In Norwich, a director is caught trying to murder Wagner’s Tannhäuser

Seventeen years ago the Norwegian National Opera staged two cycles of the Ring in Norwich’s Theatre Royal, performances that have remained vividly in the minds of anyone who saw them. Now Theater Freiburg has visited Norwich with two performances each of Parsifal and Tannhäuser. I was hoping to see both, but transport problems meant that I was only able to go to the second performance of Tannhäuser. I shall have quite a few criticisms to make, but all told it was a triumph, and was warmly received by a far from capacity audience.

There aren’t many chances to see this problem child of Wagner’s, and this was the finest account I have seen in several decades, much more moving than the Royal Opera’s production of nearly four years ago. Where Tim Albery’s production was merely null, this new one of Freiburg’s is a fairly aggressive example of director’s theatre, that disease which has nearly killed my inclination to go to operas, with Wagner being the chief victim. The would-be murderer in this case is Eva-Maria Höckmayr, who has so many bad ideas of a fashionable kind that one can confidently predict a big career for her.

As has become routine, the Overture is played — extremely well, by the Philharmonic Orchestra of Freiburg — with the curtain up, so we are quickly introduced to the perplexing muddle that constitutes Höckmayr’s contribution. The set is disorganised and ugly — some pews, a confessional with a staircase winding up it, and at the back, and on a higher level, behind a semi-transparent curtain, a Biedermeier sitting room. The Pope makes a brief appearance, a colossus who only appears here and to take a curtain call at the end. Men and women dressed mainly in neutral grey, the men with medieval haircuts, arrive and clobber one another, raise a woman (I think) on a cross, while a lost-looking figure gazes in understandable bewilderment; and two women, very similarly dressed in scarlet and white, and with black hair, easily mistaken for one another — Venus and Elisabeth, of course — do so many things that I have forgotten all of them.