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,
