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Wagner’s Venusberg

Bayreuth, 1891. Eight years after Wagner’s death, his widow, Cosima Wagner, defends her admittance of Tannhäuser to the Bayreuth Festival against critics who deem this early work unworthy of the shrine of Wagner’s mature Gesamtkunstwerk. Not so, she argues. Producing Tannhäuser presented “the task par excellence, because [this opera] was about the battle of life and death between opera and drama.”¹ Her reasoning suggests that Tannhäuser (premiered in 1845) offers a particularly focused perspective on Wagner’s artistic struggle to break free of operatic conventions in order to devise the features of his future music drama. Indeed, shortly after completing his signature treatise Opera and Drama in 1851, the composer himself had construed Tannhäuser as a transitional work that provided the decisive step forward from Der fliegende Holländer’s first forays into a “new direction” (in 1843) to his “latest” period, which started with Lohengrin (1850)—a direction he hoped would one day be consummated with his projected Ring cycle at a special festival.² There was, then, a direct line from Tannhäuser to Bayreuth. Unlike Rienzi (1842), which—as I discussed in the introduction—the composer later disavowed for its blatant adoption of the technologies of grand opéra (and which Cosima Wagner would indeed bar from the festival), Tannhäuser showed his “original” hand at work. It therefore earned admission to the Bayreuth temple.

Apart from reinforcing Tannhäuser’s seminal position within Wagner’s oeuvre, though, Cosima Wagner’s statement allows for a second interpretation. If the style and structure of Tannhäuser reflect Wagner’s music-dramatic quest, the plot itself symbolically enacts this fight between opera and drama, between inherited forms and fresh approaches. The opera’s artist-hero, after all, is torn between two fundamentally different realms of existence, the tabooed underworld of the Venusberg and the social sphere of the Wartburg; upon leaving the former, he embarks on a utopian search for an individual mode of expression that integrates both worlds. This trajectory resonates with Wagner’s own creative project, as he implied once more when confessing in 1851 that “the figure of Tannhäuser . . . sprang from my innermost heart” and represented the essence of “a human being, right down to our own day, right into the heart of an artist longing for life.”³ The mood in which Wagner professed to have conceived the opera—“a state of burning exaltation that held my blood and every nerve in fevered throbbing”—also corresponds revealingly with Tannhäuser’s emotional turmoil, erotic subtext included.⁴ Not surprisingly, it has become common coin to associate Tannhäuser the singer with Wagner the composer. Scholars have drawn parallels, for instance, between Tannhäuser’s Venusberg experience and Wagner’s painful sojourn in Paris, or between both artists’ cultural outsider positions, their grappling with sociopolitical norms, and their psychological developments. Nike Wagner even dubbed Tannhäuser “a kind of ingenious self-therapy,” since Wagner during the years of this opera’s genesis “is Tannhäuser.”⁵ Both the score and the plot seem to hold special potential for an understanding of Wagner and his larger artistic agenda.

This is not to say that allegorical associations between Wagner and his operatic heroes are unique to Tannhäuser. Wagner as Sachs (or Stolzing), Wagner as Wotan (or Siegfried), Wagner as Parsifal: the composer’s self-concocted mythic plots as well as his abundant theorizing have fostered this interpretive move, more so than with other nineteenth-century composers. And while the correlation holds particularly for Tannhäuser, with its poet-musician as single male protagonist, the identification of Wagner with Tannhäuser has its limits. At the end of the opera, Tannhäuser dies without witnessing his earthly rehabilitation—hardly a future Wagner would have wished for. Moreover, as my introduction has shown, Wagner saw himself as not merely a composer (let alone a performing musician) but as an all-round theatrical artist. As such, his creative program did not follow a single, unified trajectory that could be represented onstage by a sole artist’s undertaking: too many were the contradictions, opposing pulls, and changes over time that drove his ideas.

These complexities are evident in the fate of Tannhäuser itself. Not only was this the most popular as well as the most frequently transcribed and parodied of Wagner’s works in Germanic theaters through World War I, but it was also the work Wagner revised the most, and over the longest period of time.⁶ Starting immediately after the Dresden premiere of 1845, he effected myriad changes that were eventually reflected in the published score of 1860. For the Paris production of 1861, he added and revised large parts (particularly in the Venusberg scenes), which he then retranslated and modified for the Munich performance of 1867 and his “model production” in Vienna of 1875. Over the course of three decades, Wagner thus left what boils down to four different versions. That these reflect a good deal of his artistic development can be gleaned from the changing genre label: it morphed from “große romantische Oper” (betraying indebtedness to both French “grand” and German “romantic” opera) via the nondescript “Opéra” (1861) to “Handlung” (Action)—a moniker linking the Tannhäuser of 1867–75 to Wagner’s mature music dramas as epitomized by the “Handlung” Tristan und Isolde (1865).⁷

In addition to revising the score, Wagner was directly involved in several productions at major theaters. And for no other opera did he dedicate more ink to influencing stagings elsewhere. At the same time, Tannhäuser remained the opera that troubled him the most: his thoughts during his last years returned again and again to what he came to consider an unfinished project. In 1877, for example, Cosima Wagner reported that he was very preoccupied with the opera, considering further revisions to the Venusberg scenes; and merely three weeks before his death she famously noted: “He says he still owes the world Tannhäuser.”⁸ This opera, in other words, reveals a composer paradigmatically refining a work both on page and onstage throughout the better part of his career, in the face of his evolving creative thought as well as changing practical experiences and conditions. It can therefore shed new light on the emergence of Wagner’s artistic ideals prior to and in parallel with their theoretical formulation, in addition to their onstage realization. Tannhäuser, in short, provides a unique starting point for addressing nineteenth-century attempts at “completing” and preserving an opera in (and as) performance.

More specifically, Tannhäuser’s opening, set in the legendary Venusberg, is particularly well suited to demonstrate the importance of technologies for manifesting opera as an illusionist multimedia entity—an ideal promoted most efficiently, of course, by Wagner himself. With their gradual medial engagement, I suggest, Tannhäuser’s Venusberg scenes are an epiphany of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk. In the depths of the Venusberg, Wagner first displayed a music drama as fully enacted and embodied: Venus’s magic grotto seamlessly merges various art forms into an alluring multisensorial spectacle that fully absorbs its visitor. Yet it does so not within a diegetic play-within-a-play staged for onstage audiences. Instead, Venus’s spectacle emerges—and is perceived—as part of a natural setting within the opera. A proto-Gesamtkunstwerk in miniature, the Venusberg scenes thus afford precious glimpses into the ideal result Wagner desired for the stagings of his multimedia works, along with the strategies for their creation as well as their anticipated perception. Not coincidentally do these scenes evoke some of the major stage effects that Wagner and other composers consistently employed and refined throughout the nineteenth century (some of which will be addressed in my next chapters), including sudden transformations, lifelike simulations of nature, veiling mists, and a contested gong strike. Moreover, the Venusberg discloses the extent to which every detail of its (staged) appearance is minutely managed for utmost effect. It is hardly surprising, then, that the Venusberg scenes were the part of the Tannhäuser score Wagner retouched the most. As such, they emblematize his persistent attempts to reconcile his Gesamtkunstwerk ideal with the material conditions of nineteenth-century operatic practice by retrofitting both.

In reading the Venusberg as an archetypal anticipation of the Gesamtkunstwerk, this chapter explores what happens if we associate Wagner not with Tannhäuser, the singer, but with Venus, the director. It traces the shift from composer to total director that Wagner and others sought to attain during the nineteenth century. By expounding and expanding this association, I take a fresh look at Wagner’s theatrical aspirations away from the well-trodden (and sometimes misleading) paths of his written utterances, or from the practicalities of actual, always-contingent stage productions. This approach fleshes out my introduction’s brief sketch of the theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk with a view to its ultimate stage appearance. Like a prophetic dream, I maintain, the Venusberg scenes capture Wagner’s music-dramatic vision in vivid multimediality. In so doing, they also indicate the practical directions Wagner would explore for his future stage productions: Tannhäuser’s opening simultaneously foreshadows the means deployed by Wagner to realize his concept and their inevitable failures. Put differently, the Venusberg symbolizes—and helps explain—Wagner’s lifelong yet ambivalent pursuit of absolute directorial powers, his voracious appetite for stage technologies, and his desire for his own theater.

To be sure, this chapter illuminates Wagner’s creative objective as pars pro toto in order to buttress the core themes of Curtain, Gong, Steam. It does not explicate the related ambitions of other composers, nor does it discuss the technologies employed in actual stagings: all these will be subjects of the following chapters. Likewise, I do not submit an exegesis of Tannhäuser as a whole, nor am I concerned with minute differences between the various versions: it will suffice to concentrate on the Venusberg scenes in what is commonly called the “Dresden version” (reflecting Wagner’s revisions between 1845 and 1860) or, when specified, the “Paris version” (first performed in its entirety in Vienna in 1875). By thus zooming in on a Wagnerian ideal in its pure and abstract state, undeterred by material actualizations, I offer a lively backdrop for the individual technologies and stage-practical issues that my subsequent case studies will address. To this end, I weave increasingly specific links between the Venusberg scenes and Wagner’s theoretical writings, between the Venusberg and Bayreuth, between Venus and Wagner. Observing the composer in his Venus grotto, in short, I expose the conceptual breeding ground of his multimedia approach to opera, a safely confined laboratory in which he tested those music-dramatic ideas and technological ideals that his later productions would famously seek to deliver openly to the world. Ultimately, my allegorical reading both explicates and complicates our understanding of Wagner’s persona and artistic aspirations as well as of the broader, deeply troubled nineteenth-century utopia of total medial control in opera.

THE VENUSBERG SCENES AS GESAMTKUNSTWERK

Let us, then, imagine ourselves in the Dresden Court Theater in 1845, for the premiere of Tannhäuser. After a substantial overture, the curtain rises, but not onto the busy introductory chorus that we as mid-nineteenth-century operagoers would expect. Instead, the title hero and Venus, one of the opera’s two leading ladies, are immediately disclosed. Yet we do not hear these singers. It takes roughly a minute and a half (or 112 measures) of iridescent orchestral music before the onset of any singing, albeit only the gentle backstage chorus of invisible sirens inviting love. Wagner allows a further four minutes (172 measures) before the protagonists open their mouths. (The Paris version would have us wait even longer: almost seven minutes for the sirens and over twelve for the first solo.⁹) During this exceptionally extended singing-free time, however, we see and hear a good deal else. After all, we are inside of the Venusberg, and the goddess of love does not live poorly. Her grotto is animated by sirens and loving couples arranged around its sides, with bathing naiads in the background; at center stage, dancing nymphs are soon joined by a train of bacchantes. In Paris, youths, fauns, satyrs, the three Graces, and cupids also participate: they hustle and bustle, dance and chase each other to chromatically charged and dazzlingly fluctuating orchestral music in a bright E major, with dominating high strings and winds accented by sparkling cymbals and triangle. Instead of an opening chorus, in a word, we are faced with a glittering ballet.

Yet Wagner did not envision “dance as is usual in our operas and ballets.” As he explained in his 1852 “Notes on the Performance of Tannhäuser,” he had in mind “a consolidation of everything the highest art of dance and pantomime can accomplish: a seductively wild and enchanting chaos of groups and movements ranging from the softest delight, yearning, and longing to the most delirious impetuosity of frenzied riot.”¹⁰ About the much more lavish Paris version, the composer similarly confessed that what he demanded in “the huge and unconventional dance scenes of the first act . . . was unheard-of and departed radically from traditional choreographic practices”¹¹—a remarkable claim for a production in Paris, the European capital of ballet. After all, fusing dance and pantomime was not uncommon. In France it had most recently yielded the independent genre of ballet pantomime (or ballet d’action), which during the 1830s and 1840s was arguably as important to the Paris Opéra as grand opéra proper.¹² Some French operas also included pantomime in addition to (or as part of) their obligatory ballet, a practice Wagner had adopted in Rienzi to adorn the celebratory act 1 finale. In underlining the otherness of Tannhäuser’s beginning, however, he did have a point. Its wistful evocation of chaos (in Paris of “utmost fury” and “extreme rage”) seemed a far cry from the “ballet du genre noble et gracieuse” for which the Opéra had the prerogative among nineteenth-century Parisian theaters.¹³ Moreover, pantomimic elements were typically included at the ends of acts to suspend tension, and ballets would usually occur in the second (and never in the first) act, as Wagner’s Parisian detractors gleefully reminded him.¹⁴ Flying in the face of these conventions, the Venusberg opens Tannhäuser with a closed dramatic scene—a miniature enactment of mythic nature’s orgiastic power—that sets the stage both visually and allegorically for the ensuing action.¹⁵

For the Paris Tannhäuser, Wagner animated his stage with a further type of artistic expression, in addition to dance and pantomime. After the frolicking couples have dispersed, two successive visions of erotic mythological scenes appear in the background: the abduction of Europe by Zeus in the form of a bull, and the seduction of Leda by Zeus as a swan. Labeling these visions Nebelbilder, or “dissolving views,” Wagner alluded to their seeming immateriality, as he pictured them emerging from the “scent” of the grotto. Yet the term also referred to the homonymous optical medium popular in London since 1839 and introduced to Germanic spectators in Vienna in 1843. This new entertainment produced dissolving views through two (or more) magic lanterns that enabled the fading of one image into the next, thus simulating animation and change over time.¹⁶ It seems deliberate that Wagner likewise prescribed not one but two related Nebelbilder, separated by a period of “fade” (albeit an extended one to allow for the backstage set-up of the second vision) during which the three Graces “interpret” the first vision in dance. In turn, the dissolving views correlate with the siren chorus and its echo, providing a visual commentary on, or dramatic motivation for, the sudden outburst of acousmatic vocal music that, in the Dresden version, had merely interrupted the dance. In the Paris Venusberg, Wagner merged dance, pantomime, and live enactment of a recent optical medium with orchestral and choral ambient music to generate a minutely choreographed multimedia experience.

Tannhäuser’s most innovative scene thus acts out Wagner’s goal of media integration—“this most frank mutual permeation, generation, and completion of each art form out of itself and through each other . . . [through which] is born the united Lyric Art-Work.”¹⁷ In other words, the opening Venusberg scene (in both versions) exemplifies the theories laid out in Wagner’s 1849 essay “The Art-Work of the Future” on how to meld the individual arts into a Gesamtkunstwerk that transcends the sum of its parts. That the Venusberg includes figures from classical mythology (in an opera based on Germanic myths, no less) seems only to underline Wagner’s belief that the resulting work would succeed the hitherto unsurpassed Greek tragedy as ultimate Drama.¹⁸ Similarly, the three Graces of the Paris version call to mind Wagner’s own allegory, found in “The Art-Work,” of three closely entwined sisters representing the coveted fusion of dance, music, and poetry in his anticipated music drama.¹⁹ Small wonder that he placed special emphasis on the staging of this opening “dance.” Even in the Dresden version, he considered this “not an easy” task: “to produce the desired chaotic effect undoubtedly requires the most careful artistic treatment of the smallest details.” The director was to follow his scenic directions meticulously and listen intently to the music for additional instructions.²⁰ This equal emphasis on words and music as indicators for stage action is another token of the close audiovisual alignment he coveted.

Moreover, with its temporary abstinence from solo song the Venusberg prefigures a basic premise of Wagner’s early conception of the Gesamtkunstwerk: it enacts the birth of music drama out of dance, the art that in “The Art-Work” Wagner would call “[t]he most realistic” and place at the helm of his three “purely human” (reinmenschliche) arts of dance, poetry, and music.²¹ As such, the Venusberg scenes exhibit the relationship between dramatic situation, orchestral music, and sung melody (Versmelodie) that Wagner would theorize a few years later in Opera and Drama. Just as the musical melody emerged out of the “speaking-verse” (Sprachvers), he explained, “so have we to picture the dramatic Situation as growing from conditions which mount, before our eyes, to a height whereon the Verse-Melody appears the only fit, the necessary expression of a definitely proclaimed emotion.”²² That is to say, the dramatic situation was to intensify gradually to a point of emotional specificity that naturally required the singing voice for adequate expression. Thus Wagner strove to remedy opera’s perennial quandary regarding the artificiality of onstage singing.

Such a careful medial buildup is indeed precisely what happens in the Venusberg. The set, the lighting, the dancers, and the orchestra’s consistent “sound fields”—its high trills and narrow-ranged chromatic motifs—conjure the sensually charged atmosphere of the fabled mons horrisonus (the horribly sounding mountain), while the brief sirens’ chorus expands this ephemeral sonic architecture more than it adds meaning.²³ Only once the dramatic setting has been established visually, viscerally, and acoustically can the orchestra turn to the protagonists. In three brief, markedly distinct, and rhythmically disjointed passages that Wagner left intact in all later versions, the orchestra now reveals the state of affairs between Venus and Tannhäuser (example 1.1). The first passage, a dryly sculpted, marcato forte motif for unison strings, strikingly departs from the previous musical fluctuation; according to the stage directions, it renders Tannhäuser “as though starting from a dream.”²⁴ Next, two solo clarinets in parallel thirds softly and slowly outline a dominant chord with major ninth, their gentle swell floating in uncertain tonal territory, a musical expression of the “caressing” (schmeichelnd) intensity with which Venus pulls Tannhäuser toward herself.²⁵ The strings then burst into a rising eighth-note passage of quickly increasing density in texture, chromaticism, pitch, and dynamics, while Tannhäuser “covers his eyes with his hand as if to hold fast a vision.” Tellingly, it is at this point of introspection—of shielding a mental picture—that the orchestral expressivity grows to such a degree that only the singing voice can continue its trajectory. Over the loud diminished chord that ends this passage like a question mark, Venus vocalizes her anguish by asking her beloved: “Where are your thoughts?” As the voice enters, the orchestra simultaneously recedes into the more traditional role of recitative accompaniment: verbal articulation temporarily takes over from visual, gestural, and orchestral communication.²⁶

EXAMPLE 1.1. Richard Wagner, Tannhäuser, act 1, scene 2: opening of the 1845 “Dresden version.” © By kind permission of SCHOTT MUSIC, Mainz.

In these first fourteen measures of Tannhäuser’s act 1, scene 2, Wagner thus illustrated what he would soon describe as the ideal relationship between drama, gesture, orchestral music, and sung words: a dramatically motivated progression from audiovisual ambient scene setting via increased orchestral expressivity to the inclusion of signifying language. In so doing, he also framed the raising of the singing voice as a natural process. As Wagner explained in Opera and Drama, confronting the audience immediately with a “complete, ready-made melody” would render the latter just as unintelligible as a prefabricated dramatic situation. Only by observing both music and action as something “whose Becoming is ever present to us,” like that of nature, could the spectator comprehend them. Therefore, the Gesamtkunstwerk was to be presented “in continuous organic growth,” lest it turn into a cold “masterpiece of mechanism.”²⁷ The Venusberg scenes, then, do not only trace the evolution of music drama out of dance; they also demonstrate how all its media ought to merge gradually and naturally. And this was a seminal strategy for Wagner, one used to fend off the charge of mechanistic (that is, dramatically unwarranted) effect: it prevented his artwork from declining into the merely technological. Given Wagner’s conviction that his music drama was to effect the regeneration of society through its release from alienating industrial civilization and its return to nature (as discussed in my introduction), the Venusberg emerges as a prime location to experience the craved purification of art from anything mechanical.

The aspiration to return to (albeit idealized) nature was fostered by yet another way in which the Venusberg scenes presage Wagner’s theories. Regarding the scenery and stage setting, he declared, the theater must “be able to depict the living image of nature. . . . The walls of this Scene, which look down coldly and impassively upon the artist and towards the public, must deck themselves with the fresh tints of Nature, with the warm light of ether, to be worthy of taking their share in the human artwork.”²⁸ And nature is where Venus has made her home. Wagner’s stage directions quite literally “deck out” the three visible walls of her grotto: for the background, he envisioned a seemingly endless extension with a blue lake; for its sides, raised shores and rocky ledges; and the entire space was to be illuminated by “rosy light.” For the staging at the Paris Opéra, with its—for Wagner—unprecedented financial and technical possibilities, he expanded these already extensive directions into a detailed dramaturgy of color and light. In addition to the reddish-rosy light (now emanating from below the foreground), some “dim daylight” shines through a rocky opening, while “blue haze” hovers in the distance. Complementing the horizontal blue lake, a “greenish cascade falls the whole height of the grotto,” its white waves “wildly foaming,” and the irregularly shaped ledges are “overgrown with wonderful coral-like tropical vegetation.” The Paris Venusberg, in short, features reds, blues, greens, and whites in various gradations and all possible spatial dimensions. (Only yellow is missing, being reserved for the sunny aboveground world and Tannhäuser’s final redemption.)

Just how unusual such elaborate directions were can be gleaned from Heinrich Marschner’s romantic opera Hans Heiling of 1833. Its prologue is similarly set in a cave governed by a queen—a netherworld from which the title hero flees for the sake of earthly ventures and to which he will eventually return. “Subterranean, widely arched cave, which shows the entrances to several lateral caves, illuminated by reddish dim light” and showing “ragged walls”—thus the initial setting: a mere sketch of (if likely an inspiration for) the sumptuous Venusberg.²⁹ By contrast, Wagner’s directions read like a paint-by-number manual. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that his description of the Venusberg, with all its intricate details and mythic resonances, inspired visual artists for decades to come.³⁰

This continued inspiration must have pleased Wagner, for his call in “The Art-Work” was for the collaboration of true landscape painters, rather than routine stage designers: “What the painter’s expert eye has seen in Nature, . . . he dovetails into the united work of all the arts, as his own abundant share. Through him the scene takes on complete artistic truth: his drawing, his color, his warmly stimulating application of light, compel Nature to serve the highest purpose of art.” In return for thus providing the stage with the colors and appearances of nature, Wagner promised that painting would be consummated within the Gesamtkunstwerk:

That which the landscape painter . . . has erstwhile forced into the narrow frames of panel-pictures—what he affixed to the egoist’s secluded chamber walls, or offered for the random, incoherent, and garbled stacking in a picture-storehouse [i.e., museum]—with this he will henceforth fill the ample framework of the tragic stage. . . . The illusion which his brush and finest blend of colours could only hint at and merely distantly approach, he will here bring to perfectly deceptive representation through the artistic use of every known device of optics and artistic lighting.³¹

In its new, theatrical frame, Wagner expected painting to reach—and move—much larger audiences and receive wider appreciation. What is more, it would “effect a livelier impression” through the use of real light and the participation of living humans.³² The Venusberg and its gamboling creatures thus display Wagner’s ideal of a painterly set animated by light, colors, and bodies. In so doing, they also fulfill Wagner’s principle that everything in his Gesamtkunstwerk must become sensually perceivable in order to proceed “from imagination into actuality, that is: physicality [Sinnlichkeit]”; conversely, nothing was to be left to the “fancy” (Einbildungskraft) of the audience.³³ In short, the opening Venusberg scene is both ballet pantomime and tableau vivant—the “image of life” manifesting his desired true drama.³⁴

Finally, the most distinct feature of the Venusberg is arguably its “rosy scent.” Metaphorically, Wagner uses this term to denote the pinkish light that magically illuminates the grotto, as well as the clouds and vapors that envelop the dancers and give rise to the Nebelbilder. At the same time, the fragrance signals the grotto’s sultry, erotically suffused ambience that is impossible to evade since olfaction is the most archaic and unmediated of all human senses.³⁵ Wagner’s theory, to be sure, does not encompass smells. But the all-pervading scent neatly symbolizes the function Wagner accorded the music of his invisible orchestra: by merging physical and artistic elements, it “encloses the performer as with an atmospheric ring of Art and Nature.”³⁶ Furthermore, just like critics would soon claim for Wagner’s music, the aroma seems to have an enchanting, even narcotic, effect:³⁷ Tannhäuser, the only human in the Venusberg, is in a state of trance, his posture betraying passivity and submissiveness. In both versions, he is “half kneeling,” his head resting in Venus’s lap. Such an attitude illustrates precisely what Wagner desired for his audience. Its attention, he held, “should never be led to the mere art-media employed, but solely to the artistic object realized thereby,” so that it could fully “enjoy without the slightest effort of an Art-intelligence.”³⁸ That is to say, the spectator was not to pay critical attention to the technologies behind the artwork but solely to experience it sensually—a mode of reception epitomized by the Venusberg’s singular object of lust. Not by chance does Venus remind Tannhäuser of “lovely wonders,” “rapture,” and “blissful song” when attempting to bewitch him once more. The complete absorption she demands fully encapsulates Wagner’s concept of audience perception: “from the auditorium the public . . . vanishes to itself, and lives and breathes now only in the artwork, which seems to it as Life itself, and on the stage, which seems to it the wide expanse of the whole World.”³⁹ Like Venus’s scent, the music drama was to meld artist, performers, and audience into a common surge of devotion to Wagner’s goal.

In the fleeting, animated exhibition of the Venusberg, then, Wagner momentarily envisaged what his Gesamtkunstwerk might feel like onstage, and how it ought to be enacted and perceived. In its structure, dramaturgy, gestures, and colors, as well as in its physicality, sensuality, and multimediality, the Venusberg offers a fully realized snapshot of Wagner’s life-long artistic zeal. Small wonder that Wagner originally considered calling his opera Der Venusberg.⁴⁰

THE BAYREUTH VENUSBERG

The Venusberg thus unfolded a concrete demonstration of Wagner’s absorptive Gesamtkunstwerk first before its theoretical conceptualization and subsequently in interaction with it: in a topically resonant way, we might construe the Venusberg as the womb out of which was born Wagner’s theatrical objective.⁴¹ Yet how was this ideal to be realized? How was Wagner to create onstage the flawless medial integration Venus magically achieved in his vision? Once again, the Venusberg scenes themselves provide clues—evidence that may help us understand more fully how Wagner imagined the final appearance of his Gesamtkunstwerk, and how (and why) he went out of his way to control its onstage realization, technologies and all.

As a goddess, Venus has complete power over her realm. In the Dresden version, this is suggested by her dominating presence; indeed, the preface to the 1845 libretto explained that in the mountain “Lady Venus held her court of luxury and voluptuousness”—in other words, she was in charge.⁴² Her autocracy was underpinned in Paris by the fact that the three Graces (no less) report to her. Furthermore, at the height of her conflict with Tannhäuser, Venus conjures a second grotto with a mere sign of her hand.⁴³ One can easily picture Wagner longing for such authority and honors, particularly in the theater. As we saw in the introduction, he had always been keen to influence his works’ staged appearances, and over the course of his career he developed an acute desire to achieve a “correct,” exemplary rendition.⁴⁴ Along these lines, he admitted of the 1860 preparations for the Paris Tannhäuser that he had never fared better regarding performances: “Everything I possibly demand is being done: nowhere the slightest resistance. . . . Every detail is being submitted for my approval: . . . Now everything will be perfect.”⁴⁵ A goddess could barely ask for greater subservience. Total rule over all of theater’s multiple media was key to actualizing Wagner’s vision.

Yet even in Paris Wagner would not fully achieve this goal. Precisely as he exercised that willpower, he made enemies by resisting local conventions and audience expectations, affronting his collaborators, and snubbing the public.⁴⁶ Such diva behavior did not go well with critics and the audience’s influential Jockey Club members: Wagner was no goddess, after all. The performance that he had hoped would become “the best that has ever happened or that will take place in the near future” thus turned into one of the greatest scandals in operatic history.⁴⁷ Venus had avoided such a debacle—and thereby proffered another roadmap to theatrical success: the territory she commanded was her own. To wit, Wagner would need his own theater, perhaps even his own audience. And these requirements are precisely what he began to realize as plans for his Ring cycle unfolded. In the early 1850s, he dissociated this gargantuan project from the “theater of today” and its repertory business; instead, he craved a provisional theater purposely built for the exclusive execution of his tetralogy, to which he would invite solely interested spectators. A decade later (tellingly, after the Paris failure), he conceived of these performances as a summer festival for which he could gather the best performers from across the country—like Venus summoning her Graces.⁴⁸

Analogies between Venus’s grotto and what would materialize, during the 1870s, as Wagner’s Festspielhaus did not end with the creation of the latter. Venusberg and Bayreuth’s so-called Green Hill: both heights are widely visible yet located—as Wagner had requested in 1852 for his theater—“in some beautiful solitude.”⁴⁹ Venus’s grotto and Wagner’s Festspielhaus: both are outwardly unassuming. True to the German idealist preference for inner essence over outer appearance, they reserve their magic for the inside, revealed exclusively to those who truly seek (and gain) access, and are willing to travel and pay the price of admittance. Both are sui generis, affording unique alternatives to established society and its (then) institutionalized culture. And both offer exile to their masters, sheltering Venus from medieval Christianity and Wagner from urban Munich’s political and personal strife.⁵⁰ Like the grotto, the Festspielhaus is constructed for enhanced audience absorption, allowing spectators to rest their visually and aurally engrossed heads, Tannhäuser-like, directly in the lap of Venus (or artistic pleasure). The auditorium is only dimly lit, closing off the senses to everyday reality. And just as Venus’s grotto “bends to the right in the background so that its end seems invisible,” the Bayreuth theater’s double proscenium extends the illusion of the stage into the distance.⁵¹ The depth of the grotto obscures the source of the siren songs much as the “mystic abyss” of Bayreuth’s famously sunken pit hides the orchestra.⁵² And those same depths produce multimedia wonders just like Bayreuth’s unusually high stage house. (The heat and smells pervading the Festspielhaus during the inaugural festival were unintended evocations of Venus’s sultry ambience.⁵³)

The Venusberg, in short, foreshadowed Bayreuth in significant ways. For over three decades, it endowed Wagner with a safe and secluded allegorical laboratory in which he could experiment with his Gesamtkunstwerk-as-staged. Bayreuth’s debt to Venus did not escape the composer. In 1872, when taking a walk to the construction site of the Festspielhaus, Cosima Wagner reported on the “colorful, volcanic appearance, the earth green and pink: ‘There is the Venusberg already,’ says R[ichard].”⁵⁴ Nature and theater, the primal force of Earth erupting and the lure of artistic artifice, merged in Wagner’s notion of the Venusberg as vibrant locus of the Gesamtkunstwerk. It seems hardly accidental, then, that he abandoned this conceptual workshop (along with revisions of Tannhäuser) only after 1875, the year rehearsals in the actual Festspielhaus began. Tannhäuser’s Venus had stood in for Wagner; but now the composer could fill his own theater with sensual performances.

He did so by following Venus once more, adopting some ways in which she had transformed her grotto into a charmingly decorated and gracefully animated space. With Tannhäuser’s ballet pantomime and the dissolving views of the Paris version evolving in the background, the grotto’s far end serves as a natural stage for which the veiling perfumes become organically moving, flexible curtains like the ones that Wagner dreamed up for his Ring cycle (as chapters 2 and 4 will show). By the same token, Venus commands the music in a way that heralds the notorious opening of Das Rheingold with which the Festspielhaus would be inaugurated in 1876:⁵⁵ it is she who performs the shift from orchestral to vocal melody, and only at her command does Tannhäuser pick up his harp and break into stage song for the opera’s first aria. All in all, Venus’s seemingly natural realm is carefully groomed, its artificiality simultaneously signified and masked by the “rosy scent” and the Paris version’s “wonderful, coral-like” vegetation.⁵⁶ Venus demonstrates that all the arts and their sensorial stimuli are needed to give rise to the craved naturalness of multimedia spectacle, and thereby enhance the latter’s quasi-erotic appeal.⁵⁷

Even Venus’s choice of a grotto appears instructive regarding Wagner’s theatrical agenda. True, grottos and caves had been favored settings in opera since the genre’s inception. But the rise of pleasure gardens since the sixteenth century had also brought about a fashion for manmade grottos that were often ornately decorated with shells and tuff (that is to say, with inorganic yet natural substances), equipped with complicated waterworks (Wagner’s greenish cascade), and, increasingly, animated by automatons (or nymphs) to complete their illusion of lifelike nature. According to art historian Horst Bredekamp, such grottos were “a perfect location in which to manifest the transition of apparently untouched yet structured nature to art . . . [since they] were viewed as anthropomorphic ‘wombs’ where metals became more highly developed, as though in an underground laboratory.” Indeed, subterranean grottos and mines had long been considered living microcosms of the world. Producing precious stones and minerals, they served as both model for and locus of early empirical (i.e., technological) and theoretical studies of nature.⁵⁸ Perhaps it was because of this alchemical association that Wagner used the term grotto for a location that, in light of its width, common parlance would usually have considered a cave.⁵⁹ His Venusberg, then, was not only the womb in which his idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk took shape. Qua grotto, it also indicated the necessity of technology for the transformative process that would lead to the total artwork’s realization, while its location in—and appearance as—nature at the same time obscured these mechanics.⁶⁰ Venus achieves her highest vocation as mistress of technology, as commander of the nimble combination of multiple media. If the Venusberg spectacle of mythic nature is (multimedia) theater, Venus embodies the total artist-director.

VENUS AS WAGNER

This artistic affinity between Venus and Wagner is supported by their kinship in the private sphere. Like Venus, Wagner dominated not just the physical domain but also personal relationships: the servile rhetoric of Cosima Wagner’s diaries and her submissive posture in Fritz Luckhardt’s famous 1872 photograph of the couple—with a seated Cosima adoringly gazing up at the composer—are just two resonant evocations of Tannhäuser’s half-kneeling pose.⁶¹ Like Venus, moreover, Wagner was enamored of all things rosy. In the 1860s, for instance, he repeatedly ordered ample lengths of pink sateen while fussing about its hues. The darker shade, he warned, was not to be confused “with the earlier violet pink, which is not what I mean here, but genuine rosa [pale pink], only very dark and fiery”; a decade later, he commissioned brocade in “my pink, very pale and delicate.”⁶² More than light blues, yellows, beiges, and whites, he favored the rose color for those luxurious clothes he liked to don at home, and that inspired him both erotically and compositionally. Ribboned bedspreads and pillows, waistcoats and breeches, dressing gowns and undergarments were tailor-made in various shades of rosa, while some of his outerwear concealed, Venusberg-like, his fetish on the inside—as pink lining.⁶³ By 1880, Wagner joyfully admitted “that life in fact begins with rosa” and “rosa is life itself.”⁶⁴ Pale pink, that is, represented the least artificial and most animate—even primal—color for the composer. As such, it offered an intimate yet vital link between Wagner’s Venus grotto, his weltanschauung, and his private self.

More tellingly yet, the composer was obsessed with rosy scents. The quantities in which he ordered rose oils, rose powders, and rose essences astounded even his London supplier, who worried about detrimental influences on Wagner’s health.⁶⁵ In the late 1870s, Wagner kept urging his amour Judith Gautier not to hold back on the amounts of fragrance sent from Paris; among other reasons, he confessed that his bathtub was below his studio and he liked “to smell the perfumes rising.”⁶⁶ Roses themselves also served as stimulants. In 1863–64, Wagner personally had the boudoir of his opulent Penzing lodgings near Vienna furnished with, among other luxury items, lush satin rose garlands as would decorate the Venusberg of the 1867 Munich Tannhäuser or the Venus of the opera’s Bayreuth premiere of 1891; the “colorful magnificence” of the room, to which he rarely admitted anyone, afforded an aphrodisiac just like Venus’s grotto.⁶⁷ Gautier, too, was later asked to send silk “strewn with threads of blossoms—roses” for his chaise longue, where he would spend his mornings composing Parsifal—perhaps sprawling like (the Paris) Venus on her “sumptuous couch.”⁶⁸

The Venusberg’s affinity with Wagner’s effeminate sensual materialism was not lost on contemporaries. As early as the 1850s, Wagner himself had dreamt of sharing “a little Venus chamber” (Venusstübchen) with his first wife, Minna Wagner, whom he wished dressed “in velvet, silk, and satin”; just weeks before his death, Cosima Wagner’s comparison of his Venice room with a “blue grotto” led to the couple ruminating on Wagner’s “desire for colors, for perfumes, the latter having to be very strong, since he takes snuff.”⁶⁹ More acerbically, in 1865 a Munich satirical journal featured a “new-German composer” named Rumorhäuser who is unable to work unless his colored stockings, silk nightgowns, Oriental carpets, and exotic flowers are all impeccably arranged; to this end, Rumorhäuser issues orders from a “gorgeous bedroom” with velvet tapestries, silk curtains, and “a rocky grotto planted with fragrant moss, ivy, and box,” complete with streamlets and goldfish.⁷⁰ Away from Wagner’s oft-ridiculed material life, the rose-scented Venusberg thus presented a safe space for the composer: a place where he could enjoy his private fantasies and activate his artistic potency. In a sense, the Venusberg functioned as a technological supplement to amplify his creativity. And ironically, this technical link, too, was symbolized by the Venusberg’s pink hue: Wagner’s quintessence of life was actually foreign to natural color schemes—a synthetic derivative whose rise in both painting and fashion since the seventeenth century was intimately tied to the growing chemical industry.⁷¹

Overall, the Venusberg’s gear revealed and simultaneously fulfilled Wagner’s innermost creative needs, just as Venus personified some of his most clandestine traits. The latter, in turn, intriguingly matched the effeminate, sensuous, or erotic qualities often associated with Wagner’s music—and nowhere more so than in the soundscape of the Paris Venusberg.⁷² To be fair, the mid-nineteenth century did not yet associate pink exclusively with the female wardrobe. By the 1840s, however, the fad for early Romantic dandies to sport bright colors—including pink—as coat linings as well as for scarves and other accessories was giving way to the use of pastel colors for women’s dresses. (That pink underwear and stockings were often utilized by prostitutes made matters worse.⁷³) Sure enough, caricaturists of the 1870s delighted in the discovery of Wagner’s fabric-and-clothes-obsessed letters to his milliner by casting him as a megalomaniac cross-dresser (figure 1.1).⁷⁴ Yet they could more aptly have depicted him as Venus herself.

FIGURE 1.1. “ ‘Atlas’ in Music,” in Puck. Humoristisch-Satyrische Wochenschrift (Leipzig, July 1, 1877), 205. The title plays on the name of the Greek Titan who carried the heavens (or the musical heights); in contemporary German usage, “Atlas” also referred to satin cloth. In another pun on Wagner’s fetish for luxurious rosy fabrics, the caption has the composer secretly (“sub rosa,” here literally under a rose garland) esteem his political influence as higher than that of German chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek, Klassik-Stiftung Weimar.

While scholars have tended to elide this tantalizing kinship, some productions of Tannhäuser have alluded to it in ways that may help us gauge more deeply the implications of Wagner’s Venus fantasy.⁷⁵ Wolfgang Wagner’s Bayreuth staging of 1985, for example, heaved Venus onto a stage-like pedestal, where she was bedded on nothing but Wagner’s pale-pink satin. As she rises during her showdown with Tannhäuser, the pink cloth appears as an overlong cape she seductively wraps around herself (figure 1.2). It is when she abandons it (and the pedestal) to approach Tannhäuser imploringly that her strength suddenly fails and she collapses onto her knees in front of him, inverting his opening pose: the pink drapery (Wagner’s artistic stimulant), or so this staging suggests, constituted Venus’s power. At the Baden-Baden Festspielhaus, Nikolaus Lehnhoff in 2008 expanded this play on Wagner’s fetishism and the concomitant materialization of the Venusberg’s scent as pink fabric to explicate the theatrical self-construction of Venus herself. The more Tannhäuser withdraws, the more she sacrifices her artificial image: first her statuesque and elevated pose, then her rosy silken gown (figure 1.3) followed by her light pink dress (which henceforth replace her as the object of Tannhäuser’s sexual fantasies), and finally her wig and hairdo. The goddess deflates before our eyes into an ordinary, fragile woman by casting off all synthetic body enhancements, thereby divulging them as such—and as appendages of theatrical seduction.

FIGURE 1.2. Venus’s all-purpose pink drapery lures Tannhäuser in Wolfgang Wagner’s production of Tannhäuser, act 1, scene 2 (Bayreuth, 1985; set design: Wolfgang Wagner; costumes: Reinhard Heinrich; Tannhäuser: Richard Versalle; Venus: Ruthild Engert-Ely). Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth—Zustiftung Wolfgang Wagner.

FIGURE 1.3. Venus charms through layers of rose-colored bodily extensions in Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s staging of Tannhäuser, act 1, scene 2 (Festspielhaus Baden-Baden, 2008; set design: Raimund Bauer; costumes: Andrea Schmidt-Futterer; lighting: Duane Schuler; Tannhäuser: Robert Gambill; Venus: Waltraud Meier). TV director: Patrick Buttmann; Arthaus Musik, 2008 (screenshot).

For a 1998 production in Naples, film director Werner Herzog construed the Venusberg itself as nothing but red fabric. Shimmering crimson curtains form the Venusberg’s sides and ground, temporarily veiling the green meadows of the Wartburg valley. The oversized fringes of the curtains’ ropes supply the couch for Venus, whose interminably long dress is literally cut from the same red cloth (figure 1.4). This Venus cannot but disappear together with the curtains: they are her drapery. And yet, they seem to be upturned, their surplus flowing onto the stage floor as festoons would usually decorate the top of the proscenium arch. By rendering the Venusberg as theatrical curtain, Herzog seems to imply that the remainder of the opera—its aboveground world—is show: a performed make-believe only fleetingly revealed by the vanishing of Venus’s curtains, or a fantasy world into which Tannhäuser escapes. If the Venusberg amounts to a (however inverted) theater, it is itself the technology through which Venus produces the simulation of the “real” world. Herzog thus stages Adorno’s conviction that Tannhäuser’s escape is but pretense.⁷⁶ And all three productions depict Venus’s power of conquest as fundamentally theatrical. Even the goddess is in need of accessories—of technologies exterior to herself—to immerse Tannhäuser in her multimedia empire.⁷⁷ Light and color, cloth and stage, and even her own body become the means to simulate perfected nature in the service of total theatrical seduction.

FIGURE 1.4. The Venusberg rendered as an inverted theatrical curtain in Werner Herzog’s production of Tannhäuser, act 1, scene 2 (Teatro San Carlo, Naples, 1998; set design: Maurizio Balò; costumes: Franz Blumauer; Tannhäuser: Alan Woodrow; Venus: Mariana Pentcheva). TV director: Walter Licastro; Image Entertainment, 1998 (screenshot).

These readings of Venus as goddess of (stage) technologies lead us back to Wagner, whose lifelong pursuit we might now construe as becoming Venus, the total director. The Venusberg vision captured Wagner’s dream of easily summoning all theatrical media into a smooth multimedia surface. Yet in real life (even in his own theater), this dream could be realized only cumbersomely and partially—as was the case for every composer. Aside from the inevitable contingencies of musical performance, staging required ample technologies, which in turn entailed money, collaborators, and ingenuity. Ironically, this dependence on technology and its masters applied particularly to the Venusberg scenes. Granted, Wagner’s meticulous stage directions as well as his 1852 pamphlet (in which he pleaded with directors to take seriously his scenic imaginations) provided a solid baseline for the stage design and layout. Moreover, the composer had been actively involved in shaping the set designs for the 1845 Dresden premiere, and—uniquely among his operas—during the 1850s he imitated the French practice of publishing production books by having copies of the original decoration plans, sketches, and costume designs for Tannhäuser sent to German-language theaters. He even recommended these materials as a starting point for the stagings in Paris (1861) and Vienna (1875) that he guest-directed.⁷⁸ This tradition was continued by Cosima Wagner for the 1891 Bayreuth premiere, which in turn became the model for German productions for decades to come.⁷⁹ Albeit featuring an increasing amount of exotic floral detail, the Venusberg’s basic color scheme and setup—a richly decorated stalactite cave, with Venus’s luxurious couch tucked to the front left—thus remained remarkably constant.⁸⁰

And yet, the Venusberg scenes were particularly difficult to codify and actualize. We have already seen how concerned Wagner was about the execution of the ballet pantomime—which would remain a focus of directors and critics (and a gateway for experimental, avant-garde choreography) through the 1891 Bayreuth premiere and beyond.⁸¹ Wagner was similarly preoccupied with the rosy scents veiling the pantomime, and in his “Notes on the Performance of Tannhäuser” (as chapter 2 will show) he detailed the various procedures he had tried to achieve the desired natural fades.⁸² For the Venusberg’s brief “spectral apparition” in act 3, by contrast, he simply described the intended result and appealed to “the inventive talent of the scene-painter and machinist . . . [to] devise some contraption whereby the effect may be produced as though the glowing Venusberg were drawing nearer, and stretching wide enough—being transparent—to hold within it groups of dancing figures.”⁸³ Wagner did not possess the gifts to magically conjure up such animated apparitions, nor did he command full knowledge of the mechanics that could stand in for Venus’s powers.

Realizing his Venusberg vision would instead become a lifelong work in progress that evolved with each production. Yet Wagner remained disappointed with the outcomes, and he accounted for this dissatisfaction with his limited control over the execution. “The orchestra lifeless, the ballet quite out of keeping with the music, the singers inadequate, the decorations deficient, the stage mechanics bungled”—thus did Cosima Wagner sum up her husband’s impression of the 1875 Viennese dress rehearsal for the last production he was to see. “Only in Bayreuth,” she had already anticipated, “will he ever achieve a really good performance of Tannhäuser.” Indeed, a mere week before his death, Wagner named Tannhäuser as the first opera after Parsifal to be produced at the Festspielhaus.⁸⁴ All this explains why Cosima Wagner went to the mat over the 1891 production. Beyond being legitimized by the work’s enactment of the struggle for music drama, the Bayreuth premiere was also a quest to achieve Tannhäuser’s ultimate stage realization. Hence her desire to inform her staging with as many documents and eyewitness accounts as she could gather from performances in which Wagner had been involved. Gestures, blocking, number of dancers, cuts, and mechanical procedures were among the details she painstakingly requested, above all from the Paris Opéra, “in order to recover the authentic Tannhäuser, that which it is my obligation to represent in Bayreuth.”⁸⁵ In other words, similar to Peter Gelb’s PR strategy for the Metropolitan Opera’s 2010–12 Ring cycle discussed in the introduction, Cosima Wagner carefully promoted her staging as faithful—the ultimate fulfillment of Wagner’s dream that could only be achieved in Bayreuth. Yet this did not deter her from flouting the composer’s instructions where such disrespect might help her push the opera further toward music drama. Nor, in the production’s 1904 revival, was Siegfried Wagner averse to incorporating spectacular stage effects (such as a Rheingold-like thunderstorm and rainbow in act 2) that had meanwhile become tokens of Wagner’s mature works and their Bayreuth stagings. That is, Cosima and Siegfried essentially continued Wagner’s project of revising and adapting Tannhäuser in accordance with changing production standards and advancing technologies.⁸⁶

My brief preview of actual stage practices thus highlights the rift between the faculties of Venus and Wagner, between a multimedia vision and theatrical reality. In turn, this gap explains why technologies became so central to Wagner’s project of actualizing the Gesamtkunstwerk, and why he was so devoted to communicating to collaborators, fellow directors, and posterity both his audiovisual ideas and the means for their closest onstage approximation. The entire transference of his ideal from allegory to real space might be viewed as a technological undertaking. And yet, Wagner’s attitude to technology remained as ambivalent as was Tannhäuser’s relation to the Venusberg. Just as the singer would initially veil his sojourn there as a peregrination “far, far afield,” the composer (as we have seen in this book’s introduction) sought to keep his machineries shamefully (if elaborately) hidden in order to achieve the seamless multimediality that his allegorical Venusberg had paradigmatically modeled.⁸⁷

TANNHÄUSER’S FLIGHT

If the Venusberg scenes paved the road toward the Gesamtkunstwerk by developing a vision of its onstage appearance, they also already prefigured a central aesthetic conundrum, a challenge that Wagner would painfully encounter when seeking to realize this ideal in actual theaters, even—and specifically—in those productions over which he had the most control. For although Venus qua goddess commands her technologies flawlessly, she does not succeed in capturing Tannhäuser for good. This might seem paradoxical. Inasmuch as the Venusberg shares crucial structural traits with the Gesamtkunstwerk and Venus herself so closely resembles Wagner, why does Tannhäuser, the representative spectator, not appreciate it? Why does the effect of Venus’s media magic wear off even in the elaborate Paris version? And what does this failure mean for the validity of Wagner’s theatrical project overall?

By way of concluding my allegorical reading, let us ask Tannhäuser himself. “Too much! Too much!” (Zu viel! Zu viel!), he laconically responds before explaining in his Venus song what exactly this overkill consists of. There is, first, the daunting prospect of eternity—the timelessness that Venus’s grotto congeals into endless space. This eternity, along with the perpetuity of a single sensual pleasure, makes Tannhäuser long to return to temporality and its rhythms, to the natural changes of feelings, seasons, light, and life. His rejection of infinity can easily be translated into musical terms and associated with the ubiquitous charges levied against Wagner’s works (and his diva-like megalomania) from the 1840s on. Key was what Wagner later sanctified as “endless melody” (unendliche Melodie) and linked to the continuous orchestral flow of emotional expression.⁸⁸ Critics tended to find this seemingly unending, artificial declamation boring. Instead, they wished for traditional musical numbers with their clear melodic phrases and hummable tunes, the time- honored change between recitative and aria (along with their different modes of temporality), and a variety of forms—which is to say, the same ebb and flow of emotions and appearances whose absence Tannhäuser laments. Not coincidentally, commentators missed such temporal structures particularly in the “aphoristic” Venusberg music.⁸⁹ By contrast, the remainder of Tannhäuser consists mostly of traditional operatic scenes, complete with arias, ensembles, and grand finales. To begin with, though, there is tranquility after the musical dissolution of the Venusberg into ethereal high strings and flutes (the “blue skies and serene sunlight” of the “beautiful valley” indicated in the score).⁹⁰ The pit orchestra keeps silent for almost five minutes (seventy-three measures), inverting its long, voice-free presence at the opera’s opening. Instead we hear a rare succession of purely diegetic music—sounds that emanate quasi-naturally from the onstage world: a shepherd’s song, piping, and an a cappella pilgrims’ chorus. Only in anticipation of Tannhäuser’s reaction does the pit orchestra sneak back in. Its temporary muteness outside the Venusberg thus underlines its affinity to technology we observed in the introduction to this book. It also renders audible just how central Wagner’s orchestra was for his effort to overwhelm audiences with the Venusberg-Gesamtkunstwerk.

Ironically, then, Tannhäuser seems to side with Wagner’s critics, questioning the artistic premises of his music drama by suggesting that breaks in the stream of orchestral data are required to maintain audience attention. More importantly in our context, Tannhäuser’s flight from monotonous eternity may also challenge Wagner’s efforts to tightly prescribe the productions of his operas, which imbued stagings with “workness” and, by implication, with a claim to quasi-timeless validity. Does the Venusberg scenario insinuate that a natural emergence and life cycle of productions could be more satisfying? Did Wagner sense, perhaps inadvertently, that spectators would long for change not only during one operatic evening but also in the staged experience of a single work over time? And is this why Tannhäuser initially buries his head in Venus’s lap, to avoid seeing too much and to safeguard his own inner vision?

Tannhäuser’s second stanza substantiates this suspicion. Too much, he now says, of “rosy scents,” as opposed to “forest airs.” Too much, that is, of intoxicating perfumes, just like many critics felt anesthetized by Wagner’s ceaseless and chromatically suffused music. Too much, more generally, of artificiality, which simply cannot replace what Tannhäuser misses: natural light and the warmth of sunshine, “fresh green meadows” and “the clear blue of our skies,” birdsong and the peal of bells—in other words, the touches, sights, and sounds of a pastoral landscape. Venus here learns what Wagner would later experience in Bayreuth: no matter how perfectly her technologies function, her Venusberg theater cannot fully simulate nature, cannot indefinitely pretend to present “real life.” By the same token, even the best-equipped nineteenth-century theater would ultimately prove unable to stage Wagner’s most challenging scenes realistically. As we shall see in chapter 4, critics of the 1876 Ring premiere would sneeringly observe that artifice was lurking everywhere. Tannhäuser’s weary reaction to such pretense, in turn, shows that even Venus lacks the power to control her audience’s reception completely. Although she minutely aligns every detail of her spectacle with its sensuous purpose, she cannot shut out the sensations emerging from Tannhäuser’s inner world—the spectator’s imagination that in “The Art-Work” Wagner had hoped to silence.

Too much, then, of Venus’s dominance. As Tannhäuser laments in his third stanza, her grotto has made him but a slave. He may sing only at her command, can live for only one emotion. Along with nature, temporality, and air, he ultimately longs for freedom. This pronouncement rounds off Tannhäuser’s anticipation of anti-Wagnerian polemics, as pronounced above all by Wagner’s fiercest and most astute nineteenth-century detractor, Friedrich Nietzsche. Many a passage from Nietzsche’s 1888 “The Case of Wagner,” in which the philosopher began to settle accounts with the composer, could indeed be substituted for—or read as elaborations of—Tannhäuser’s complaints. “Enough! Enough!” (Genug! Genug!) is how Nietzsche grinds to a halt his cynical account of Wagner’s theories, where he bewails Wagner’s “infinity . . . without melody” and the theatricality of Wagner’s music, in which “[t]he whole no longer lives at all: it is composite, calculated, artificial, an artifact.”⁹¹ He contends this artifact arose “from a hallucination—not of sounds but of gestures,” just as happens at the opening of Tannhäuser; and he struggles with “[t]he way Wagner’s pathos holds its breath, refuses to let go an extreme feeling, achieves a terrifying duration of states when even a moment threatens to strangle us.” He insists: “Wagner’s art has the pressure of a hundred atmospheres: stoop, for what else can one do?”⁹² Like Tannhäuser emerging from this endless submissive pose, Nietzsche begins to rebel when he recognizes that Wagner’s “seductive force increases tremendously [and] clouds of incense surround him,” like the aroma enveloping Venus. And, dreading suffocation, Nietzsche—like Tannhäuser—calls for “Air! More air!”⁹³ A few years earlier, Nietzsche already likened his escape from modern music’s beguiling sickness to a flight from “the nymph’s grotto.”⁹⁴ Now, the philosopher bids farewell to Wagner the “tyrant” and “old magician”: it is Wagner as Venus whom he can suffer no longer.⁹⁵

Tannhäuser’s fate thus presages the destiny of many early Wagnerians. Religiously devoted to Wagner in their youth, they later often strove desperately to disentangle themselves from him, embracing instead Bizet, Mozart, or the previously snubbed Italian number opera as the equivalent to their—ostensibly saving—conventional Wartburg world.⁹⁶ With their treasure-trove of metatheatrical commentaries, therefore, the Venusberg scenes not only forecast the theoretical and stage-practical development of Wagner’s ultimate music-dramatic goal, but also uncannily portend the initially dominant course of its reception.

WAGNER’S VISION

The Venusberg, then, showcases Wagner’s vision for the staged music drama he would strive to produce for the rest of his life. At the same time, as miniature Gesamtkunstwerk, it enacts its own breakdown—the failure to overpower operagoers through ceaseless and seamless multimedia spectacle. As such, it might also anticipate a change in Wagner’s theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk itself. From the mid-1850s on, inspired by his reading of Schopenhauer, the composer gradually moved emphasis from drama back to music. When explicating this shift in his influential “Beethoven” essay of 1870, he drew on Schopenhauer for an analogy between allegorical dreams and the truth content of music. While the visible world would always remain at the level of mere appearances, music answered the call for true nature: the cry of the awakening dreamer, he held, symbolized the rise of music as the core of all art.⁹⁷ This analogy obviously resonates with the second Venusberg scene, where Tannhäuser rouses “as though starting from a dream” and instinctively refers to sound as cause and emblem of his unfulfilled desires. Accordingly, his awakening is ceremonially followed by the opera’s first aria—a stage song, moreover, in which he articulates his longing for true nature we observed above. Wagner’s later theoretical move thus reinforces Tannhäuser’s complaint that real life cannot be generated or replicated by amassing artificial media.

In the end, Wagner might have wanted it both ways, identifying with both Venus and Tannhäuser, seeking to reign over the staging while simultaneously breaking free of Venus’s directorial tyranny in search of expressive musical freedom. Within the opera, though, Tannhäuser’s dream remained elusive, and the Venusberg experience became a nightmare for both Tannhäuser and the goddess.⁹⁸ The failure to reconcile their positions signals, perhaps, the crucial dilemma of Wagner’s career, as well as of nineteenth-century opera at large: the impossibility of incorporating the staging into works to the same extent as music and text. For all of Wagner’s sly promotion of the Gesamtkunstwerk in theory and practice, my allegorical reading suggests that he may have known all along that he would ultimately fail to forge a complete—and completely natural—multimedia unity, and that it was unfeasible to regulate its presentation and reception entirely, even in his own theater. Perhaps it was this hunch that (along with his discovery of Schopenhauer) motivated his conceptual return to music as the total artwork’s primal seed, and that eventually caused him to abandon revisions of Tannhäuser as well—an opera whose plot structure would always thwart the integration of the theatrical as crystallized in the Venusberg.

When Wagner professed at the end of his life that he still owed Tannhäuser, then, he may have referred not only to further changes to the score but also to his overall failure to fully live up to his vision and outdo Venus—that is, to attain total control over both stage and audience. Small wonder that both he and Cosima Wagner were so eager to produce Tannhäuser at Bayreuth: they must have thought that the allegory of the Gesamtkunstwerk might be redeemed in (and by) the Venusberg incarnate. And yet, figuratively speaking, Wagner had already devoted the Festspielhaus to nothing other than bringing the Venusberg aboveground. From this perspective, his efforts to veil the stage technologies on which he so heavily relied (just like his hiding from the public eye the stimulating pink silk inside his cloaks) appear as a struggle to repress the Venusberg scenes’ premonition of failure. Like the magician Nietzsche accused him of being, Wagner knew the mechanism behind his creations, the pretense on which his claims rested. And in order to mask this inconvenient truth (or his own darker side), he all the more doggedly sought to make his vision appear plausible in writing and onstage.

Arguably, the closest he came to achieving this goal was not with any production of Tannhäuser but with his last work, Parsifal (1882). This was the only opera written specifically for Bayreuth, and Wagner’s original staging was preserved there exclusively for an unprecedented administrative eternity (the thirty years’ duration of contemporary copyright protection). Tellingly, Parsifal’s plot inverts seminal aspects of Tannhäuser’s trajectory and its relation between nature and artifice, society and underworld. Once again—though this time in the middle act—(dark) magic appears as perfected theatrical wizardry to conjure an occult and dimly lit artificial realm, complete with tropical vegetation, charming maidens, and an ageless seductress emerging from the depths of the earth. (So similar are Venus’s and Klingsor’s dominions that the Brückner studio’s original set for the magic garden clearly rubbed off on their design for Bayreuth’s 1891 Venusberg.⁹⁹) Once again this enclosed magical fortress is contrasted with the religious sphere, chanting believers, sunny meadows, and the redeeming sounds of the “Dresden Amen.” But Parsifal’s Venusberg no longer provides the source and frame of the drama, or the nucleus of multimedia enchantment. Dramaturgically, it remains mere episode; dramatically, it gets undone once and for all; musically and visually, it appears as the most traditionally operatic scene. As Wagner himself admitted, he was using his “old paintpot” while composing act 2—a metaphor for “sensuous intervals” that nevertheless evokes both the Venusberg’s colorful interior and its overall artifice.¹⁰⁰ The redeeming Gesamtkunstwerk proper has meanwhile been aired out and transformed into a truly natural, even sacred, landscape. In the Holy Grail meadows, time famously “turns into space” and visitors are free to come and go. Nature and art, time and space, ritualistic performance and audience here fuse. By the end of his life, Wagner’s artwork was no longer in need of allegorical seclusion. Not even Tannhäuser might have fled this gracious (and spacious) landscape—just as critics tended to be less polemical about Parsifal than about any previous Wagner opera.

In Parsifal, in short, Wagner confidently pursued the Gesamtkunstwerk’s victory over artifice. Innocence, compassion, and faith overcome the magic castle and its technological wonders that were built on—and symbolic of—modern society’s capital offense against nature, Klingsor’s self-castration: no operatic moment illustrates more literally (and ghoulishly) media scholar Marshall McLuhan’s claim that “[a]ny invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies.”¹⁰¹ Klingsor’s magic realm is a prosthesis to take the place of his virility, the epitome of a manmade mechanical effect displacing the organic power of nature. By implication, its rejection and destruction reinstate nature’s principles. As Wagner had outlined in his early theories, the newfound return to nature enacted in Parsifal thus not only opens up a space for his total artwork, but also heralds—at least on the level of plot—the salvation of mankind. Moreover, the simple belief exhibited by Parsifal, “pure fool made wise by compassion,” might suggest the attitude an ideal audience was to assume for this salvation to take place—and for the illusionist staging to succeed.

Still, this victory could be made perceptible onstage only through those same technical means that Wagner (like other contemporary composers and practitioners) had honed, with variable success, throughout his life. Even the overcoming of technics by nature had to be staged within the realm of technē. Let us descend, then, into opera’s technological Venusberg, the mechanical underbelly of Wagner’s theories and practices, and peer at the instruments he and others wielded in the attempt to turn into a directorial Venus. Just like Tannhäuser, though, we shall eventually resurface to full daylight at the end of each of the following chapters, taking a bird’s-eye view of the durability of technologies and stage effects, the perpetuity composers at least implicitly desired for aspects of their stagings, and these facets’ Venusberg-like transformations over time. Having used Wagner’s Tannhäuser as a lens through which to view the nineteenth-century desire to achieve multimedia fusion on the opera stage, we shall now zoom in on select material practices and mechanical procedures by which composers sought to realize—and force onto stage—this metaphysical utopia.