Freedom & Anarchy

Just imagine this beginning! Someone is at the goal of all sensual desires, bliss and abundance everywhere, the orchestra is boiling, you experience "a seductively wild and ravishing chaos" (© Wagner) - and then the deliberate full stop: farewell to all abundance: towards truth, asceticism - and death. Tannhäuser, first performed in 1845, tells of a divided man - and of love. This is what the Wartburg singing community asks for, and this is what Tannhäuser is also looking for: he finds almost endless lust with Venus, the goddess of love, and hopes to find bliss with the "pure" Elisabeth. But the (experienced) erotic becomes a centrifugal force that drives him to the fringes of society - and beyond. But he is not alone: in his vacillation between lust and renunciation, between guilt and protest, in being torn between sensual fulfillment and exaltation, he is entirely in keeping with the grammar of the Romantic age - and still speaks directly to us today.

After Rienzi and Der fliegende Holländer,Tannhäuser represents the next major step in Richard Wagner's development. What's more, there are many references to later works: "The pilgrimage and Rome music points to his last opera, Parsifal, as far as the religious aspect is concerned. And the Venus music refers to Tristan und Isolde - even in the first, Dresden version," explains premiere conductor Philippe Jordan.

In Tannhäuser, of course, one also recognizes Wagner's henceforth repeatedly repeated material turn to the Middle Ages as well as the continuation of the idea of redemption and forgiveness that drove him. And of course Tannhäuser can also be read as an artist's drama: "He is someone who wants to create. But in order to create, he has to experience. He has long since overcome pure ability, it gets him nowhere and bores him. That's why he has to push the boundaries in order to continue to grow in his art," says Jordan. What's more, Tannhäuser's quest can serve as a model for art as a whole, as stage designer Momme Hinrichs sees it:

Following new productions of Parsifal, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Lohengrin in the last four seasons, Tannhäuser is now on the Vienna State Opera's premiere schedule. In 1857, the Viennese were first introduced to a complete opera by Wagner with this work - not at the Court Opera, but in the large Thalia Theater, which seated 4,000 people. Just two years later, Tannhäuser was also performed in Vienna's leading opera house, and even the feared pope of critics, Eduard Hanslick, was impressed by the work. This time, a mixture of the earlier Dresden version and the later Parisian and Viennese versions of the opera will be performed. It will be staged by director Lydia Steier, who has enjoyed success between Paris, Salzburg, Dresden, Berlin and Vienna and whose debut at the Haus am Ring is eagerly awaited.

The singers include Günther Groissböck (Landgrave Hermann), Clay Hilley (Tannhäuser), Martin Gantner (Wolfram von Eschenbach), Malin Byström (Elisabeth) and Ekaterina Gubanova (Venus).