Overture: Tannhäuser

No one present at the first performance of Tannhäuser in Dresden in 1845 had heard anything like it before. True, the Pilgrims’ Chorus, as presented by lower woodwind and horns at the Andante maestoso beginning of the Overture, is a chorale of a kind that the churchgoers among them would have been familiar with. But then there is that yearning first entry of the cellos with its upward leap and its chromatic slide downwards and, after the full-orchestral parade of the Pilgrims’ Chorus and a change of tempo to Allegro, there is the glitteringly sensuous Venusberg music followed by Tannhäuser’s heroic love song on woodwind and violins - all of which must have been a heady blend for an audience unused to mixing sex with religion. While some of them might have considered the voluptuous extremes of Wagner’s scoring as distasteful as the visual equivalent about to be seen on the stage, no one could have found the climax of the overture, where the Pilgrims’ Chorus is presented in renewed orchestral glory, anything but irresistible.

Tannhäuser has changed many a young life - none more perhaps than that of Anton Bruckner, whose first experience of Wagner’s music was a production of Tannhäuser mounted in Linz in 1863. It is not difficult to imagine what a revelation the opera must have been to him, even though the score was nearly twenty years old by then. The Pilgrims’ Chorus, as presented by lower woodwind and horns at the Andante maestoso beginning of the Overture, would have been the kind of thing he was familiar with. But then there is that yearning first entry of the cellos with its upward leap and its chromatic slide downwards and, after the full-orchestral parade of the Pilgrims’ Chorus and a change of tempo to Allegro, there is the glitteringly sensuous Venusberg music followed by Tannhäuser’s heroic love song on woodwind and violins - which must have been a heady mix for a well brought-up cathedral organist. The more voluptuous extremes of Wagner’s orchestration he did not himself adopt for his own chaste purposes as a symphonist but the distribution of the weight of the orchestra to profile the climax of the construction, on the return of the Pilgrims’ Chorus, was something he would not forget.