intensity with which Venus pulls Tannhäuser toward herself.25 The strings then burst into a rising eighth-note passage of quickly increasing density in texture, chromaticism, pitch, and dynamics, while Tannhäuser “covers his eyes with his hand as if to hold fast a vision.” Tellingly, it is at this point of introspection—of shielding a mental picture—that the orchestral expressivity grows to such a degree that only the singing voice can continue its trajectory. Over the loud diminished chord that ends this passage like a question mark, Venus vocalizes her anguish by asking her beloved: “Where are your thoughts?” As the voice enters, the orchestra simultaneously recedes into the more traditional role of recitative accompaniment: verbal articulation temporarily takes over from visual, gestural, and orchestral communication.26
EXAMPLE 1.1. Richard Wagner, Tannhäuser, act 1, scene 2: opening of the 1845 “Dresden version.” © By kind permission of SCHOTT MUSIC, Mainz.
In these first fourteen measures of Tannhäuser’s act 1, scene 2, Wagner thus illustrated what he would soon describe as the ideal relationship between drama, gesture, orchestral music, and sung words: a dramatically motivated progression from audiovisual ambient scene setting via increased orchestral expressivity to the inclusion of signifying language. In so doing, he also framed the raising of the singing voice as a natural process. As Wagner explained in Opera and Drama, confronting the audience immediately with a “complete, ready-made melody” would render the latter just as unintelligible as a prefabricated dramatic situation. Only by observing both music and action as something “whose Becoming is ever present to us,” like that of nature, could the spectator comprehend them. Therefore, the Gesamtkunstwerk was to be presented “in continuous organic growth,” lest it turn into a cold “masterpiece of mechanism.”27 The Venusberg scenes, then, do not only trace the evolution of music drama out of dance; they also demonstrate how all its media ought to merge gradually and naturally. And this was a seminal strategy for Wagner, one used to fend off the charge of mechanistic (that is, dramatically unwarranted) effect: it prevented his artwork from declining into the merely technological. Given Wagner’s conviction that his music drama was to effect the regeneration of society through its release from alienating industrial civilization and its return to nature (as discussed in my introduction), the Venusberg emerges as a prime location to experience the craved purification of art from anything mechanical.
The aspiration to return to (albeit idealized) nature was fostered by yet another way in which the Venusberg scenes presage Wagner’s theories. Regarding the scenery and stage setting, he declared, the theater must “be able to depict the living image of nature. . . . The walls of this Scene, which look down coldly and impassively upon the artist and towards the public, must deck themselves with the fresh tints of Nature, with the warm light of ether, to be worthy of taking their share in the human artwork.”28 And nature is where Venus has made her home. Wagner’s stage directions quite literally “deck out” the three visible walls of her grotto: for the background, he envisioned a seemingly endless extension with a blue lake; for its sides, raised shores and rocky ledges; and the entire space was to be illuminated by “rosy light.” For the staging at the Paris Opéra, with its—for Wagner—unprecedented financial and technical possibilities, he expanded these already extensive directions into a detailed dramaturgy of color and light. In addition to the reddish-rosy light (now emanating from below the foreground), some “dim daylight” shines through a rocky opening, while “blue haze” hovers in the distance. Complementing the horizontal blue lake, a “greenish cascade falls the whole height of the grotto,” its white waves “wildly foaming,” and the irregularly shaped ledges are “overgrown with wonderful coral-like tropical vegetation.” The Paris Venusberg, in short, features reds, blues, greens, and whites in various gradations and all possible spatial dimensions. (Only yellow is missing, being reserved for the sunny aboveground world and Tannhäuser’s final redemption.)
Just how unusual such elaborate directions were can be gleaned from Heinrich Marschner’s romantic opera Hans Heiling of 1833. Its prologue is similarly set in a cave governed by a queen—a netherworld from which the title hero flees for the sake of earthly ventures and to which he will eventually return. “Subterranean, widely arched cave, which shows the entrances to several lateral caves, illuminated by reddish dim light” and showing “ragged walls”—thus the initial setting: a mere sketch of (if likely an inspiration for) the sumptuous Venusberg.29 By contrast, Wagner’s directions read like a paint-by-number manual. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that his description of the Venusberg, with all its intricate details and mythic resonances, inspired visual artists for decades to come.30
This continued inspiration must have pleased Wagner, for his call in “The Art-Work” was for the collaboration of true landscape painters, rather than routine stage designers: “What the painter’s expert eye has seen in Nature, . . . he dovetails into the united work of all the arts, as his own abundant share. Through him the scene takes on complete artistic truth: his drawing, his color, his warmly stimulating application of light, compel Nature to serve the highest purpose of art.” In return for thus providing the stage with the colors and appearances of nature, Wagner promised that painting would be consummated within the Gesamtkunstwerk:
That which the landscape painter . . . has erstwhile forced into the narrow frames of panel-pictures—what he affixed to the egoist’s secluded chamber walls, or offered for the random, incoherent, and garbled stacking in a picture-storehouse [i.e., museum]—with this he will henceforth fill the ample framework of the tragic stage. . . . The illusion which his brush and finest blend of colours could only hint at and merely distantly approach, he will here bring to perfectly deceptive representation through the artistic use of every known device of optics and artistic lighting.31
In its new, theatrical frame, Wagner expected painting to reach—and move—much larger audiences and receive wider appreciation. What is more, it would “effect a livelier impression” through the use of real light and the participation of living humans.32 The Venusberg and its gamboling creatures thus display Wagner’s ideal of a painterly set animated by light, colors, and bodies. In so doing, they also fulfill Wagner’s principle that everything in his Gesamtkunstwerk must become sensually perceivable in order to proceed “from imagination into actuality, that is: physicality [Sinnlichkeit]”; conversely, nothing was to be left to the “fancy” (Einbildungskraft) of the audience.33 In short, the opening Venusberg scene is both ballet pantomime and tableau vivant—the “image of life” manifesting his desired true drama.34
Finally, the most distinct feature of the Venusberg is arguably its “rosy scent.” Metaphorically, Wagner uses this term to denote the pinkish light that magically illuminates the grotto, as well as the clouds and vapors that envelop the dancers and give rise to the Nebelbilder. At the same time, the fragrance signals the grotto’s sultry, erotically suffused ambience that is impossible to evade since olfaction is the most archaic and unmediated of all human senses.35 Wagner’s theory, to be sure, does not encompass smells. But the all-pervading scent neatly symbolizes the function Wagner accorded the music of his invisible orchestra: by merging physical and artistic elements, it “encloses the performer as with an atmospheric ring of Art and Nature.”36 Furthermore, just like critics would soon claim for Wagner’s music, the aroma seems to have an enchanting, even narcotic, effect:37 Tannhäuser, the only human in the Venusberg, is in a state of trance, his posture betraying passivity and submissiveness. In both versions, he is “half kneeling,” his head resting in Venus’s lap. Such an attitude illustrates precisely what Wagner desired for his audience. Its attention, he held, “should never be led to the mere art-media employed, but solely to the artistic object realized thereby,” so that it could fully “enjoy without the slightest effort of an Art-intelligence.”38 That is to say, the spectator was not to pay critical attention to the technologies behind the artwork but solely to experience it sensually—a mode of reception epitomized by the Venusberg’s singular object of lust. Not by chance does Venus remind Tannhäuser of “lovely wonders,” “rapture,” and “blissful song”