Richard Wagner: Tannhäuser - The Met: Live in HD

James Levine conducts Wagner’s early masterpiece in its first return to the Met stage in more than a decade. 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.

World premiere: Court Opera, Dresden, 1845. Premiere of revised version: Opéra, Paris, 1861. History, myth, and invention come together in Tannhäuser to create a unique and powerful drama. The title character was a real 13th-century Minnesinger who inspired a legend that Wagner used as the basis for the opera. He notably added the character of Elisabeth, based on the historical Saint Elisabeth of Hungary, wife of the Landgrave of Thuringia. The opera’s score went through several revisions after the original performances, most importantly when Wagner added the Venusberg ballet for the 1861 French premiere.

Much of the score of Tannhäuser belongs to the tradition of Romantic opera that Wagner developed and transcended over the following decades to arrive at the new operatic aesthetic of his mature music dramas. In Tannhäuser, he expands mid-19th-century models of melody, harmony, and form to take his music to unprecedented expressive heights, both in the vocal and orchestral writing. The title character’s dramatic narrative in Act III, which abandons conventional melody in favor of a speech-based structure, directly points towards Wagner’s later works and remains striking in its modernity.

Composer: Richard Wagner
Librettist: Richard Wagner

Sung In German
Conductor: James Levine

Cast: Tannhäuser: Johan Botha, Elisabeth: Eva-Maria Westbroek

Wolfram: Peter Mattei, Venus: Michelle DeYoung, Landgraf Hermann: Günther Groissböck

With Greek and English subtitles

Duration: 260'

With the support of ΑΝΤ1