Baumgarten blames lack of rehearsal time on Tannhäuser Boos? Bayreuth 2011

Tannhäuser fights for his "morals" - in his pants

Really? It takes Baumgarten, according to an interview today, years to rehearse and prepare his productions? He might be in the wrong business. But of course, that explains the reason this production is getting such a bad press - doesn't it?.

DW - World looks at the opening of that festival.

Bayreuth Festival opens among mixed reactions

The 100th Bayreuth Festival opened on Monday evening with a new staging of Richard Wagner's romantic opera "Tannhäuser." But many audience members were shocked at its modern and unusual interpretation.


Boos from the audience are almost a standard occurrence with every new production that kicks off at the Bayreuth Festival. This year's opening on July 25, featuring the new production of "Tannhäuser" directed by Sebastian Baumgarten and conducted by Thomas Hengelbrock, was no exception. Still, the reaction in the audience - which included German Chancellor Angela Merkel, some of her cabinet members and an array of celebrities - must have been hard to swallow, even for the most experienced in the director's team.

A pregnant Venus, an Elisabeth who enters a recycling center and allows herself to be disintegrated, main character Tannhäuser in his underwear, video projections displaying digestion processes and the fertilization of an egg, copulating animals in a cage - and in the midst of it all, members of the audience sitting on the stage. All that can be found in the production and has little to do with romanticism.

An art installation by stage designer Joep van Lieshout reveals a world unto itself: an industrial plant which takes care of various human needs, from eating and drinking to sexual satisfaction. In a perfect cycle of sustainability, even human excrement is collected here and used to generate energy.

Thought-provoking?

"I'm used to doing Brecht theater," director Sebastian Baumgarten told Deutsche Welle in an interview. "I'm interested in systems that are intricately connected and how various figures act within them. We are trying to implement this form of performance here."

However, according to Baumgarten, there was not much time for rehearsals. He explained that it usually takes years to create the right level of intensity in a piece of this sort and to direct the cast as effectively as possible.

"If you only rehearse for seven, eight weeks, you're not at the level that you're used to reaching as a director," said Baumgarten.

That is perhaps a way of explaining or excusing any directing glitches. Singer Michael Nagy also seems to feel a need to explain things.

"This production poses many questions and gives few answers," said Nagy. "A lot of the work is left to the viewer. I find that this is exactly the right process on the path of authenticity."

In any case, "Tannhäuser" provides the audience with a lot of drama. It tells of a singing contest in the Middle Ages, in which the main character violates societal values with his profane songs.

A trend for the new and different

Despite its 100th anniversary, the Bayreuth Festival - which runs through Aug. 28 - will not celebrate in any special way this year. But a new feature this time is a performance by the Israeli Chamber Orchestra in Bayreuth's town hall on July 26. It is the first performance of this kind, as Wagner's music is frowned upon in the Jewish community due to the fact that he was admired by Hitler and other Nazi officials.

At the press conference preceding the festival, Katharina Wagner - the event's co-director and Wagner's great-granddaughter - announced that the director of the 2013 staging of the epic "The Ring of the Nibelung" operas would be Hans Castorf. Known for his provocative productions with embedded political critique, it will be no surprise if Castorf also manages to fan the flames of controversy. However, one thing is certain: the plot of the operas will not be changed, as official regulations prohibit this.

Author: Rick Fulker / ew
Editor: Louisa Schaefer

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Where to listen to: Bayreuth 2011. Tannhauser (New Production)

ConductorThomas Hengelbrock,
making his Bayreuth debut

It seems a little early but as some people wish to know. The truth of course is that performances from Bayreuth will be available from a number of sources - and I will try and include more nearer the time. However, for now:

Sebastian Baumgarten's new production can be heard on the opening night of the festival  at BR-Classic online here

The program will start at 15:57 CET live.(25 July) 

I will give the place and dates for Tristan, Meistersinger, etc as we get closer to the time.

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Bayreuth 2011 Preview: Tannhauser.

Sebastian Baumgarten: The man to rescue
 Tannhauser from its text?

Yes, it's nearly that time again - Bayreuth! You may not be there - unless you have: lined up for the last 10 years, bought a ticket on an immensely overpriced tour, are a member of the press, a member of a Wagner Society, a member of the "Friends of Bayreuth" a German politician, Steven Fry making a documentary about Stephen Fry...sorry, I mean Richard Wagner or acquired a ticket by some other means - but it's likely you will catch a radio broadcast somewhere or catch Lohengrin on ARTE. Love it or hate it,  this has to be done. So, in the first part of an ongoing series, right up to the first performance on the 25 July, I present a preview of this years opener:


TANNHÄUSER.

It's a new production! (Bayreuth loves a revival) What will it look like? Giant Mice? Tiny Mice? No mice at all? The mind boggles, but it should be interesting - at the very least.

Conductor:Thomas Hengelbrock - First time at Bayreuth. Want to know what the press have said about him? Go to his website here

Director: Sebastian Baumgarten - This is going to be interesting: What someone else has said about him:"Sebastian Baumgarten once said in an interview that he is only satisfied once the stage material has emancipated itself from the text on which it is based". So, what do his productions look like? Really? You want to see? Well, you asked for it:





Stage design: Joep van Lieshout
Costumes: Nina von Mechow
Dramaturgy: Carl Hegemann
Lighting: Franck Evin
Video: Christopher Kondek
Choral Conducting: Eberhard Friedrich
Landgraf Herrmann: Günther Groissböck
Tannhäuser: Lars Cleveman

Wolfram von Eschenbach: Michael Nagy
Walther von der Vogelweide: Lothar Odinius
Biterolf: Diógenes Randes
Heinrich der Schreiber: Arnold Bezuyen
Reinmar von Zweter: Martin Snell
Elisabeth, Nichte des Landgrafen: Camilla Nylund

Venus: Stephanie Friede
Ein junger Hirt:Katja Stuber

When?

Monday 25. July  Tannhäuser I
Monday 01. August Tannhäuser II
Sunday 07. August Tannhäuser III
Saturday 13. August Tannhäuser IV
Friday 19. August Tannhäuser V
Thursday 25. August Tannhäuser VI

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Tannhäuser: An opera for those that have felt outlawed because of their sex?

Tim Ashley, examines Tannhäuser and finds it to be not only  a favorite to such a diverse group of individuals as Freud, Oscar Wild and Queen Victory, but also  that it became a totem to the "counterculture" and  especially to those  outlawed because of their "sex"

Tannhäuser in the kingdom of the goddess Venus, by Henri Fantin-Latour. Photograph: akg-images

In chapter 11 of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde's hero goes to the opera. As transgression and excess begin to rot that famous portrait, the piece to which he becomes obsessively drawn is Wagner'sTannhäuser, the only named musical work in a passage widely viewed as a catalogue of the trappings of decadence. Wilde describes the "rapt pleasure" Dorian takes in "seeing in the prelude to that great work of art a presentation of the tragedy of his own soul".

Dorian was by no means alone, for it was in Tannhäuser, more than any of Wagner's other operas, that many in the late 19th century found a reflection of their moral and sexual concerns. Its admirers included Queen Victoria, Baudelaire and Freud. It inspired major works both of literature and pornography, and was interpreted as everything from a justification of normative values to a fierce celebration of counterculture extremes. It appealed above all to those who were – or felt – outlawed by their sexuality.

The opera's starting point is the dichotomy between flesh and spirit, as refracted through a variation on the medieval legend of the troubadour Tannhäuser, who strayed into the Venusberg, or kingdom of the goddess Venus, whose lover he became. Sexual satiety provoked his return to the world of men, where shame impelled him to seek salvation by undertaking a self-mortifying journey to Rome to beg absolution from the Pope. The latter, however, rejected his request: damnation awaits those who have enjoyed the pleasures of Venus; Tannhäuser has no more chance of achieving salvation than the Pope's staff has of beginning to flower. Yet after the troubadour left, the Pope's staff did, indeed, miraculously, begin to flower. But too late for Tannhäuser's soul: he had returned to Venus with whom he will remain until he is damned on judgment day.

Wagner, the self-styled musical redeemer par excellence, made drastic changes to this tale in order to affect his hero's salvation. On entering the Venusberg, Wagner's Tannhäuser abandons his relationship with the virginal Elisabeth, niece of the Landgrave of Thuringia, who loves both him and his music. Back in the world of mortals, he is asked at a singing contest to improvise a song on the nature of love. But he breaks into an explicit hymn to Venus, which exposes both his erotic secrets and a world of extreme sexual experience beyond the comprehension of prudish Thuringian society.

Elisabeth, refusing to accept his social ostracism, demands he be offered the potential for salvation, and in his absence also begs the Virgin Mary to take her from this earth to intercede directly with God on his behalf should he fail. Her prayer is granted. Tannhäuser, once more seeking Venus, is held back from the Venusberg by mention of Elisabeth's name, and dies as news of the miracle in Rome reaches mourners at her funeral.

Wagner was never satisfied with the score of Tannhäuser, which has the most complex editorial history of all his operas. There are two major versions: the first more or less gives us the piece as it was heard at its Dresden premiere in 1845; the second, the so-called Paris version, presents us with the revision that Wagner prepared for the first performance in France, which was planned as part of his attempt to conquer the French capital in 1860/61.

Both scores follow the same narrative outline and derive their dramatic power and unity from an underlying vision of sexuality and spirituality as antithetical yet mutually dependent. In the opera's world, the idea of spirit cannot exist without the idea of flesh, and the lofty moral implications of the redemption of Tannhäuser's soul are balanced by one of the most extreme depictions of sex attempted in music.

Within these polarities, Elisabeth is neither naïve or girlish, as some have supposed. Virginity endows her with powers of self-determination strong enough to take on a gang of armed men on Tannhäuser's behalf. Sainthood embodies tremendous fixity of will, in contrast to the promiscuous desires of the Venusberg, which bring in their wake the allure of the profane, linguistically as well as musically. Decorum dictates that the word "Venusberg" is left in its original German in English-language discussions of the opera. But it translates out of the Latin mons veneris and into English as "mountain" or "hill of Venus". Wagner reportedly became embarrassed when anyone pointed out the opera's erotic nomenclature. But he knew what he was doing, and the libretto is full of puns about being "in" or "penetrating" the hill of Venus that were not lost on its first admirers.

Both versions of the score bring the sacred and the profane into disturbing proximity, however, by allowing flesh and spirit to speak the same thematic language. The strings' first entry consists of a rhythmic octave leap followed by four descending chromatic notes. The phrase is later associated with pilgrims singing of "the burden of sin", but in the Venusberg its component parts, now sundered, are also identified with the limitless expression of desire. The leap, prefaced by bounding woodwind, juts impertinently upwards, while the chromatic descent, thanks to the addition of an extra note, has mutated into a yielding moan.

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