Image from Wagner's Parsifal
The Netherlands Opera's performance of Wager's Parsifal, directed by Pierre Audi, Amsterdam 2012

Lamenting is something of the national sport for opera buffs. And of the many great laments that were raised by our people in the 20th century, few were as plaintive and endearingly quaint as that against the disappearance of baroque and classical opera from live performance. A generation of producers and directors had made the decision that the mythological allegories and standard declamations were incompatible with modern audiences, and it took many years and much courage to drag, say, Mozart’s Agamemnon back on the stage.

Just in time for the “modern” audience to change again. Here in the 21st century, we are positively ecstatic about anything featuring the faintest whiff of an Olympian. Mention Iphigenia in passing and we are, by and large, there, in our seats, waiting to be declaimed at. The fresh problem for the operatic producer, it turns out, isn’t classicism, but the presentation of heavily religious operas to an increasingly secular audience. Operas that held the stage with an assured sense of righteous entitlement in the 19th and 20th centuries tend to appear at best naïve and at worst positively shrill to humanist ears. This is a shame, as there is some beautiful music there, some of the most sublime ever written. Luckily, some dastardly clever directors have set about solving the problem of presenting these classics to a new generation of secularists.

One of the main dramatic conundrums centers on the portrayal of religious ecstasy. Deeply moving to believers, all of the lurching and renouncing and abject groveling come off as just plain creepy to a generation that has learned through bitter experience to see more of the emotionally abused terrorist-in-training in these surreal transports than the noble knight of purity. Think of Marguerite in the marvelous trio at the end of Gounod’s Faust singing

Radiant angels above,

take my soul to Heaven’s breast.

God of justice, I submit to Thy will.

God of mercy, forgive me.

Radiant angels above,

take my soul to Heaven’s breast.

The melody is glorious, but the dramatic effect is often that of a battered wife rapturously pleading with her abusive husband to be let back into the kitchen to make him his favorite dinner. The suffering she undergoes in the opera is entirely out of proportion to her vices, which amount to little more than credulity and a bit of vanity. She is a human caught and torn apart by the perverse logic of sin and retribution, and expires with a Stockholmish “Thank you sir, may I have another?”

Many directors trot out the full array of Heavenly Effects to realize this scene, with lighting and background imagery aiming at an overall conception of Marguerite as an innocent lamb of pure light and radiant goodness. In 2011, however, the Metropolitan Opera’s production, which misfired on so very many conceptual levels (which I would lament, but simply don’t have the time), tackled the issue of Marguerite’s ecstasy in a rather bold way. Their take was simply, “We’re going to turn the creepy up to 11.” Marina Poplovskaya’s Marguerite is a woman unhinged, and the more she turns to religious inspiration for guidance, the more wrecked she becomes. The production, as it read on the stage, implied that religion is where you go when everything else about you is broken, and that what it offers isn’t so much salvation as a tainted morphine drip while dying. Faust doesn’t kill Marguerite, nor Mephistopholes, but rather theology itself, and all it offers by way of consolation is a mad vision of tinsel angels while it finishes her off, covering its bloody tracks in a concluding chorus of gross self-congratulation.

Gounod’s original intention? Almost certainly not, but in terms of uncovering layers of meaning for a fresh set of sensibilities, it was remarkably effective. It’s certainly something that can be experimented with profitably in other scenes of variously goofy religious transport. At the end of Puccini’s one act opera Suor Angelica, for example, the good sister falls into a mystical reverie that combines ruminations about the Virgin Mary, grace, suicide, damnation, purity, and a summons to Heaven from her dead son. It’s a dense ten minutes which hardly gives one emotion a chance to breathe before throwing itself into another, resulting in the overall impression that the librettist, Forzano, was being paid by the job rather than the hour.

I know of one production that presented it as an over-the-top Italian melodrama (think of the “Mamma… mamma mia!” play from Godfather II), hoping to wring comedy from how utterly kitchen-sink Forzano’s libretto is here. I had some laughs, because it expertly pushed precisely those moments that are on the verge of self-parody in the original completely over the edge.

It’s clearly not a long-term solution, though, nor I think a generally workable one. Secular we may be, but I think the general tolerance for nun death-scene burlesque is probably not as high as my own. Really, the opera could benefit by approaching the problem through the same lens as Poplovskaya’s Marguerite. This nun has had things done to her mind by the world and a religious order intent on exploiting the world’s cruelty for its own gain, and there is true tragedy in that. It is a tragedy that is not beautifully resolved by her reunion with her dead son at the end, but is rather only deepened by the torture she puts herself through on the way to her final act of delusion. There is really nothing more moving that you could put on a stage than the misery of hope so glaringly unfulfilled. But you have to be willing to renounce the traditional role of religious ecstasy in opera, and that has been something slow in coming.

All of this, however, is detail work next to the real monumental task to be faced in the era of the stridently secular audience – squaring up to Wagner’s big three Christian operas. Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Parsifal. I’ve heard radio advertisements for these that are positively apologetic in tenor. “This year – Parsifal…. But bear with us, and we’ll do Tristan NEXT year!” You’ve heard them too, perhaps – lots of focus on the lush sets, shimmering orchestration, and featured performers, while the story gets shoved discretely out of the limelight like a murderer ever…so…casually pushing a bloody knife under the couch with his foot.

I understand. Take Tannhäuser, which was probably my favorite opera growing up. I love it, and even I have to admit it’s dramatically tough to swallow if you’re not massively predisposed to it through the greatness of the music. Here’s the run-down: Tannhäuser is hanging out with Venus having way awesome sex all the time, but craves life on Earth, so he leaves, finds the beautiful Elizabeth, but makes the faux-pas of singing about Venus in front of her at a song contest, for which the assembled crowd threatens to slaughter him if he doesn’t go to the Pope and slavishly abase himself. He goes. The Pope doesn’t forgive him. Elizabeth decides to die because apparently then God has to forgive him… somehow. She dies. The Pope’s staff sprouts leaves. It’s a miracle! Tannhäuser is saved. The end.

Okay, that’s flippant, but you see the central problems:

The opera demonises human passion and lust which, if you know anything about Wagner the man, raises an eyebrow or two. Nobody except Elizabeth seems to have any problem with executing Tannhäuser for SINGING AN ILL-CHOSEN SONG.

And the Pope is kind of a dick.

And Wagner’s theme of female self-sacrifice, which works to such stunning effect in The Ring and Tristan, makes absolutely no sense here unless you are locked into the Jesus trope, which as a society we increasingly aren’t. Person A dying doesn’t forgive the actions of person B. That’s not how justice works anywhere except the twisted-death-cult reasoning of the Catholic Church. If that reasoning isn’t compelling to you, the entire last act of the opera just seems cruel and arbitrary.

What is to be done? One of the tactics that seems successful to me is a shift of frame. Wagner’s operas are populated with fascinating characters. For many operas, if the eponymous hero strikes you as something of an ineffectual dink, you don’t really have anywhere else to turn to anchor your emotional investment. Not so with Wagner. In Tannhäuser, I think humanists gravitate instinctively to the character of Wolfram, the man who stays faithful to his friendship even as it costs him the love of his life, who believes strongly in companionship with humanity, and who struggles honestly with the contradiction between his faith and the tragedy he sees playing out before him by people crushed under the wheels of penance and salvation. He is us, and the more that character is brought to the foreground, the more that opera will resonate with modern audiences.

This frame-shift has paid off well in another Wagner religious opera, Parsifal. It features a central hero whom precisely nobody finds appealing. He has all of the negative aspects of Siegfried without the redeeming qualities of being helplessly in love or getting to fight awesome giants-turned-dragon. In the age of Big Dumb Christian He Men that was fine, but opera companies are rapidly figuring out that he’s not quite the stuff intriguing radio spots are made of.

Which is why we see focus shifting more and more to the figure of Kundry. She is a creature of magic from times ancient who ever wishes to serve the noble warriors of her age, but who is treated scornfully by her latest charges, the Knights of the Grail. Worse still, she has recently fallen under the spell of the evil wizard Klingsor, and so is compelled to work against the very people her waking self suffers such agonies to protect. For those of us who could really care less whether the perpetually wailing head of the Grail Knights gets his mystical wound healed in the end by Parsifal or not, it is Kundry and her broken descent into emptiness that compels.

In the end, the revealing of the Grail forces her to fall to the ground, lifeless in some interpretations, though Wagner’s libretto describes her state as “entseelt” which can be interpreted as alive, but de-souled. This is supposed to be a moment of redemptive purification, but played right, it could stand as a powerful instance of the mad quest for theological purity tearing apart those who are actually doing good in the world. The boys’ club is reassembled, and the first order of business is to kill the witch who is too complicated for them to understand. It’s a dark truth about how religion has functioned in the West since the fall of Astarte that only a dramatic genius on the order of Wagner could have set within the text so completely in spite of his own intentions.

I do love all of this music dearly, and I want to be able to see it all played on the stage many times more before I die. And not just these, but the other rich Christian-themed operas in the pantheon – Meyerbeer’s The Huguenots, Poulenc’s Dialogue of the Carmelites with its chilling mass execution scene finale, Wagner’s Lohengrin with the delicious curse of the new Christian gods that falls from Ortrud’s lips – there is shimmering beauty and fantastic drama to be had here. But I won’t get to see any of it if opera companies chuck them all overboard as they did Baroque opera last century under the banner of “Modern audiences can’t connect with this material.” There is much that can be done to save these works for our secular age, to show that they have things to say beyond their veneer of unnecessary female sacrifice and ecstatic set pieces.

Because nobody knows how to portray the dark core of a religion so effectively as those who believe it free of darkness.