Tannhäuser at the Wiener Staatsoper

 

I have really only started attending the opera regularly since I moved to Budapest. I had been to the Washington Opera a few times way back when, and the Met once, the Deutsche Oper Berlin on a guest performance in DC, and maybe to a couple student / summer tourist performances here and there, but for the last 12 (12!) years it’s only been Budapest.

So, I know that in the grand scheme of things Budapest is considered a perfectly respectable opera company, with performances ranging from competent to brilliant on a given night, but as an ensemble company in a cash-strapped small country, it simply can’t afford the kind of talent that would place it consistently in the very top tier. It’s probably a bit better than the Washington Opera ever was, but how do I compare it to the likes of a hazily remembered performance of the Met or Deutsche Oper?

For some time I’ve been meaning to branch out and watch a performance in Vienna, among other cities. Actually they have (at least) two operas there. The Staatsoper does serious productions, while the Volksoper generally produces lighter fare.  And, so for my birthday Móni got us tickets to see Wagner’s Tannhäuser. Móni let me choose the performance, and I chose this one because a) I like it a lot and b) I have seen it three times in Budapest, which should serve as a good basis of comparison.

So how does Vienna stack up against Budapest? First, it’s 10 times as expensive. The price of our seats in the rafters would have gotten us pretty close to the front rows in the stalls in Budapest. Of course, low prices mean that you sometimes have to suffer sitting near chatty tourists, and high prices presumably mean you are paying for quality, but on the whole, let’s call Budapest the winner.

Second, our opera house is much nicer than theirs. It just is. In part this is because the Americans bombed the Vienna opera house in the war and much of it had to be rebuilt in the 1950s. So the lower foyer has a rebuilt grand staircase, but the theater itself looks like a giant Tastee Diner dressed up as a napoleon pastry. 

There are advantages to forced rebuilding, though. In Budapest we get a bit ashamed when our fellow patrons who use wheelchairs cannot be given the proper treatment that they deserve. Sadly, the same is true for our Metro system. Vienna trumps us with elevators in both.

Apart from the wheelchair issue, so far Budapest 2-0. Now the overture starts. The overture to Tannhaüser, clocking in at just under 20 minutes, is one of the greatest pieces of orchestral music ever written. In Budapest, sometimes you don’t get to hear the first couple minutes properly, but here the whispers cut off as soon as the first, or maybe second, note of the horn sounds, which is one of the things I’m listening for, since sometimes I think Budapest has a slightly dodgy brass section. But this might be because I listen to a lot of Wagner and Richard Strauss, who both wrote very difficult horn parts. And indeed the Viennese horns do their job without the slightest falter or blemish.  But the strings, by contrast, are played a bit too tightly by the more expressive standards of Budapest, which is fine when the singing starts but sounds too robotic for the overture. So we’ll call this one a tie.

No orgy ballet! In Budapest we always get to see the writhing debauchery of Venusberg as the curtain rises (the result of a little contretemps between Wagner and the French), a good reason to bring your opera glasses. But the prudish Austrians stuck to the Master’s original intentions. Budapest 3-0-1. Out comes Tannhaüser, dressed up in cca 1900 clothing. (with Venus in evening wear, sultrily sucking down – is that 2 cigarettes? – with Tannhäuser nattily dressed for travel with a boxy suitcase – coz he’s hitting the road, you know.) The opera itself takes place in the 14^th century. I don’t know if I like this. All the more surprisingly because I thought Vienna was conservative about stuff like this. Later we get young pilgrims dressed in tails and old pilgrims shambling around in hospital gowns, one in a straightjacket. OK, it’s just the costumes. We’ll let it slide. 3-0-2.

But then the singing starts and it’s clear that we are on a different level. Tannhaüser is played by American Stephen Gould who flies around the world as a heldentenor-for-hire. Vienna uses guest principals for a given performance, but I think he sings in Vienna quite often because I listened to an interview on Radio Stephensdom a few years ago where he said so (I listen to Radio Stephensdom, Vienna’s fantastic classical radio station on the Internet when I work because I can tune out the German when they start to blabber but I can’t tune out the Hungarian when Hungary’s equally fabulous Bártok Rádio starts to blabber, except Gould’s German was sufficiently rudimentary that I couldn’t tune it out either and I had to stop and listen). Anyways, he’s really good at singing in German. Simply this huge and amazingly controlled voice.

What really struck me about the performance was not only the technical quality of the singing and the timbres of the voices, but the level of nuance not just of Gould, but of all the other principals, especially Matthias Goerne as Wolfram, which added an extra dimension to the story that I had never experienced before. For example, the minstrels with their singing contest debating the nature of love in the 2^nd act is a bit of a dull litany in the Budapest production, but here becomes a taut psychodrama.

So final score is 5-3-2 Vienna. It isn’t streets ahead of Budapest on a good night but it is in a different category. For all I know this was a stellar night for the Staatsoper, but if this the average level of quality, then I’ll be visiting more frequently. It could be the comparison isn’t quite fair because the Budapest Tannhäuser is an old warhorse, and the best singers tend to go toward the higher profile nearly revamped productions. So I propose that the Hungarian government follow the lead of our western neighbors and disburse an extra 50 million euros to the Hungarian State Opera so that we can also find ourselves on a solid financial footing for enjoying world-class opera. It will be money better spent than whatever else it is they are spending our money on. And Stephen, if you come to Budapest, send me an email and I'll buy you a beer.

Finally, as for the audience, there was great consideration, even in the attic. Of course, the fact that half of Vienna has the ague reverberates up there in the rafters better than anyone else, but egregious cases were swiftly dealt with by the guardians of the audience, without the need for the operpolizei. We happened to have Herr Postnasaldrippen sitting behind us, but after a couple dirty looks he managed to restrain his snorts until the moments after the orchestra took up at the end of the aria. Gesundheit!