Composer  Richard Wagner
Musical director  Philippe Jordan

Tannhauser  Robert Gambill
Elisabeth  Camilla Nylund
Venus  Waltraud Meier
Landgraf  Stephen Milling
Wolfram von Eschenbach  Roman Trekel

Stage director  Nikolaus Lehnhoff
Sets  Raimund Bauer
Costumes  Andrea Schmidt-Futterer

Choir  Festspielhaus-Chor Baden-Baden
Orchestra  Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin


Tannhauser is a man in search of the meaning of life, a Faustian character, an Everyman. He looks for meaning in incompatible worlds. In his travels through time and space he always transforms one form of being into the other, a voyage in time that of necessity end sin avoid. Tannhauser always appears at the wrong time and in the wrong place. He is in sarch, wandering around without a home, without solid ground under his feet. He is the prototype of the uncompromising contemporary driven by a longing to die.

Vensuberg, Wartburg and Rome are the three significant places in this opera. Tannhauser moves between those different worlds, turns around in circles and looks for salvation from this unending loop by death. The world appears to him like a continuously turning spiral whether he is in an erotic dream, in the social-political life or in nowhere-land.

In Tannhauser’s view the essence of love is destroyed through the separation of the spiritual and the sensual Eros. Tannhauser’s outburst at the end of the song contest, ‘Move to the Venusberg’ is an unequivocal pleading for an erotic and social freedom which he pays dearly.