Wagner's Tannhäuser

Admired by Queen Victoria, Oscar Wilde and Freud, Tannhäuser contains one of the most extreme depictions of sex attempted in music. Tim Ashley on Wagner's most controversial operaIn chapter 11 of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde's hero goes to the opera. As transgression and excess begin to rot that famous portrait, the piece to which he becomes obsessively drawn is Wagner's Tannhäuser, the only named musical work in a passage widely viewed as a catalogue of the trappings of decadence....

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