of technological development, La Fura dels Baus enacts opera’s inherent reliance on the live interaction between humans and machines. As such, their production engages an ongoing cultural nostalgia for embodied technologies, corporeal media, and the machine age. By the same token, it may be precisely opera’s inherent material and medial hybridity that feeds a renewed fascination with this genre. Opera’s unapologetic embrace of mixed media, of singing bodies and reeling technologies, and its presupposition of a blatantly suspended disbelief in the reality of the audiovisual performance may in the end prove more forward-looking—or current, at least—than Wagner imagined. All the more reason, then, to give opera’s Wagnerian technologies their historic and conceptual due.
1
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
