38 Richard Casilly and Jessye Norman, Covent Garden, 1973 (photo: Donald
Southern)
p. 41 Janis Martin and Jtoss Thomas, San Francisco, 1966 (photo: Carolyn Mason
Jones)
p. 42 The Venusberg, Bayreuth, 1892 (photo: Royai Opera House Archives)
p. 45 Gabriele Schnaut and Richard Versalle, Bayreuth, 1987 (photo: Wilhelm
Rauh, Festspielleitung Bayreuth)
p. 60 Visions from Scene One, Bayreuth, 1892 (photos: Royal Opera House
Archives)
p. 68 Josephine Veasey, Covent Garden, 1955 (photo: Houston Rogers)
p. 70 The Valley of the Wartburg in spring, Bayreuth, 1892 (photo: Royal Opera
House Archives)
p. 84 Gwyneth Jones, Bayreuth, 1977 (photo: Festspie!leinmg Bayreuth)
p. 93 Act Three, Bayreuth, 1987 (photo: Lauterwasser, Festspielleitung Bayreuth)
p. 96 The 1970 Munich production (photo: RudolfBetz)
Picture research: Henrietta Bredin
'Tannhii:user' - An Obsession
Ashman
June 1845, letter to Karl Gaillard
I enclose with this letter a copy of my Tannhauser - as he lives and
breathes, a German from head to toe.1
Nooember 1851, 'A Communication to My Friends'
This Tannhauser was(. ..) the spirit of the whole Ghibelline race for
all ages, represented by one dearly defined and infinitely moving
figure; moreover he was a human being, a man for today, a man to touch
the heart of an artist who longed for real life.
October 1859, letter to Mathilde Wesendonck
Tannhiiuser ( ...) the opera in which! first worked with a growing sense
of the beautiful and convincing need for transitions.
September 1860, 'Music of the Future'
As to the difference between my Tatmhiiuser and conventional opera, I
draw your attention to the dramatic poem on which it is based ( ...)
although the story deals with legendary miracles, it contains a logical
dramatic development(. ..) and makes absolutely no concession to the
banal requirements of an opera libretto.
N()'l)ember 1877, Cosima Wagner's Diaries
R. says he has in mind shortening the new first scene considerably, it
weighs the rest down too much, there is a lack of balance, this scene
goes beyond the style of Tannhiiuser as a whole (. ..) The problem
occupies him greatly.
March 1881, letter to Ludwig li
Recently Rubinstein(. ..) played us the first scene ofTarmhiiuser ( ...)
[it] far surpasses anything that even Berlioz achieved in this dissolute
genre and (. ..) it is certainly not inferior to anything that I myselfhave
written,
February 1883, Cosima Wagner's Diaries
He also declares his wish to do Tannhiiuser in Bayreuth first; he says
that if he can get this settled, he will have achieved more than by
staging Tristan.
Tamzhiiuser is unique among Wagner's dramas. It may be considered as his
only large-scale unfinished work; yet, paradoxically, it exists in four stages of
completion (one oft hem in a 'foreign' language) which could be performed as
musical entities. I take these to be: what was performed at the t1rst night in
Dresden, 1845; the published score of1860; a choice of material offered at the
three Paris performances of 1861, in French; and the Vienna 'version'
1. Translations in this article are: for Wagner's letters, Selected Letters of Richard Wagner,
translated and edited by Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (Dent); for Cosima
Wagner's Diaries, Geoffrey Skelton (Collins); for Mein Leben, Andrew Gray, edited by
Mary Whittall (Cambridge); and for Wagner's essays, W< Ashton Ellis, slightly adapted.
In this Guide, unless otherwise credited, quotations from the Tannhiiuser text are from
Rodney Blumer's performing translation.
7
supervised by Wagner in 1875. Ever the practical man of the theatre, Wagner
was prepared to accept and make often astonishing cuts and transpositions -
consider the Munich Dutchman performances of1864 - but he rarely revised
earlier compositions wholesale. Tannhiiuser is the major exception. A full list
of changes, which began the day after the Dresden premiere ofOctober 1845
and continued until the performances in Vienna in November 1875, would
number over 30 items - including the addition of whole new scenes and the
translation of the entire libretto into French. Every time Wagner was directly
involved with mounting the work, he changed it, often on a performance to
performance basis. In Dresden between 1845 and 1848 alone he performed
two different endings, three versions of the Act Three prelude and at least
three versions oft he Shepherd Boy's cor anglais solo. In Paris in 1861 none of
the three evenings had an identical musical text. Tannhiiuser was also the only
score which he submitted to the full 19th-century operatic treadmill ofa gala
opening in Paris. And lastly, although prolific with the pen about aU his stage
works and their reception, Wagner wrote more about the actual performing of
Tannhiiuser than about any other of his dramas.
So why this obsession? The circumstances of the work's creation made it
a
inevitable that it would become an oeuvre clef, a major piece of
experimentation and also a kind of'Portrait ofDorian Grey' which had to be
continually retouched as its author matured. Tannht;user was the first major
work principally conceived during Wagner's residence in Dresden -- a
schizophrenic period of relative security and nascent fame as regards his
material existence but of major upheaval and revolutionary anticipation in
his artistic life. The subject -- and the musical material - of Tannhauser
dearly mirror this schizophrenia. In less than seven years, Wagner effectively
planned his entire life's work: Dutchman, Tannhiiuser and Lohengrin were
written; the dramas ofThe Ring and The Mastersingers sketched in outline; and
Tristan and Parsifal 'researched' and mentally filed. In later life it was always
1annhiiuser that Wagner cited as the major stepping stone ofhis development.
In 1860, introducing his 'new' Tristan music to Paris, he described the step he
took from then contemporary opera to Tannhiiuser as 'mein erster
Standpunkt' ('my first standpoint'). In 1882 he told Cosima that 'Tannhii.user,
Tristan and Parsifal belong together' and called the earliest work
'a consummate drama ... [with] musically some things insufficiently
expressed'.
At the time he wrote Tannhiiuser Wagner had access to all the tools of the
working dramatic composer - a stage, musicians and singers, and
commissions to put on his own works. The Dresden period was, in practice,
his equivalent of Verdi's 'galley years': he had to compose, and to produce
work at a speed that often outstripped his capabilities. 'At the time that I
wrote Tannhiiuser,' he wrote to Mathilde Wesendonck in April1860, 'I was not
yet able to do the sort of thing that is necessary here [i.e. for the new
Venusberg scene] (. ..) only now that I have written Isolde's final
transfiguration have I been able to find the right ending for the Hying
Dutchman overture as well as- the horrors of the Venusberg. One becomes
aU-powerful only by playing with the world.' In the 1850s, in enforced exile in
Switzerland, without a company to hand or any sign of prospective
performances which he could personally control, Wagner the musician
significantly fell silent and written theory preceded experiment. Tannhiiuser
was, and had to be, an experiment in music sur le vi/; for that reason it was
never perfected to his satisfaction.
8
Heinrich Knote as Tcmnhtiuser in 1908 (Royal Opera House Archives)
Dramatically, the work is a Janus-faced cornucopia of its composer's
obsessions. Th1s 'consummate drama' has renunciations, a curse, a Liebestod,
a redemption, a singing competition and magical transformations of both
scenery and stage properties. Wagner would later create whole dramas out of
just one of these embryo strands: the examination of the social function and
subject matter of art in The Mastersingers, the renunciation oflove in The Ring,
or the longing for a state beyond mortal existence in Tristan.
These themes were not merely prefigured in Tannhiiuser but were
continually reworked - at source, so to speak - whenever Tannhiiuser was
revised. The score was like an artist's drawing board for experiment. Material
was 'borrowed' but frequently repaid with interest. In Paris, for example, the
score was given the chromatic clothing that turned Venus from the one-scene
operatic devil ofDresden in 1845 into a major character representing the pull
of selfish erotic love - the polar opposite of the 'pure' love of Elisabeth. 2 But
2, Ironically, for t!le second (and third) pedbrmances in Paris, Wagner was forced to
make two cuts ir. this new duet and, because of problems with the stage band, to omit
the second appearance of Venus altogether.
9