Ballett der Bayerischen Staatsoper

David Alden's production of Wagner's grand romantic opera was recorded at the National Theatre in Munich, with Bayerische Staatsoper, in September 1994. Shot over three days by leading opera director Brian Large, this recording benefits from the ideal technical conditions made possible by a closed session. Alden, one of the most iconoclastic interpreters of classical opera, stirs up the visionary, erotic, and archetypal elements in Wagner's work. The cold, forbidding aspect of the stylized and predominantly monochrome sets and costumes by Roni Toren and Buki Shiff manifests the strait-jacket of tradition from which Tannhäuser seeks to free himself in this powerful opera.

In the 2022/23 season, Alexei Ratmansky created a three-part evening for the Bayerisches Staatsballett based on overtures by Pyotr I. Tchaikovsky and Shakespeare's Hamlet, The Tempest and Romeo and Juliet. Ratmansky forms an abstract ballet out of them, in which narrative motifs appear again and again without following a fixed plot. Instead, overture follows overture - each as a new beginning. The result is a multi-layered dialog between music, literature and dance that questions classical ballet in the here and now.