Wagner’s most challenging scenes realistically. As we shall see in chapter 4, critics of the 1876 Ring premiere would sneeringly observe that artifice was lurking everywhere. Tannhäuser’s weary reaction to such pretense, in turn, shows that even Venus lacks the power to control her audience’s reception completely. Although she minutely aligns every detail of her spectacle with its sensuous purpose, she cannot shut out the sensations emerging from Tannhäuser’s inner world—the spectator’s imagination that in “The Art-Work” Wagner had hoped to silence.
Too much, then, of Venus’s dominance. As Tannhäuser laments in his third stanza, her grotto has made him but a slave. He may sing only at her command, can live for only one emotion. Along with nature, temporality, and air, he ultimately longs for freedom. This pronouncement rounds off Tannhäuser’s anticipation of anti-Wagnerian polemics, as pronounced above all by Wagner’s fiercest and most astute nineteenth-century detractor, Friedrich Nietzsche. Many a passage from Nietzsche’s 1888 “The Case of Wagner,” in which the philosopher began to settle accounts with the composer, could indeed be substituted for—or read as elaborations of—Tannhäuser’s complaints. “Enough! Enough!” (Genug! Genug!) is how Nietzsche grinds to a halt his cynical account of Wagner’s theories, where he bewails Wagner’s “infinity . . . without melody” and the theatricality of Wagner’s music, in which “[t]he whole no longer lives at all: it is composite, calculated, artificial, an artifact.”91 He contends this artifact arose “from a hallucination—not of sounds but of gestures,” just as happens at the opening of Tannhäuser; and he struggles with “[t]he way Wagner’s pathos holds its breath, refuses to let go an extreme feeling, achieves a terrifying duration of states when even a moment threatens to strangle us.” He insists: “Wagner’s art has the pressure of a hundred atmospheres: stoop, for what else can one do?”92 Like Tannhäuser emerging from this endless submissive pose, Nietzsche begins to rebel when he recognizes that Wagner’s “seductive force increases tremendously [and] clouds of incense surround him,” like the aroma enveloping Venus. And, dreading suffocation, Nietzsche—like Tannhäuser—calls for “Air! More air!”93 A few years earlier, Nietzsche already likened his escape from modern music’s beguiling sickness to a flight from “the nymph’s grotto.”94 Now, the philosopher bids farewell to Wagner the “tyrant” and “old magician”: it is Wagner as Venus whom he can suffer no longer.95
Tannhäuser’s fate thus presages the destiny of many early Wagnerians. Religiously devoted to Wagner in their youth, they later often strove desperately to disentangle themselves from him, embracing instead Bizet, Mozart, or the previously snubbed Italian number opera as the equivalent to their—ostensibly saving—conventional Wartburg world.96 With their treasure-trove of metatheatrical commentaries, therefore, the Venusberg scenes not only forecast the theoretical and stage-practical development of Wagner’s ultimate music-dramatic goal, but also uncannily portend the initially dominant course of its reception.
WAGNER’S VISION
The Venusberg, then, showcases Wagner’s vision for the staged music drama he would strive to produce for the rest of his life. At the same time, as miniature Gesamtkunstwerk, it enacts its own breakdown—the failure to overpower operagoers through ceaseless and seamless multimedia spectacle. As such, it might also anticipate a change in Wagner’s theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk itself. From the mid-1850s on, inspired by his reading of Schopenhauer, the composer gradually moved emphasis from drama back to music. When explicating this shift in his influential “Beethoven” essay of 1870, he drew on Schopenhauer for an analogy between allegorical dreams and the truth content of music. While the visible world would always remain at the level of mere appearances, music answered the call for true nature: the cry of the awakening dreamer, he held, symbolized the rise of music as the core of all art.97 This analogy obviously resonates with the second Venusberg scene, where Tannhäuser rouses “as though starting from a dream” and instinctively refers to sound as cause and emblem of his unfulfilled desires. Accordingly, his awakening is ceremonially followed by the opera’s first aria—a stage song, moreover, in which he articulates his longing for true nature we observed above. Wagner’s later theoretical move thus reinforces Tannhäuser’s complaint that real life cannot be generated or replicated by amassing artificial media.
In the end, Wagner might have wanted it both ways, identifying with both Venus and Tannhäuser, seeking to reign over the staging while simultaneously breaking free of Venus’s directorial tyranny in search of expressive musical freedom. Within the opera, though, Tannhäuser’s dream remained elusive, and the Venusberg experience became a nightmare for both Tannhäuser and the goddess.98 The failure to reconcile their positions signals, perhaps, the crucial dilemma of Wagner’s career, as well as of nineteenth-century opera at large: the impossibility of incorporating the staging into works to the same extent as music and text. For all of Wagner’s sly promotion of the Gesamtkunstwerk in theory and practice, my allegorical reading suggests that he may have known all along that he would ultimately fail to forge a complete—and completely natural—multimedia unity, and that it was unfeasible to regulate its presentation and reception entirely, even in his own theater. Perhaps it was this hunch that (along with his discovery of Schopenhauer) motivated his conceptual return to music as the total artwork’s primal seed, and that eventually caused him to abandon revisions of Tannhäuser as well—an opera whose plot structure would always thwart the integration of the theatrical as crystallized in the Venusberg.
When Wagner professed at the end of his life that he still owed Tannhäuser, then, he may have referred not only to further changes to the score but also to his overall failure to fully live up to his vision and outdo Venus—that is, to attain total control over both stage and audience. Small wonder that both he and Cosima Wagner were so eager to produce Tannhäuser at Bayreuth: they must have thought that the allegory of the Gesamtkunstwerk might be redeemed in (and by) the Venusberg incarnate. And yet, figuratively speaking, Wagner had already devoted the Festspielhaus to nothing other than bringing the Venusberg aboveground. From this perspective, his efforts to veil the stage technologies on which he so heavily relied (just like his hiding from the public eye the stimulating pink silk inside his cloaks) appear as a struggle to repress the Venusberg scenes’ premonition of failure. Like the magician Nietzsche accused him of being, Wagner knew the mechanism behind his creations, the pretense on which his claims rested. And in order to mask this inconvenient truth (or his own darker side), he all the more doggedly sought to make his vision appear plausible in writing and onstage.
Arguably, the closest he came to achieving this goal was not with any production of Tannhäuser but with his last work, Parsifal (1882). This was the only opera written specifically for Bayreuth, and Wagner’s original staging was preserved there exclusively for an unprecedented administrative eternity (the thirty years’ duration of contemporary copyright protection). Tellingly, Parsifal’s plot inverts seminal aspects of Tannhäuser’s trajectory and its relation between nature and artifice, society and underworld. Once again—though this time in the middle act—(dark) magic appears as perfected theatrical wizardry to conjure an occult and dimly lit artificial realm, complete with tropical vegetation, charming maidens, and an ageless seductress emerging from the depths of the earth. (So similar are Venus’s and Klingsor’s dominions that the Brückner studio’s original set for the magic garden clearly rubbed off on their design for Bayreuth’s 1891 Venusberg.99) Once again this enclosed magical fortress is contrasted with the religious sphere, chanting believers, sunny meadows, and the redeeming sounds of the “Dresden Amen.” But Parsifal’s Venusberg no longer provides the source and frame of the drama, or the nucleus of multimedia enchantment. Dramaturgically, it remains mere episode; dramatically, it gets undone once and for all; musically and visually, it appears as the most traditionally operatic scene. As Wagner himself admitted, he was using his “old paintpot” while composing act 2—a metaphor for “sensuous intervals” that nevertheless evokes both the Venusberg’s colorful interior and its overall artifice.100 The redeeming Gesamtkunstwerk proper has meanwhile been aired out and transformed into a truly
