Tannhäuser

This is the first complete television production recorded at the annual Wagner Festival in Bayreuth. Director Götz Friedrich sees the minstrel Tannhäuser as a rugged artistic individualist, much as Wagner was himself, misunderstood by his contemporaries who seek to throttle his inalienable right of expression. He turns his back on a regulated, stifling society and retreats into the world of his own impossible dreams. Whereas other productions of "Tannhäuser" show the minstrel acutally biding time in the court of Venus, in Friedrich's version Tannhäuser's harp triggers an imaginary Venusberg, in which the strings become a tangled web of pure sensuality. Tannhäuser discovers that a completely anything-goes society is just as restrictive in the end, and he returns to the real world. But Tannhäuser can't go home again. Once again he lashes out at his hypocritical associates, who condemn him. His only defender is the saintly Elisabeth, who in this production is played by the same soprano who sings Venus - two sides of the coin in the eternal feminine. She prays for her own death, so that thereby Tannhäuser's soul leaves this restrictive world for a better one in which his genius is appreciated.