Tannhäuser as Veteran Rock Star: Michael Fuller reviews Harry Kupfer’s fifth ‘Tannhäuser’

Review of Tannhäuser, directed Kupfer, conducted Albrecht, Zurich, 2013. 

November 2013, Volume 7, Number 3, 61–2.

Taken at face value, the story of Tannhäuser is doubly distant to modernist sensibilities. The medieval troubadour, his understanding informed by religious ritual and courtly convention, is historically distant from our secular social context; whilst his 19th-century romantic re-creation, agonising over the distinction between sacred and profane love, is psychologically distant from our ethical context. This double-distancing creates problems for any self-consciously modernist staging of Tannhäuser, and such problems are not wholly avoided in Harry Kupfer’s recent production of this work (his fifth), for the Opernhaus Zürich. Kupfer’s staging makes effective use of lighting and projections to create a variety of more-or-less contemporary settings in which the action unfolds; but these are only partially successful in establishing modern resonances with the drama.