Review: Climate protests on stage a debut at the Met Opera
“Wolfram, wake up!” came a shout from the highest seats of the Metropolitan Opera. “The source is polluted!”
At first it seemed strange to cast on the character of Wolfram in Wagner’s Tannhäuser, that returned to the Met on Thursday evening, with that role sung by the great baritone Christian Gerhaher in his company debut. (Indeed, his arrival was what made the night remarkable to begin with.) But that cry was the beginning of an uninterrupted stream of climatic grievances, designed to coincide with Wolfram’s description, during the midway through Act II singing competition, of love as a miraculous spring.
“Spring is spoiled!” the protester continued in the Family Circle, then dropped a banner that read: “No opera on a dead planet.”
More protesting voices emerged, from the group Extinction Rebellion. Onstage, the performers froze until the Met’s gold curtain fell around the gilded stage. Protesters and jeering spectators began shouting at each other throughout the main hall.
“Shame!” one person near me shouted in the general direction of the protests. Others shouted, “Go away!” and “Go home!” As a couple with performative problems walked out, one of them, a man dressed in a black tie, said, “Is there No safety here?”
People had questions. One person asked an usher, “Are the police here?”, while another usher asked no one in particular, “Where is Gelb?” – referring to Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager.
Another banner unfurled from a seat across the hall, reading “Extinction Rebellion,” accompanied by the group’s logo: a circle with an hourglass in it. Someone in the box below immediately tried to pull the banner down, rendering the text invisible, and the woman who had dropped it was suddenly removed from her spot. Security had arrived.
Gelb stepped onto the stage and told the audience, “We are very sorry for the disruption. We’ll start in about a minute.”
However, when the performance restarted, it didn’t take a minute for another protester to stand up to shout from the back of the orchestra section, holding a square banner with the Extinction Rebellion logo. The curtain went down again.
A man near the protester ripped the banner from her hands. Another threw a poster at her face. Two rows in front of me, someone, seemingly unfazed, began reading on a Kindle.
After a twenty-minute delay, Gelb returned to the stage and told the audience that the performance would continue, but with the house lights on, “so that our security personnel in the building can remove any demonstrators who wish to protest and be arrested. ” (New York City police later said that no arrests had been reported.) Then he added in a strangely martial tone, “We’re not going to let them beat us.”
At that moment, the theater was visibly emptier – not only because of the demonstrators who had been eliminated, but also because of the many spectators who simply gave up. Still, the show went on.
Here I must offer a necessary disclosure. As a critic, I enjoy thinking and writing about the performance so far. But while I have a general idea of what followed – and what followed was excellent – I never felt fully engaged with the show again. There was the visual distraction of vigilant security and police officers in the aisles. And there was the nervous anticipation of the return of the protest: would it return to the famous Pilgrim Choir? In the ‘Song for the Evening Star’?
Understandably, some in the crowd were dismayed by the disruption to their night out, but it was difficult to shake the angry, even violent reaction from others to the protesters. Did they think that “Tannhäuser” comes from the most politically active time in Wagner’s life, his years in Dresden, Germany, which ended with his flight after the May Uprising in 1849? Had they seen that when the performance resumed, with the scene in which an entire audience turned against Tannhäuser for an ode that heralded the truth for him and a heresy for them?
The rest of the evening – which lasted until midnight due to the protests – passed without any disruption, apart from the usual ringing of a mobile phone. There was no more news, at least beyond the original headline of Gerhaher’s debut.
And his performance alone is reason to return to this “Tannhäuser”, in Otto Schenk’s dusty and old-fashioned, but extremely loving production from the 1970s. Gerhaher is one of our best living song singers, a storyteller and a chameleon, an astute and convincing interpreter whose approach to text shines in the small room. But he has also appeared on European opera stages; his “Wozzeck” this summer at the Aix Festival in France, performed without ever leaving the stage, was a Kafkaesque descent into torment and tragedy.
The immensity of the Met can be unkind to singers of Gerhaher’s size and attention to detail. But on Thursday he easily filled the room, drowned out only by the protests. He was slightly tense at his loudest, but more human because of it. His “Song to the Evening Star” was not comforting or buttery, like Peter Mattei’s when this production was last revived, in 2015; a fragile comfort, it hurt and felt like a real goodbye.
Gerhaher was surrounded by seasoned Wagner singers: Ekaterina Gubanova as a lush Venus; Georg Zeppenfeld as stentorian Landgraf Hermann; Elza van den Heever as Elisabeth is more moving in her prayerful “Allmächt’ge Jungfrau” than in the exuberant “Dich, teure Halle.” Andreas Schager’s tenor has a bright power, but the irrepressibility of a fire hose, which suits roles of heroic, bumbling naivety such as Siegfried and Parsifal, and not so much with the tormented and multi-dimensional Tannhäuser. His Rome story in Act III was downright angry where it should have been shattering.
In the orchestra pit, Donald Runnicles initially led the opera slowly, but with form, with the opening being spiritual rather than stately. That led to orgiastic music for the Venusberg that was perhaps as PG-rated as the staging that followed, but which also had remarkable clarity – in phrasing and balance. All night long, Runnicles was in complete control of the score, even if he could bear to give up a little of his grip.
With such an approach, however, the orchestra resisted the invitation for a sweet opening to the third act, which instead took on a heartbreaking sanctity as it foreshadowed Elisabeth’s resigned prayer for death. As Runnicles gestured toward the stage, security and police walked the aisles, as if trying to forcibly preserve the beauty of the music. Not for the first or last time that night, it made a good moment feel bad.
Tannhauser
Through December 23 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org.