St.Clair Attempts Wagner’s ‘Tannhauser’--Deep in the Heart of Texas

AUSTIN, TEXAS —  Musicians like to tell the hoary tale about the young Jascha Heifetz (or was it Yehudi Menuhin or Fritz Kreisler?). Carrying his fiddle case, the prodigy got lost, it seems, in the wilds of Greenwich Village.

“How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” he plaintively asked a passing native. The answer was swift: “Practice, man, practice.”

If Carl St.Clair, music director of the Pacific Symphony in Costa Mesa, wants to get to the Met, or some unreasonable facsimile thereof, he is doing his practicing these days deep in the heart of Texas.

The maestro’s credentials as a symphonic conductor are virtually beyond reproach. But he is smart enough to seek some useful operatic experience away from the central limelight. And he is getting that experience at the remarkably ambitious Austin Lyric Opera.

St.Clair, who happens to hail from Yoakum, Texas, happens to count among his mentors Walter Ducloux, a longtime pioneer of operatic academia in Los Angeles. And the genial Ducloux happens to serve as artistic director at the Austin Lyric Opera, a 9-year-old, wholly professional company with a budget of $2.3 million that musters three operas annually in the handsome, 3,000-seat Bass Concert Hall on the University of Texas campus.

In the recent past, St.Clair came here to try his hand, and baton, at “Boheme,” “Tosca” and “Rigoletto”--all standard-repertory challenges that are relatively easy (everything in opera is relative). Over the weekend, however, he turned to the momentous, sprawling convolutions of “Tannhauser.” It turned out to be his first Wagner opera, and Austin’s too.

“Tannhauser” experts do not spring instantly, like Venus, from the half shell. Mastering the massive Wagnerian myth, and the forbidding aesthetic it embodies, takes time and repeated exposures. Bruno Walter, Hans Knappertsbusch and Wilhelm Furtwangler did not start at the top. Still, St.Clair made a promising first step Friday night on what could be a long, arduous and rewarding journey.

He held the awkward apparatus at his disposal well in hand. With an excellent orchestra (mostly players from the Austin Symphony), a properly expanded chorus and a hard-working cast dominated by stalwart would-bes (the sort of singers regularly encountered at Opera Pacific in St.Clair’s backyard in Orange County), he sustained cohesion, clarity and momentum. For now, that may be enough.

For nearly four hours, he kept his steadfast eye on the long line and the grand climax. Favoring the Dresden edition, he savored bel-canto lyricism as well as heroic thunder. Toiling under precarious acoustical conditions (did I hear a microphone?), he accompanied his uneven singers carefully, always respecting the vital balance between pit and stage.

He commands an obvious affinity for the Germanic idiom. That doesn’t mean, of course, that he has already unraveled all the “Tannhauser” knots or found poetry to match all the inherent prose.

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He didn’t manage to coax much dynamic variety from the assembled artists who seemed to think singing Wagner meant singing loud. He didn’t stress a great deal of expressive detail, didn’t always keep tensions focused en route to the long-delayed, cathartic cadences. He occasionally buried the inner instrumental voices in orchestral mush. Sometimes, when one most wanted uplifting inspiration, he delivered mundane routine. Still, he offered an honorable, enlightened effort under trying conditions.

The most trying of the conditions--call them distractions--involved the staging. For reasons that may have been rooted in economy as much as theatrical conviction, Austin smothered the ultra-Romantic opera in gimmicky modernist cliches. Joseph McClain, general director of the company, placed the action, it says here, in a “post-apocalyptic time setting.” John Boesche’s hideous semiabstract sets--literal stumbling blocks for the cast--suggested a collapsed freeway underpass with murky projections constantly changing in the background (lighting designer: David Nancarrow). Most of Michaele Hite’s costumes suggested indiscriminate raids on a Salvation Army thrift shop and a tuxedo rental emporium. Jose Luis Bustamante’s Venusberg choreography invoked misplaced flamenco posturing.

This “Tannhauser” pretended to be a progressive examination of the universal conflicts separating flesh and spirit. In truth, alas, it was just a fatuous, pretentious, trendy yet trivial exercise, clumsily executed.

One singer rose triumphantly above the tawdry milieu. Helen Donath, an internationally celebrated diva from Corpus Christi, returned to her home state to portray the saintly Elisabeth for the first time in her lengthy career. The former soubrette, who seems to have discovered the secret of eternal youth, sang with poignancy, radiance and astonishing ease.

Unlike many a would-be Wagner-tenor, John Fredric West brought ample stamina and reasonable power to the title role. His unfocused tones frequently resembled a Helden-rasp, however, and his deportment adhered to time-dishonored klutzery. (At the Saturday night performance his duties were assumed by Timothy Mussard of UCLA.)

As Frau Venus, Eugenie Grunewald sounded passably seductive but looked patently ridiculous in rags that might pass for an impoverished Valkyrie’s nightie. Mark Rucker introduced a fervent if not particularly introspective Wolfram. Richard Johnson offered a bluff Landgraf Hermann. Cheryl Parrish made much of the expanded duties of a Shepherd awkwardly deprived of sheep.