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
