Meeting Venus

The Hungarian conductor Zoltan Szanto is invited by an opera house in Paris to conduct Wagner’s Tannhäuser, the largest opportunity his career has offered him. The cast has been drawn from all over the world and the lead has gone to the Swedish diva Karin Anderson. She does not care for the idea of working with an unknown conductor and the two of them begin badly, while the rehearsals start coming apart through union disputes, jealousies and colliding egos. In the middle of all of it these two mismatched people fall in love. István Szabó made the film after his own experience staging Tannhäuser at the Paris Opera, and it needles both the opera world and the notion of a united Europe. Glenn Close plays Karin and Niels Arestrup plays Zoltan; the singing voice for Close is Kiri Te Kanawa.