Time’s Arrow or The Nature of the Offence: Michael Fuller is stimulated by Castellucci’s meditations on time and sin in his new ‘Tannhäuser’ for Munich

Review of Tannhäuser, directed Castellucci, conducted Kirill Petrenko, Munich, 2017.

November 2017, Volume 11, Number 3, 60–62.

The stark polarities found in Tannhäuser surely invite directorial intervention in an age that sees the black-and-white ethics (and theology) which it presents as problematic. Munich’s new staging is the second Wagner production by the confrontational Italian director Romeo Castellucci, following his 2012 Parsifal in Brussels (reviewed in The Wagner Journal, live in v/2 and on DVD in viii/3). Of that earlier production, Castellucci wrote: ‘I tried to forget everything I knew […]. A work like this needs a vision coming from one’s deepest places.’ The generation of ideas and images by a process akin to free association, which informed that earlier production, appears to have been employed also in this staging of Tannhäuser.