Tannhäuser by Wagner, ne 06 úno 2011, Od (2011/2011), Režie Guy Montavon,, Dirigent Stefan Anton Reck, Teatro Municipale Valli, Reggio Emilia, Italy

once and for all Tannhäuser , perhaps his most beloved artistic creature, certainly one of those that engaged him most. The three versions indicated above are in fact those conventionally cataloged as such only because they have the greatest number of variants compared to the previous version, but a precise reconstruction of the materials has made it possible to trace the existence of at least four further versions (dated 1845, '47, '51 and '75), so that the attempt to establish which version of the work can be considered "definitive" is doomed to certain failure. The libretto, written by Wagner in Paris between 1841 and 1942, consists of the grafting on each other of two medieval legends, not without the addition by the author of original characters and situations. One dates back to a 13th century historical tale about the Minnesänger battle (love singers) at the Wartburg (the home of the Landgrave of Thuringia, at whose court the poetic challenges between the singers were held in the 12th and 13th centuries, including the "characters" of the Wagnerian work Wolfram von Eschenbach and Walther von der Vogelweide), whom Wagner knew "second-hand" through the collection The faithful of San Serapione by Hoffmann and the collection of Germanic sagas by the Brothers Grimm; the other is a well-known popular legend of the fourteenth century, that of Venus and Tannhäuser, already taken up by Tieck in a story, by Arnim and Brentano in a poem from the collection of popular poetic texts Des Knaben Wunderhorn , by Heine in a lyric and by Brothers Grimm in a fairy tale.