various procedures he had tried to achieve the desired natural fades.82 For the Venusberg’s brief “spectral apparition” in act 3, by contrast, he simply described the intended result and appealed to “the inventive talent of the scene-painter and machinist . . . [to] devise some contraption whereby the effect may be produced as though the glowing Venusberg were drawing nearer, and stretching wide enough—being transparent—to hold within it groups of dancing figures.”83 Wagner did not possess the gifts to magically conjure up such animated apparitions, nor did he command full knowledge of the mechanics that could stand in for Venus’s powers.
Realizing his Venusberg vision would instead become a lifelong work in progress that evolved with each production. Yet Wagner remained disappointed with the outcomes, and he accounted for this dissatisfaction with his limited control over the execution. “The orchestra lifeless, the ballet quite out of keeping with the music, the singers inadequate, the decorations deficient, the stage mechanics bungled”—thus did Cosima Wagner sum up her husband’s impression of the 1875 Viennese dress rehearsal for the last production he was to see. “Only in Bayreuth,” she had already anticipated, “will he ever achieve a really good performance of Tannhäuser.” Indeed, a mere week before his death, Wagner named Tannhäuser as the first opera after Parsifal to be produced at the Festspielhaus.84 All this explains why Cosima Wagner went to the mat over the 1891 production. Beyond being legitimized by the work’s enactment of the struggle for music drama, the Bayreuth premiere was also a quest to achieve Tannhäuser’s ultimate stage realization. Hence her desire to inform her staging with as many documents and eyewitness accounts as she could gather from performances in which Wagner had been involved. Gestures, blocking, number of dancers, cuts, and mechanical procedures were among the details she painstakingly requested, above all from the Paris Opéra, “in order to recover the authentic Tannhäuser, that which it is my obligation to represent in Bayreuth.”85 In other words, similar to Peter Gelb’s PR strategy for the Metropolitan Opera’s 2010–12 Ring cycle discussed in the introduction, Cosima Wagner carefully promoted her staging as faithful—the ultimate fulfillment of Wagner’s dream that could only be achieved in Bayreuth. Yet this did not deter her from flouting the composer’s instructions where such disrespect might help her push the opera further toward music drama. Nor, in the production’s 1904 revival, was Siegfried Wagner averse to incorporating spectacular stage effects (such as a Rheingold-like thunderstorm and rainbow in act 2) that had meanwhile become tokens of Wagner’s mature works and their Bayreuth stagings. That is, Cosima and Siegfried essentially continued Wagner’s project of revising and adapting Tannhäuser in accordance with changing production standards and advancing technologies.86
My brief preview of actual stage practices thus highlights the rift between the faculties of Venus and Wagner, between a multimedia vision and theatrical reality. In turn, this gap explains why technologies became so central to Wagner’s project of actualizing the Gesamtkunstwerk, and why he was so devoted to communicating to collaborators, fellow directors, and posterity both his audiovisual ideas and the means for their closest onstage approximation. The entire transference of his ideal from allegory to real space might be viewed as a technological undertaking. And yet, Wagner’s attitude to technology remained as ambivalent as was Tannhäuser’s relation to the Venusberg. Just as the singer would initially veil his sojourn there as a peregrination “far, far afield,” the composer (as we have seen in this book’s introduction) sought to keep his machineries shamefully (if elaborately) hidden in order to achieve the seamless multimediality that his allegorical Venusberg had paradigmatically modeled.87
TANNHÄUSER’S FLIGHT
If the Venusberg scenes paved the road toward the Gesamtkunstwerk by developing a vision of its onstage appearance, they also already prefigured a central aesthetic conundrum, a challenge that Wagner would painfully encounter when seeking to realize this ideal in actual theaters, even—and specifically—in those productions over which he had the most control. For although Venus qua goddess commands her technologies flawlessly, she does not succeed in capturing Tannhäuser for good. This might seem paradoxical. Inasmuch as the Venusberg shares crucial structural traits with the Gesamtkunstwerk and Venus herself so closely resembles Wagner, why does Tannhäuser, the representative spectator, not appreciate it? Why does the effect of Venus’s media magic wear off even in the elaborate Paris version? And what does this failure mean for the validity of Wagner’s theatrical project overall?
By way of concluding my allegorical reading, let us ask Tannhäuser himself. “Too much! Too much!” (Zu viel! Zu viel!), he laconically responds before explaining in his Venus song what exactly this overkill consists of. There is, first, the daunting prospect of eternity—the timelessness that Venus’s grotto congeals into endless space. This eternity, along with the perpetuity of a single sensual pleasure, makes Tannhäuser long to return to temporality and its rhythms, to the natural changes of feelings, seasons, light, and life. His rejection of infinity can easily be translated into musical terms and associated with the ubiquitous charges levied against Wagner’s works (and his diva-like megalomania) from the 1840s on. Key was what Wagner later sanctified as “endless melody” (unendliche Melodie) and linked to the continuous orchestral flow of emotional expression.88 Critics tended to find this seemingly unending, artificial declamation boring. Instead, they wished for traditional musical numbers with their clear melodic phrases and hummable tunes, the time- honored change between recitative and aria (along with their different modes of temporality), and a variety of forms—which is to say, the same ebb and flow of emotions and appearances whose absence Tannhäuser laments. Not coincidentally, commentators missed such temporal structures particularly in the “aphoristic” Venusberg music.89 By contrast, the remainder of Tannhäuser consists mostly of traditional operatic scenes, complete with arias, ensembles, and grand finales. To begin with, though, there is tranquility after the musical dissolution of the Venusberg into ethereal high strings and flutes (the “blue skies and serene sunlight” of the “beautiful valley” indicated in the score).90 The pit orchestra keeps silent for almost five minutes (seventy-three measures), inverting its long, voice-free presence at the opera’s opening. Instead we hear a rare succession of purely diegetic music—sounds that emanate quasi-naturally from the onstage world: a shepherd’s song, piping, and an a cappella pilgrims’ chorus. Only in anticipation of Tannhäuser’s reaction does the pit orchestra sneak back in. Its temporary muteness outside the Venusberg thus underlines its affinity to technology we observed in the introduction to this book. It also renders audible just how central Wagner’s orchestra was for his effort to overwhelm audiences with the Venusberg-Gesamtkunstwerk.
Ironically, then, Tannhäuser seems to side with Wagner’s critics, questioning the artistic premises of his music drama by suggesting that breaks in the stream of orchestral data are required to maintain audience attention. More importantly in our context, Tannhäuser’s flight from monotonous eternity may also challenge Wagner’s efforts to tightly prescribe the productions of his operas, which imbued stagings with “workness” and, by implication, with a claim to quasi-timeless validity. Does the Venusberg scenario insinuate that a natural emergence and life cycle of productions could be more satisfying? Did Wagner sense, perhaps inadvertently, that spectators would long for change not only during one operatic evening but also in the staged experience of a single work over time? And is this why Tannhäuser initially buries his head in Venus’s lap, to avoid seeing too much and to safeguard his own inner vision?
Tannhäuser’s second stanza substantiates this suspicion. Too much, he now says, of “rosy scents,” as opposed to “forest airs.” Too much, that is, of intoxicating perfumes, just like many critics felt anesthetized by Wagner’s ceaseless and chromatically suffused music. Too much, more generally, of artificiality, which simply cannot replace what Tannhäuser misses: natural light and the warmth of sunshine, “fresh green meadows” and “the clear blue of our skies,” birdsong and the peal of bells—in other words, the touches, sights, and sounds of a pastoral landscape. Venus here learns what Wagner would later experience in Bayreuth: no matter how perfectly her technologies function,
