Wagner’s ‘Tannhäuser’ from stage to screen
JAMES LEVINE conducts Wagner’s early masterpiece, Tannhäuser, in its first return to the Met stage in more than a decade, and music-lovers can enjoy the experience at Ster-Kinekor Garden Route Mall, Somerset Mall and V&A Nouveau.
Today’s leading Wagnerian tenor, Johan Botha, takes on the daunting title role of the young knight caught between true love and passion.
Eva-Maria Westbroek is Elisabeth, adding another Wagner heroine to her Met repertoire after her acclaimed Sieglinde in the Ring a few seasons ago. On the heels of his recent triumph in Parsifal, Peter Mattei sings Wolfram, and Michelle DeYoung is the love goddess, Venus.
Tannhäuser takes place in and around Wartburg Castle, in Thuringia in central Germany, and in the mythical grotto of Venus, the goddess of love. Wartburg was the setting of a - possibly legendary – 13th-century song contest as well as the home of Saint Elisabeth of Hungary (1207–1231), wife of the Landgrave of Thuringia.
It would later become associated with Martin Luther, who translated the New Testament from Greek into German there.
The pagan–Christian dichotomy expressed in the twofold setting is central to the opera’s dramatic core.
Wagner (1813–1883) was the controversial creator of music-drama masterpieces that stand at the centre of today’s operatic repertory. An artistic revolutionary who reimagined every supposition about theatre, Wagner insisted that words and music were equals in his works. This approach led to the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art”, combining music, poetry, architecture, painting, and other disciplines, a notion that has had an impact on creative fields far beyond opera.
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