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
