The New York Times International - 01.08.2019

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION THURSDAY, AUGUST 1, 2019 | 15

culture

The Wartburg castle, so central to

Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” that it’s part of

the opera’s full title, makes an appear-

ance only briefly in Tobias Kratzer’s

new production, which is playing in

repertory through Aug. 25 after open-

ing the Bayreuth Festival here. At the

beginning of the overture, a video

projected onstage shows the medieval

fortress in sweeping drone footage fit

for a tourism commercial. Then it’s

gone.

Instead, the camera’s focus turns

downward, to a scrappy Citroën van

driven by a merry band of anarchists.

There’s Venus, their leader, at the

wheel, looking crazed and sultry in a

sparkling black unitard. With her are a

raggedy clown, a drum-playing dwarf

and a drag queen named Le Gateau

Chocolat.

This is “Tannhäuser,” I swear. It’s

just that in Mr. Kratzer’s rollicking

production — intelligent and surpris-

ingly wrenching, though not quite fully

formed — the Venusberg is not the

libretto’s mythical pleasure realm so

much as a lifestyle of young, brash

artistry. That pathetic clown, it turns

out, is Tannhäuser, joining Venus and

company to litter the German country-

side with signs saying: “FREELY

WILLING. FREELY DOING. FREELY

ENJOYING.”

Those words are Wagner’s, from his

bad-boy days as a revolutionary in

Dresden, where “Tannhäuser” had its

premiere in 1845. He revised the opera

in 1861 for a production in Paris, incor-

porating the groundbreaking musical

language he used in “Tristan und

Isolde” and patching some of the plot’s

leaks. It wasn’t perfect, but it was

better; Wagner had aspirations to

continue revising it for the rest of his

life.

Today, you’re likely to come across

the Paris version, or some hybrid. But

here, Mr. Kratzer has opted for the

original Dresden score — because, he

said in a program book interview, it’s

truer to Wagner’s revolutionary spirit.

Regardless of how persuasive that

argument may be, there was little case

for it in the orchestra pit, where Valery

Gergiev was making his Bayreuth

debut. Throughout the evening, his

interpretation of the music was unreli-

ably thoughtful, and at times lackadai-

sical. The overture began promisingly,

sedate and serene — with the Pilgrim’s

Chorus theme, which returns near the

end in the brasses, played over quiet,

downward chromatic scales in the

strings. But instead of a light, buzzing

sound from the violins, he drew some-

thing heavier, jabbing and overly

present.

The baked-in filmic qualities of the

overture provided a fitting soundtrack

for the movie that is the foundation of

Mr. Kratzer’s production. (Manuel

Braun is the video director.) Venus’s

Citroën arrives at a Burger King,

where her gang scams the restaurant

out of a meal. Leaving, they are cut off

by a police officer on foot. Out of des-

peration, Venus runs him over and kills

him — a sobering end to all the fun,

and the beginning of Tannhäuser’s

doubts about her way of life.

As the film ends and the curtain

rises, we see the Citroën pulled over at

a roadside food stand with the Disney-

land look of a faded fairy-tale cottage.

Here, Tannhäuser (the mighty tenor

Stephen Gould, with ever-increasing

despair) sings his ode to Venus but

eventually begins to beg for escape.

She can be awfully persuasive, though,

especially as performed by the char-

ismatic Elena Zhidkova. (A late re-

placement for Ekaterina Gubanova,

she showed no signs of insufficient

rehearsal time.)

So Tannhäuser gets back in the van,

until he can’t take it anymore and

throws himself out the door and onto

the highway. A cyclist — in the role

traditionally presented as a shepherd

boy but here never clearly defined —

rouses him and says to listen as pil-

grims pass through on their way to

Rome.

That city, and the pope within it, are

treated metaphorically, changing with

each act. In this case, “Rome” is the

Bayreuth Festival Theater, revealed in

miniature atop a hill toward the back of

the stage. The “pilgrims” are a mirror

image of the audience: making their

way to Wagner’s theater in tuxedos,

gowns and formal lederhosen, fanning

themselves with program books. (Out-

side a week ago, on opening night, the

temperature was nearing 100 degrees

Fahrenheit.)

The theater, in a somewhat confus-

ing turn, is also a stand-in for the Wart-

burg; its minnesingers —

Tannhäuser’s fellow knight-

troubadours — approach him wearing

the lanyards you might see off-duty

singers wearing around the festival

grounds. Tannhäuser, it turns out, is a

cast member of “Tannhäuser,” return-

ing at last to his colleagues.

This sets up a play-within-a-play

premise for Act II, a “Tannhäuser” by

way of “Kiss Me, Kate.” The lower half

of the stage is a traditional set for the

opera’s singing contest; the upper half

is a screen showing film of life back-

stage, adding both comedy (a lot of it)

and moments of psychological clarity.

We see, for example, that Elisabeth —

Tannhäuser’s saintly love, sung by the

soprano Lise Davidsen in an astonish-

ingly mature Bayreuth debut at just 32

— is faithful, but not a simple

archetype. She is far more compli-

cated, her devotion to Tannhäuser

almost pathological and her behavior

self-destructive.

When she returns in Act III — years

after Tannhäuser leaves to seek re-

demption in “Rome,” now meaning jail

because he took the fall for the officer’s

death at Burger King — Ms. Da-

vidsen’s Elisabeth is in a downward

spiral. She finds the dwarf, Oskar

(Manni Laudenbach), who is living out

of the decrepit Citroën, and joins him in

waiting for Tannhäuser to return

alongside other newly released pris-

oners.

He doesn’t, and her prayer that

follows, which has heavenly purity on

a recent Decca recording, is here more

forlorn, with a dark turn to a shocking

sex scene with the knight Wolfram

(Markus Eiche, who sculpted a tender

“Song to the Evening Star”). She

forces him to dress like Tannhäuser the

clown, then appears to die, though it’s

not clear how or when.

That’s because Mr. Kratzer’s produc-

tion begins to muddle in the third act,

not always aligning with the libretto as

he aspires to illustrate the divergent

paths artists’ lives can follow. Oskar is

homeless; Le Gateau Chocolat, we

learn from a luxury billboard, sells out;

Venus never changes; and Tannhäuser,

back from jail, has nothing to return to.

He dies — maybe — holding Elisa-

beth’s body and imagining the road

trip they would have shared, smiling

and riding into the sunset, if only he

hadn’t met Venus.

Some confusion aside, Mr. Kratzer’s

reading of the opera is both novel and

clever. I left the theater thinking of

Wahnfried, Wagner’s house in the

center of Bayreuth, where an exhibi-

tion is celebrating the 100th anniversa-

ry of the birth of Wolfgang Wagner, the

composer’s grandson, who is credited

with establishing the “Bayreuth Work-

shop” model of the festival today. The

idea is that our interpretations of Wag-

ner are ever-evolving; that’s why

directors are hired for several years, to

tweak their productions with each

revival.

Even for Wagner, “Tannhäuser” was

always a work in process; for Mr.

Kratzer, returning over the next few

years, it will be, too, with the potential

to keep refining and improving. The

festival, for its part, can help by hiring

a new conductor.

Wagner gets driven into today

OPERA REVIEW

BAYREUTH, GERMANY

BY JOSHUA BARONE

‘Tannhäuser’ at Bayreuth

is smart and rollicking

but not quite fully formed

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ENRICO NAWRATH

Clockwise from top left, Stephen Gould as the title character in “Tannhäuser,” with

Elena Zhidkova as Venus and Manni Laudenbach as Oskar; Mr. Gould and Ms. Zhid-

kova; and, from left, Mr. Laudenbach and Mr. Gould with Lise Davidsen as Elisabeth.

The conductor Valery Gergiev’s

interpretation of the music was

unreliably thoughtful, and at

times lackadaisical.

If you want to write a dystopian novel

in these quasi-dystopian times, you

need to go dark. Really dark. And the

premise of Juli Zeh’s bracing, furious

novel, “Empty Hearts,” is so dark that

I laughed out loud when I read it on

the book’s back cover. Britta, “a wife,

mother and successful businesswom-

an,” runs a start-up called, innocuously,

The Bridge, which algorithmically

scours the internet in search of de-

spondent people, then matches them

up with terrorist organizations to act

as suicide bombers. There’s your dys-

topian cocktail, served chilled: the

internet as universal despair enabler, a

global climate of societal chaos and a

data-harvesting company well posi-

tioned to exploit both. As I said — go

dark or go home.

Zeh, the recipient of several German

literary awards and a former United

Nations worker, sets her tale in a dis-

armingly plausible version of near-

future Europe, troubled not just by

Brexit but by Frexit (France), Swexit

(Sweden) and Spexit (Spain). The

current American president continues

to cast a long shadow, while Angela

Merkel has resigned in defeat. She’s

been replaced by Regula Freyer, head

of the fascistically inclined Concerned

Citizens’ Crusade, who scores populist

points by promising to ban imported

beers in Germany.

The novel opens not with mayhem

but with the spick-and-span kitchen of

a spick-and-span house in the spick-

and-span city of Braunschweig, one of

the medium-size German burgs that

Britta champions as “towns that obey

the laws of pragmatism down to the

smallest detail.” Her home is a “con-

crete cube with a lot of glass” because

“if you have no desire to indulge in any

self-deception about the times you live

in, then polished concrete is exactly

what you can still love.” This is Britta

to a T: cold-eyed, opportunistic and

unburdened by bothersome principles.

She secretly scoffs at an idealistic

friend who “has yet to understand that

politics is like the weather: It happens,

whether you watch it or not.” When

she’s not hosting elegant dinner par-

ties, Britta’s running The Bridge along

with her partner, Babak, a brilliant

Iraqi immigrant who designed the

company’s algorithm, code-named

Lassie.

The Bridge is humming along, hap-

pily servicing organizations from ISIS

to environmental extremists, when

Britta and Babak get news of a botched

suicide attack they had nothing to do

with. As with any company facing an

imperiled market share, they respond

swiftly and soon find themselves en-

tangled with a menacing, mustachioed

entrepreneur named Guido Hatz.

(While I never puzzled out whether the

Pynchonesque character names are

actual anagrams, in either English or

German, reader, I was tempted.)

“Empty Hearts” has the veneer of a

thriller, but it’s more accurate to call it

a chiller: chilling in the accuracy of its

satire and chilling in its diagnosis of

our modern malaise. The novel may

appear at first glance to be a facile

“Wake up, yuppies!” parable, but it

guides us with assurance toward

thornier terrain. For starters: How

eager would you be to abandon your

democratic principles in the fight to

preserve them? How eager shouldyou

be? By the novel’s end, Britta has an

awakening of sorts, though it may not

be the one that you expect. She exam-

ines her complicity in this fractured

historical moment, in which she “can’t

be a voter or a citizen anymore, or

even a customer and a consumer, but

only a service provider, a member of a

service team that supports and supple-

ments the collective journey to the

abyss.” The novel takes its title from a

fictional pop lyric that’s adopted as a

slogan by a resistance army, but to the

American reader at least, it may recall

the inspirational chant from “Friday

Night Lights”: “Clear eyes, full hearts,

can’t lose.” By the end of “Empty

Hearts,” the eyes are definitely clear,

but winning no longer seems to be an

option.

Dystopian cocktail, served chilled

BOOK REVIEW

Empty Hearts

By Juli Zeh. Translated by John Cullen.

288 pp. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday.

$26.95.

BY ADAM STERNBERGH

Adam Sternbergh’s most recent novel is

“The Blinds.”

Juli Zeh.

PETER VON FELBERT

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