Hartmut Haenchen conducts Wagner’s potent early opera of love and desire starring Peter Seiffert, Emma Bell, Christian Gerhaher and Sophie Koch, in Tim Albery’s acclaimed production at the Royal Opera House.

In Venus’s domain of the Venusberg, the great singer Tannhäuser tires of Venus’s love and escapes. In a song contest at home on the subject of love, Tannhäuser argues for the importance of physical desire, revealing his sin with Venus, to the people’s horror, and he is ordered to make a pilgrimage to the Pope to seek redemption.

In his critically acclaimed 2010 production for The Royal Opera, director Tim Albery focusses on the conflict at the heart of Tannhäuser (and of so many Wagner works) – the opposing pulls of the sensual and the spiritual, and the redemptive powers of love.

Against this backdrop, the beauty of the score’s most acclaimed moments – including Wolfram’s ‘O du, mein holder Abendstern’, Elisabeth’s ‘Allmächt’ge Jungfrau’ and Tannhäuser’s glorious ‘Dir töne Lob’– shine forth.

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