In his ‘Reminiscences of Auber’ (1871), Richard Wagner recalled he had occasionally met the elder composer over ices at the Café Tortoni back in 1860, at the time the revised Tannhäuser was in rehearsal at the Paris Opera. On one occasion, when Auber was asking after these preparations, Wagner explained to him something of the nature of the opera. Auber ‘gleefully rubbed his hands together’ and replied, ‘Ah, so there will be spectacle; it will be a success, then, never fear!’ Wagner recounts the anecdote with the irony of hindsight, of course, since the Paris Tannhäuser production of the following March (1861) turned out to be a legendary fiasco. Auber naively assumed that Tannhäuser was cut from the familiar cloth of Parisian grand opera, and that French audiences would respond favourably to such elements as the fleshy ballet-pantomime with its nymphs and satyrs, the procession of pilgrims through a ‘Romantic’ landscape of changing seasonal hues, the hunting party at the end of Act I, and the ceremonial entry of the Thuringian nobles to the song-contest at the court of Landgrave Hermann in Act II. It was by no means an unreasonable assumption. Granted, Wagner had updated the score (the opening ‘Bacchanale’ and the scene between Tannhäuser and Venus in Act I, particularly) with touches of the advanced chromaticism and the sequential-developmental style of Tristan und Isolde, quite at odds with the comfortable phraseology of much grand opera. But when Tannhäuser was originally composed, in 1845, Wagner's experience of French grand opera was still relatively fresh, and its impact still considerable.