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
