Mounting Excitement: Barry Emslie is much taken with the Copenhagen ‘Tannhäuser’

Review of Tannhäuser, directed Holten, conducted Layer, Copenhagen, 2009 (Decca, 2 DVDs).   

March 2012, Volume 6, Number 1, 75–7.

Well, this is fascinating stuff. More than that, if it is possible to say that a production has got to the guts of an opera then Royal Danish Opera and Kasper Holten have. Those guts are sexuality and creativity, but of course both terms are profoundly loaded and spill out all over the place. In fact Tannhäuser may well be Wagner’s most intellectually ambivalent music drama. It was often on his mind, forced him into alterations (this is the Paris version), and late in life the admission that he still hadn’t got it right. We might infer that like all profound and original artists he at times struggled to handle what had sprung from the Pandora’s box of his own fecund and remarkable imagination. We have cause to be grateful to Holten that he doesn’t shirk that struggle.