Song and Dance: Matthew Rye reviews two highly contrasting versions of ‘Tannhäuser’ on DVD

Reviews of Tannhäuser, directed Waltz, conducted Barenboim, Berlin, 2014 (BelAir Classiques, 1 BluRay disc); Tannhäuser, directed Baumgarten, conducted Kober, Bayreuth, 2014 (Opus Arte, 2 DVDs).

March 2016, Volume 10, Number 1, 67–70.

Of all Wagner’s music dramas, Tannhäuser offers directors the greatest scope yet also arguably sets the deepest traps. Even considering fantasies of swan-borne knights, ghostly ship crews and transformational helmets, its plot has enough mythic implausibilities to challenge the literalists and ambiguities to reward the adventurous. Its change in popularity from being perhaps the most often staged of Wagner’s works in his lifetime, to the rarest of the canonic ten in modern times, has little to do with the appreciation, or the stylistic problems, of its music. Audiences in the 19th century thrilled to the titillation of seeing on stage a world forbidden to them by the moralist strictures of ‘Victorian’ society and which eventually tapped into turn-of-the-century decadence. Whether they appreciated Wagner’s deeper philosophical or political issues in choosing to develop the story is a moot point.