Wagner's epic opera from the Grand Theatre, Leeds, directed by David Fielding and sung in English. This new Opera North production is music director Paul Daniel 's farewell to the company before he moves to English National Opera. Presented by Piers BurtorvPage. The medieval knight Tannhauser is torn between two women and the diametrically opposing views of life and love which they represent. The goddess Venus seduces Tannhauser with the delights of sensual love, but the penalty is eternal damnation.
Can the love of the pure and virtuous Elisabeth - one of Wagner's most complex and fascinating heroines - win Tannhauser's salvation?
Chorus of Opera North,
English Northern Philharmonia, conductor Paul Daniel
Act
7.10 Interpretations of Tannhauser Richard Coles explores interpretations of Tannhauser in 19th-century
Europe. Whilst the young aristocrats of the Jockey Club wrecked the Paris performances of 1861, Baudelaire admired the opera as an attack on the hypocrisy of bourgeois respectability. And Oscar Wilde was to make Dorian
Gray trace his own spiritual biography in Tannhauser's moral dereliction.
7.30 Act 2
8.35 Peter Redgrove
A poetry reading given at last year's Poetry International festival in London. Peter Redgrove won the Queen's
Gold Medal for poetry in 1996 and published a new collection - his 24th - called Assembling a Ghost.
8.55 Act 3