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| Wagner: Tannhäuser - designs by Darko Petrovic, courtesy of Teatro Nacional de São Carlos in Lisbon |
Later this month, the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos in Lisbon will be presenting a new production of Wagner's Tannhäuser, opening on 23 April 2026. The theatre's first staging of the work in nearly thirty years. And the production will feature role debuts for Jonathan Stoughton (Tannhäuser) and Annemarie Kremer (Venus), plus Allison Oakes as Elisabeth. Graham Jenkins conducts and Max Hoehn directs with set designs by Darko Petrovic, costumes by Nuno Velez, choreography by Isabel Galriça and animations by Amber Cooper-Davies. I recently chatted to Max Hoehn and Darko Petrovic to find out more about their plans for the production.
Darko has worked on Tannhäuser before, for a production in Cologne. He was pleased to be returning to the work, finding it fascinating and very romantic. For him, it is still a kind of mystery, and he thinks of Wagner as intending to keep a path of mystery in his work. Darko sees their role as one of trying to solve the hidden meanings that add weight to the narrative. Cologne used the first (Dresden) version of the opera and performances were not it in the theatre so they were able to put the extra musicians all around the auditorium.
Whilst Max has not worked on Tannhäuser before, in 2023 he directed Der fliegende Holländer at the São Carlos in Lisbon also with Graham Jenkins conducting. Max comments on the visceral impact of Wagner's sound world, as if you are entering a cathedral of sound with all those layers. The question for him and Darko is how do you create space and images that let the music breathe. An inherently taxing challenge.
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| Wagner: Tannhäuser - designs by Darko Petrovic, courtesy of Teatro Nacional de São Carlos in Lisbon |
Like many of Wagner's heros, Tannhäuser is very damaged but approachable. With Darko, Max wanted to create a psychological space for the piece focused around Tannhäuser's divided personality. Max is very drawn to the end of the Fin de siècle period and the German Weimar Republic. He and Darko have used the graphic art of the period as the aesthetic for the designs, so the opera becomes part erotic dream and part nightmare. Much of the art of the Weimar Republic, particularly that which the Nazis labelled as Entartete Kunst, has a very nightmarish, surreal quality and Max feels that Wagner's music fits. He and Darko made these decisions early on in the process, before deciding a particular interpretative path.
Max took a similar approach in his production of Der fliegende Holländer in Lisbon, where he brought out the city's links to the sea. With Tannhäuser having not been staged at the theatre for nearly 30 years, there will be those who have never seen a production before. Whereas if he was directing the opera in Germany, where it is familiar, Max would work with parallel metaphors, in Lisbon he wanted to find interesting ways of presenting the key elements of the story. The production will not be completely realistic, but they find ways of representing the drama.
Which means asking questions such as 'What is the Venusberg', 'What is the Wartburg', whilst moving away from the original realistic interpretation. For Max and Darko it is important to consider how to represent these religious aspects of the opera. Max admits that the production in Lisbon will inevitably be different from how he might direct it in Germany, but his overall approach would probably be the same.
Darko points out that if you follow the libretto literally, then you will go wrong. Wagner knew this; he was disappointed with the scenic setup of his works. With the production of the Ring at Bayreuth he felt the results looked so kitsch and evidently could not bear it. An abstract approach works well because Wagner's works were more advanced than the theatrical reality of the time. If you visit King Ludwig's castles (Neuschwanstein has wall paintings by one of the designers from Parsifal), it is clear that Wagner's music was so far ahead of the visual aesthetic of the time. A realistic set is no longer going to work, and Darko feels that it helps the audience if you have an interpretation adapted to Wagner's visionary world.
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| Wagner: Tannhäuser - animation by Amber Cooper-Davies., courtesy of Teatro Nacional de São Carlos in Lisbon |
Max and Darko have worked together before, and they deal a lot in dreams. The music of Tannhäuser makes them feel the uneasiness that pervades the work. Tannhäuser is an outsider who does not fit in anywhere. They feel that it is important to look at the opera differently and not with the eye of televisual realism. Opera nowadays has to offer something else rather than the realism of television.
Tannhäuser is a taxing piece, and two of the singers (Jonathan Stoughton and Annemarie Kremer) are singing their roles for the first time. Max comments that you have to accept that this is sport, the performers need to be high-level athletes as well as singers. So rehearsals must take this into account: you cannot simply rehearse non-stop. Jonathan Stoughton has been performing Wagner in Mannheim, in their The Ring in One Evening, as well as Lohengrin and Parsifal. Annemarie Kremer has performed in Tannhäuser before, singing the role of Elisabeth in the French version of the opera!
In Lisbon, they are performing Wagner's Vienna version of the opera, which was created for the last production that Wagner supervised. [The work premiered in Dresden and Wagner then made some alterations, before creating a new version in French for Paris complete with the Bacchanal in Act One, then this was revised in German for Vienna.]
The Vienna version is close to the Paris version with the full Venusberg music. Max admits that he could not imagine directing the Dresden version as this misses so much of the Venusberg music. In the Lisbon production, their setting for the Venusberg is grounded in the 1920s aesthetic with its graphic art. And Max feels that this brings a sense of the dark period to come in the 1930s and 1940s. Thus, the Venusberg becomes the underworld that gave Berlin its reputation. For the Bacchanal they have dancers and actors, with an animation adding a dream-like quality to the staging, though it opens with just the music.
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| Wagner: Tannhäuser - animation by Amber Cooper-Davies., courtesy of Teatro Nacional de São Carlos in Lisbon |
In the opera Tannhäuser is accused of committing a terrible crime, and Max wanted to find a way to make this more than a philosophical concept. So that in Max and Darko's Venusberg, Tannhäuser is exploring the gay and bisexual nightlife of the time. This enables the audience to understand Tannhäuser's double life in a very explicit way. Max points to the great heldentenor Max Lorenz who sang the role in the 1930s and 1940s. He had two secret lives as he was gay, and married to a Jewish wife. Yet he survived. And there are various gay figures who take inspiration from Tannhäuser, and Max mentions Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray and De Profundis. In this latter, Wilde mentions turning to Christ and the element of salvation in Tannhäuser encouraged Max to make the connection.
There remain questions. What did Wagner imagine as a solution for the designs of the opera? What is the salvation that comes at the end of Tannhäuser? Perhaps Wagner himself did not know. Max admits that the ending of the opera is still a work in progress, however he affirms that there is going to be a miracle and that Tannhäuser will die. Their challenge is to create that!
Both Max and Darko are definitely open to doing further Wagner operas. Darko loves working on Wagner, finding the works ambivalent: the more in depth you go, the more you see how problematic it gets. He describes working on Wagner as taking a deep dive into the world of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the consequences. It helps to concentrate on specifics, the time period of the 1920s is a convenient way to interpret his music. Darko admires the composer as a theatre writer, but his works are challenging though Darko admits that they are huge fun too. Max remains unambivalent in my admiration for a work like Tannhäuser. He loves the composer's but there is darkness too. When he staged Der fliegende Holländer it was as a ghost story, a child's nightmare.
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| Wagner: Tannhäuser - designs by Darko Petrovic, courtesy of Teatro Nacional de São Carlos in Lisbon |
The world nowadays has a short attention span allied to a narrow idea of Wagner based on the political identity he came to be associated with. By setting the work in the late Fin de siècle, Max and Darko want to show that Wagner was like a drug, and he was seen was decadent and modernist.
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