“from the auditorium the public . . . vanishes to itself, and lives and breathes now only in the artwork, which seems to it as Life itself, and on the stage, which seems to it the wide expanse of the whole World.”39 Like Venus’s scent, the music drama was to meld artist, performers, and audience into a common surge of devotion to Wagner’s goal.
In the fleeting, animated exhibition of the Venusberg, then, Wagner momentarily envisaged what his Gesamtkunstwerk might feel like onstage, and how it ought to be enacted and perceived. In its structure, dramaturgy, gestures, and colors, as well as in its physicality, sensuality, and multimediality, the Venusberg offers a fully realized snapshot of Wagner’s life-long artistic zeal. Small wonder that Wagner originally considered calling his opera Der Venusberg.40
THE BAYREUTH VENUSBERG
The Venusberg thus unfolded a concrete demonstration of Wagner’s absorptive Gesamtkunstwerk first before its theoretical conceptualization and subsequently in interaction with it: in a topically resonant way, we might construe the Venusberg as the womb out of which was born Wagner’s theatrical objective.41 Yet how was this ideal to be realized? How was Wagner to create onstage the flawless medial integration Venus magically achieved in his vision? Once again, the Venusberg scenes themselves provide clues—evidence that may help us understand more fully how Wagner imagined the final appearance of his Gesamtkunstwerk, and how (and why) he went out of his way to control its onstage realization, technologies and all.
As a goddess, Venus has complete power over her realm. In the Dresden version, this is suggested by her dominating presence; indeed, the preface to the 1845 libretto explained that in the mountain “Lady Venus held her court of luxury and voluptuousness”—in other words, she was in charge.42 Her autocracy was underpinned in Paris by the fact that the three Graces (no less) report to her. Furthermore, at the height of her conflict with Tannhäuser, Venus conjures a second grotto with a mere sign of her hand.43 One can easily picture Wagner longing for such authority and honors, particularly in the theater. As we saw in the introduction, he had always been keen to influence his works’ staged appearances, and over the course of his career he developed an acute desire to achieve a “correct,” exemplary rendition.44 Along these lines, he admitted of the 1860 preparations for the Paris Tannhäuser that he had never fared better regarding performances: “Everything I possibly demand is being done: nowhere the slightest resistance. . . . Every detail is being submitted for my approval: . . . Now everything will be perfect.”45 A goddess could barely ask for greater subservience. Total rule over all of theater’s multiple media was key to actualizing Wagner’s vision.
Yet even in Paris Wagner would not fully achieve this goal. Precisely as he exercised that willpower, he made enemies by resisting local conventions and audience expectations, affronting his collaborators, and snubbing the public.46 Such diva behavior did not go well with critics and the audience’s influential Jockey Club members: Wagner was no goddess, after all. The performance that he had hoped would become “the best that has ever happened or that will take place in the near future” thus turned into one of the greatest scandals in operatic history.47 Venus had avoided such a debacle—and thereby proffered another roadmap to theatrical success: the territory she commanded was her own. To wit, Wagner would need his own theater, perhaps even his own audience. And these requirements are precisely what he began to realize as plans for his Ring cycle unfolded. In the early 1850s, he dissociated this gargantuan project from the “theater of today” and its repertory business; instead, he craved a provisional theater purposely built for the exclusive execution of his tetralogy, to which he would invite solely interested spectators. A decade later (tellingly, after the Paris failure), he conceived of these performances as a summer festival for which he could gather the best performers from across the country—like Venus summoning her Graces.48
Analogies between Venus’s grotto and what would materialize, during the 1870s, as Wagner’s Festspielhaus did not end with the creation of the latter. Venusberg and Bayreuth’s so-called Green Hill: both heights are widely visible yet located—as Wagner had requested in 1852 for his theater—“in some beautiful solitude.”49 Venus’s grotto and Wagner’s Festspielhaus: both are outwardly unassuming. True to the German idealist preference for inner essence over outer appearance, they reserve their magic for the inside, revealed exclusively to those who truly seek (and gain) access, and are willing to travel and pay the price of admittance. Both are sui generis, affording unique alternatives to established society and its (then) institutionalized culture. And both offer exile to their masters, sheltering Venus from medieval Christianity and Wagner from urban Munich’s political and personal strife.50 Like the grotto, the Festspielhaus is constructed for enhanced audience absorption, allowing spectators to rest their visually and aurally engrossed heads, Tannhäuser-like, directly in the lap of Venus (or artistic pleasure). The auditorium is only dimly lit, closing off the senses to everyday reality. And just as Venus’s grotto “bends to the right in the background so that its end seems invisible,” the Bayreuth theater’s double proscenium extends the illusion of the stage into the distance.51 The depth of the grotto obscures the source of the siren songs much as the “mystic abyss” of Bayreuth’s famously sunken pit hides the orchestra.52 And those same depths produce multimedia wonders just like Bayreuth’s unusually high stage house. (The heat and smells pervading the Festspielhaus during the inaugural festival were unintended evocations of Venus’s sultry ambience.53)
The Venusberg, in short, foreshadowed Bayreuth in significant ways. For over three decades, it endowed Wagner with a safe and secluded allegorical laboratory in which he could experiment with his Gesamtkunstwerk-as-staged. Bayreuth’s debt to Venus did not escape the composer. In 1872, when taking a walk to the construction site of the Festspielhaus, Cosima Wagner reported on the “colorful, volcanic appearance, the earth green and pink: ‘There is the Venusberg already,’ says R[ichard].”54 Nature and theater, the primal force of Earth erupting and the lure of artistic artifice, merged in Wagner’s notion of the Venusberg as vibrant locus of the Gesamtkunstwerk. It seems hardly accidental, then, that he abandoned this conceptual workshop (along with revisions of Tannhäuser) only after 1875, the year rehearsals in the actual Festspielhaus began. Tannhäuser’s Venus had stood in for Wagner; but now the composer could fill his own theater with sensual performances.
He did so by following Venus once more, adopting some ways in which she had transformed her grotto into a charmingly decorated and gracefully animated space. With Tannhäuser’s ballet pantomime and the dissolving views of the Paris version evolving in the background, the grotto’s far end serves as a natural stage for which the veiling perfumes become organically moving, flexible curtains like the ones that Wagner dreamed up for his Ring cycle (as chapters 2 and 4 will show). By the same token, Venus commands the music in a way that heralds the notorious opening of Das Rheingold with which the Festspielhaus would be inaugurated in 1876:55 it is she who performs the shift from orchestral to vocal melody, and only at her command does Tannhäuser pick up his harp and break into stage song for the opera’s first aria. All in all, Venus’s seemingly natural realm is carefully groomed, its artificiality simultaneously signified and masked by the “rosy scent” and the Paris version’s “wonderful, coral-like” vegetation.56 Venus demonstrates that all the arts and their sensorial stimuli are needed to give rise to the craved naturalness of multimedia spectacle, and thereby enhance the latter’s quasi-erotic appeal.57
Even Venus’s choice of a grotto appears instructive regarding Wagner’s theatrical agenda. True, grottos and caves had been favored settings in opera since the genre’s inception. But the rise of pleasure gardens since the sixteenth century had also brought about a fashion for manmade grottos that were often ornately decorated with shells and tuff (that is to say, with inorganic yet natural substances), equipped with complicated waterworks (Wagner’s greenish cascade), and, increasingly, animated by automatons (or nymphs) to complete their illusion of lifelike nature. According to art historian Horst Bredekamp, such grottos were “a perfect location in which to manifest the transition of apparently untouched yet structured nature to art