Where’s the gay plot in Tannhäuser?
NewsThe National Theater in Košice, in Slovakia, is creating a version of Wagner’s opera in which the hero is reconfigured as the composer’s homosexual son, Siegfried (pictured).
‘Unlike in German-speaking countries, there is no distinctive performance tradition for Richard Wagner’s operas in Slavic Eastern Europe,’ says the Košice Theatre. The show opens on December 1.
Slovakia has a right-wing, anti-gay government. Could be interesting.
More here.
Here is my take. T is having a secret affair with Wolfram in a conventional heterosexual society. He tires of the restrictions and flies off to the well-known gay paradise of V’berg. (Venus is, of course a drag queen, ruling over the resort.)
He gets fed up with the decadence and returns to his home. He confesses what he has done, but is told he must go to a centre where he can receive conversion therapy – this of course is Rome. He is told the therapy has been successful and returns home where he marries his childhood sweetheart Elizabeth, but continues to have secret assignations with Wolfram, who dedicates to Tannhäuser his great love song “O Du mein holder Abendstern…..“ what else could it mean!?
You got one important detail wrong.. Tannhauser is a (gay) convert to Islam, so he doesn’t go to Rome, but
to Mecca to undergo a course in conversion therapy. Instead of therapy, he is publicly beheaded and his soul condemned to an eternity of hellfire.
I deliberately kept Islam out of my story. I think my version is stageable, but in the current climate your amendment – clever as it is – would be likely to cause major problems.
You know, I think that might actually work.
Will someone suggest this to Katharina Wagner?
Bisexual, surely. His marriage to the repellent Winifred produced four sprogs, and he may have had others, so it was not just a lavender marriage, even if it started out as one.
Sorry, no! In my version he is gay, conversion therapy did not work and it was a marriage of convenience to Elisabeth – his best friend since childhood – to appease conventional expectations. There could be an Act IV, with Tannhäuser and Wolfram meeting at night as the court has gone on a hunt! The Brangäne figure could be Elisabeth, as she’s happy for T to meet W occasionally but in secret. Melot would be one of Wolfram’s ex-boyfriends, jealous at T’s new cosy set-up…. This 4-act version would probably by called Tanntris.
Wasn’t Wagner himself the composer and “poet” glorifying incest between siblings (act I of Walkure, anyone)? Wasn’t Brunhilde technically Siegfried’s aunt? Wasn’t Richard himself involved in bisexual interests with Kind Ludwig to get something in return? So Slovakia may be onto something as his operas are fucked up in the first place.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/wagner-incest-and-game-of-thrones
As the great Anna Russell pointed out, Gutrune was the first woman Siegfried ever met who was not his aunt.
So the Slovakian government is rounding up gays? How else does it express the ‘anti gay’ policy?
Or is it that anything that you agree with and which others don’t particularly like is now regarded as ‘right wing anti’?? How about talking about the majority; or don’t you like them either?
Cheap labels for the intellectually lazy.
Darling, there are *lots* of ways of being anti-gay without rounding gay people up.
I am *sure* you could think of some and perhaps quite often do!
Maybe if you actually read something about Slovakia’s current policies instead of posting your usual instant anti-woke diatribes here we’d all be better off.
Wagner would have been appalled, so why not?
Correction: Slovakia does not have a right-wing government, it is rather left wing. Former communist prime minister Robert Fico leads a party called Smer (Direction – Social Democracy). Not every populist is thus right-wing, important to note.