Richard Wagner -- Tannhäuser (Overture) -- Score

Richard Wagner had already established himself well in Germany, even after having to flee Saxony due to his left-wing politics and participation in the May 1849 uprising in Dresden. Having settled first in Zurich, then in Paris, he continued composing, including an adaptation of his 1845 opera Tannhäuser for the Paris Opera. Apart from translating the libretto into French, he altered the structure of the opera to better suit the French stage.

It was customary at the Paris Opera for there to be a ballet, usually in the penultimate act, but Wagner tacked it onto the Overture instead. Wagner did not wish to disrupt his plot with an unnecessary dance number, and it made dramatic sense to add a bacchanale to the opening scene at the Venusberg. (As a side note, this also caused him some trouble, as the direct translation of that term into French also happened to be a euphemism for the mons pubis.) There were numerous other alterations and additions to the 1845 Dresden version, and Wagner was closely involved in the production, including over 164 rehearsals, eager to establish himself in Paris.

Despite all this effort, the Paris version only ran three performances. Placing the ballet at the beginning caused consternation to members of the Jockey Club, young aristocrats who were less interested in opera than in ogling the ballerinas, and were not about to leave their dinner parties early to accommodate Wagner's dramatic vision. They disrupted the premiere with noisemakers and whistling after realizing their late arrival caused them to miss the ballet entirely, leading Wagner to retaliate by removing the ballet from the second performance. The opera was also used as a focal point for anti-Austrian sentiment among the French public, as it was put on at the suggestion of Princess Pauline von Metternich, wife of the Austrian ambassador to France, as well as Emperor Napoleon III's pro-Austrian foreign policy.

After the third performance (which Wagner did not even attend) was repeatedly brought to a halt by protests, he withdrew the work from the stage and withdrew himself from Paris, abandoning his attempt to establish himself in that city; the political ban on his return to Germany was revoked the following year, and he settled in Bavaria. Despite all this, the current 'standard' version of Tannhäuser performed throughout the world is the Paris Version, translated back into German.

Score sourced through the International Music Score Library Project / Petrucci Music Library: https://imslp.org/wiki/Special:Imagef...
https://imslp.org/wiki/Special:Imagef...

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