Seeing the Wood for the Trees: Matthew Rye attempts to cut a path through the thicket of ideas in a daringly original take on ‘Tannhäuser’

Review of Tannhäuser, directed Bieito, conducted Dmitri Jurowski, Antwerp, 2015.

March 2016, Volume 10, Number 1, 56–8.

As one might have expected from director Calixto Bieito, his concept of Tannhäuser offers a mixture of insight and bafflement, revelation and frustration. In an interview in the programme he recalls that it was the first opera he ever saw on stage, in Barcelona at the age of 15, and it made an abiding impression, which begs the question of why it has taken him so long to stage it for the first time. This Flanders Opera presentation is his third Wagner production, following stagings of Holländer and Parsifal in Stuttgart, and from what I have seen of those in brief video snippets and pictures there’s a shared vision of an apocalyptic milieu with this Tannhäuser. If that teenage experience inspired him and his younger brother to play at being medieval knights, there’s unsurprisingly none of that in the adult Bieito’s concept. And less than a contest between sexual and spiritual love, or between hedonism and socio-religious conformity, he treats the drama as a battle between the natural world and a stultifying civilisation, with Venus the representative of the former, Elisabeth of the latter. But it’s not quite as simple as that.