Models, Muses and a Missing Masterpiece: Barry Emslie is unimpressed by faux radicalism in Robert Carsen’s ‘Tannhäuser’

Review of Tannhäuser, directed Carsen, conducted Weigle, Barcelona, 2008 (C major, 2 DVDs).

November 2012, Volume 6, Number 3, 90–92.

This is a production that looks radical but isn’t. Robert Carsen has pulled the work out of its customary context and placed it in a wholly different one merely to illustrate the original’s focus on the revolutionary artist. In fact his interpretation, despite its extravagantly new visual language, is scarcely an interpretation at all. It is decorative, mirroring – but only superficially – the original at nearly every step. Naturally one can admire the incidental insights (Venus and Elisabeth as ideological sisters, although that is hardly new), and one is always entertained by the strikingly fresh stage language on show, but the undertaking as a whole flounders on the banal fact that Wagner’s original, when seriously examined, does what Carsen’s is doing, only much better, and in a vastly deeper and more contradictory manner.