Seville bills itself as the “City of 150 operas,” and celebrated this fact at the Exposition of 1992 by erecting a magnificent new opera house, the Teatro de la Maestranza, right beside the Plaza de Toros. The seasons of the two theaters do not overlap. Next month, there will be a rare staging of an opera buffa by local boy Manuel Garcia, renowned for being the first to bring opera to New York, with his teenage daughter La Malibran.
The 1800-seat house has state-of-the-art acoustics, a wide (and open) pit and presumably decent stage machinery, though nothing about Achim Thorwald´s current production of Tannhäuser, co-presented with the Teatr Wielki of Poznan, would have been difficult to produce in the opera houses of two hundred years ago: Pretty stage pictures, paper snow falling, erotic ballet in flesh-colored tights, zaftig singers with big voices. What’s the problem?
Tannhäuser, the second of Wagner’s three “romantic operas,” tickled Eduard Hanslick and established the composer’s bona fides as the coming German kid. He got a job as kapellmeister to the King of Saxony, whose ancestors, Landgraf Hermann of Thuringia and Saint Elisabeth of Hungary, the opera salutes. Wagner blew all this success (except notoriety) by participating in the Revolution of 1848 in Dresden and was then a hunted man for fifteen years, which included the disastrous Paris debut of the revised Tannhäuser.
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