Sense and Sensuality: Ian Palmer eyes the Venusberg in a richly cast new Paris ‘Tannhäuser’ from Covent Garden

Review of Tannhäuser, directed Albery, conducted Bychkov, Royal Opera House, London, 2010.

March 2011, Volume 5, Number 1, 91–6.

It is all too common to consider Wagner only as the composer of operas and to dismiss as theatrical pandering the fact that in two of these, Rienzi and Tannhäuser, he composed extended divertissements for ballet. Yet there is good reason to think that Wagner took his ballets seriously. Rienzi’s Act II sequence emerged organically – he explained in 1851 – as ‘a self-evident festival that Rienzi must give to the people’, and concerning the creation of the Bacchanal sequence in Tannhäuser, which in collaboration with the Opéra’s then Ballet Master Lucien Petipa he wrote for the opera’s Paris premiere, Wagner later reflected: ‘I threw myself enthusiastically into the task of setting up the huge and unconventional dance scenes in the first act.’