Bayreuth Festival 2019: Tannhäuser Premiere

Abstract

The new production of Richard Wagner’s opera “Tannhauser”, presented in the program of the Bayreuth Opera Festival in 2019, has been analyzed. The work discusses the use by director Tobias Kratzer of modern techniques ofscenographic and directorial work, which combines traditional theater techniques and new achievements, multi-media and contexts that are associated with the personality of the author and the history of the festival. Personality of the composer and details of his biography were used both in the visual series of the film and brought into the image of the main character of the opera. One of the contexts of using the image of the composer was the replacement of the religious theme of the work with a cult of personality of the author, when the goal of religious pilgrimage instead of Rome is worship of art in Bayreuth. Additional meanings used in the production were the appeal to the characteristic images of German culture, which acquired idiomatic meaning and allusions to the conceptual art of the twentieth century. Such an unconventional approach to the interpretation of the plot has become a new page in the history of the festival productions of “Tannhäuser”.