as well as of the broader, deeply troubled nineteenth-century utopia of total medial control in opera.
THE VENUSBERG SCENES AS GESAMTKUNSTWERK
Let us, then, imagine ourselves in the Dresden Court Theater in 1845, for the premiere of Tannhäuser. After a substantial overture, the curtain rises, but not onto the busy introductory chorus that we as mid-nineteenth-century operagoers would expect. Instead, the title hero and Venus, one of the opera’s two leading ladies, are immediately disclosed. Yet we do not hear these singers. It takes roughly a minute and a half (or 112 measures) of iridescent orchestral music before the onset of any singing, albeit only the gentle backstage chorus of invisible sirens inviting love. Wagner allows a further four minutes (172 measures) before the protagonists open their mouths. (The Paris version would have us wait even longer: almost seven minutes for the sirens and over twelve for the first solo.9) During this exceptionally extended singing-free time, however, we see and hear a good deal else. After all, we are inside of the Venusberg, and the goddess of love does not live poorly. Her grotto is animated by sirens and loving couples arranged around its sides, with bathing naiads in the background; at center stage, dancing nymphs are soon joined by a train of bacchantes. In Paris, youths, fauns, satyrs, the three Graces, and cupids also participate: they hustle and bustle, dance and chase each other to chromatically charged and dazzlingly fluctuating orchestral music in a bright E major, with dominating high strings and winds accented by sparkling cymbals and triangle. Instead of an opening chorus, in a word, we are faced with a glittering ballet.
Yet Wagner did not envision “dance as is usual in our operas and ballets.” As he explained in his 1852 “Notes on the Performance of Tannhäuser,” he had in mind “a consolidation of everything the highest art of dance and pantomime can accomplish: a seductively wild and enchanting chaos of groups and movements ranging from the softest delight, yearning, and longing to the most delirious impetuosity of frenzied riot.”10 About the much more lavish Paris version, the composer similarly confessed that what he demanded in “the huge and unconventional dance scenes of the first act . . . was unheard-of and departed radically from traditional choreographic practices”11—a remarkable claim for a production in Paris, the European capital of ballet. After all, fusing dance and pantomime was not uncommon. In France it had most recently yielded the independent genre of ballet pantomime (or ballet d’action), which during the 1830s and 1840s was arguably as important to the Paris Opéra as grand opéra proper.12 Some French operas also included pantomime in addition to (or as part of) their obligatory ballet, a practice Wagner had adopted in Rienzi to adorn the celebratory act 1 finale. In underlining the otherness of Tannhäuser’s beginning, however, he did have a point. Its wistful evocation of chaos (in Paris of “utmost fury” and “extreme rage”) seemed a far cry from the “ballet du genre noble et gracieuse” for which the Opéra had the prerogative among nineteenth-century Parisian theaters.13 Moreover, pantomimic elements were typically included at the ends of acts to suspend tension, and ballets would usually occur in the second (and never in the first) act, as Wagner’s Parisian detractors gleefully reminded him.14 Flying in the face of these conventions, the Venusberg opens Tannhäuser with a closed dramatic scene—a miniature enactment of mythic nature’s orgiastic power—that sets the stage both visually and allegorically for the ensuing action.15
For the Paris Tannhäuser, Wagner animated his stage with a further type of artistic expression, in addition to dance and pantomime. After the frolicking couples have dispersed, two successive visions of erotic mythological scenes appear in the background: the abduction of Europe by Zeus in the form of a bull, and the seduction of Leda by Zeus as a swan. Labeling these visions Nebelbilder, or “dissolving views,” Wagner alluded to their seeming immateriality, as he pictured them emerging from the “scent” of the grotto. Yet the term also referred to the homonymous optical medium popular in London since 1839 and introduced to Germanic spectators in Vienna in 1843. This new entertainment produced dissolving views through two (or more) magic lanterns that enabled the fading of one image into the next, thus simulating animation and change over time.16 It seems deliberate that Wagner likewise prescribed not one but two related Nebelbilder, separated by a period of “fade” (albeit an extended one to allow for the backstage set-up of the second vision) during which the three Graces “interpret” the first vision in dance. In turn, the dissolving views correlate with the siren chorus and its echo, providing a visual commentary on, or dramatic motivation for, the sudden outburst of acousmatic vocal music that, in the Dresden version, had merely interrupted the dance. In the Paris Venusberg, Wagner merged dance, pantomime, and live enactment of a recent optical medium with orchestral and choral ambient music to generate a minutely choreographed multimedia experience.
Tannhäuser’s most innovative scene thus acts out Wagner’s goal of media integration—“this most frank mutual permeation, generation, and completion of each art form out of itself and through each other . . . [through which] is born the united Lyric Art-Work.”17 In other words, the opening Venusberg scene (in both versions) exemplifies the theories laid out in Wagner’s 1849 essay “The Art-Work of the Future” on how to meld the individual arts into a Gesamtkunstwerk that transcends the sum of its parts. That the Venusberg includes figures from classical mythology (in an opera based on Germanic myths, no less) seems only to underline Wagner’s belief that the resulting work would succeed the hitherto unsurpassed Greek tragedy as ultimate Drama.18 Similarly, the three Graces of the Paris version call to mind Wagner’s own allegory, found in “The Art-Work,” of three closely entwined sisters representing the coveted fusion of dance, music, and poetry in his anticipated music drama.19 Small wonder that he placed special emphasis on the staging of this opening “dance.” Even in the Dresden version, he considered this “not an easy” task: “to produce the desired chaotic effect undoubtedly requires the most careful artistic treatment of the smallest details.” The director was to follow his scenic directions meticulously and listen intently to the music for additional instructions.20 This equal emphasis on words and music as indicators for stage action is another token of the close audiovisual alignment he coveted.
Moreover, with its temporary abstinence from solo song the Venusberg prefigures a basic premise of Wagner’s early conception of the Gesamtkunstwerk: it enacts the birth of music drama out of dance, the art that in “The Art-Work” Wagner would call “[t]he most realistic” and place at the helm of his three “purely human” (reinmenschliche) arts of dance, poetry, and music.21 As such, the Venusberg scenes exhibit the relationship between dramatic situation, orchestral music, and sung melody (Versmelodie) that Wagner would theorize a few years later in Opera and Drama. Just as the musical melody emerged out of the “speaking-verse” (Sprachvers), he explained, “so have we to picture the dramatic Situation as growing from conditions which mount, before our eyes, to a height whereon the Verse-Melody appears the only fit, the necessary expression of a definitely proclaimed emotion.”22 That is to say, the dramatic situation was to intensify gradually to a point of emotional specificity that naturally required the singing voice for adequate expression. Thus Wagner strove to remedy opera’s perennial quandary regarding the artificiality of onstage singing.
Such a careful medial buildup is indeed precisely what happens in the Venusberg. The set, the lighting, the dancers, and the orchestra’s consistent “sound fields”—its high trills and narrow-ranged chromatic motifs—conjure the sensually charged atmosphere of the fabled mons horrisonus (the horribly sounding mountain), while the brief sirens’ chorus expands this ephemeral sonic architecture more than it adds meaning.23 Only once the dramatic setting has been established visually, viscerally, and acoustically can the orchestra turn to the protagonists. In three brief, markedly distinct, and rhythmically disjointed passages that Wagner left intact in all later versions, the orchestra now reveals the state of affairs between Venus and Tannhäuser (example 1.1). The first passage, a dryly sculpted, marcato forte motif for unison strings, strikingly departs from the previous musical fluctuation; according to the stage directions, it renders Tannhäuser “as though starting from a dream.”24 Next, two solo clarinets