mines had long been considered living microcosms of the world. Producing precious stones and minerals, they served as both model for and locus of early empirical (i.e., technological) and theoretical studies of nature.58 Perhaps it was because of this alchemical association that Wagner used the term grotto for a location that, in light of its width, common parlance would usually have considered a cave.59 His Venusberg, then, was not only the womb in which his idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk took shape. Qua grotto, it also indicated the necessity of technology for the transformative process that would lead to the total artwork’s realization, while its location in—and appearance as—nature at the same time obscured these mechanics.60 Venus achieves her highest vocation as mistress of technology, as commander of the nimble combination of multiple media. If the Venusberg spectacle of mythic nature is (multimedia) theater, Venus embodies the total artist-director.
VENUS AS WAGNER
This artistic affinity between Venus and Wagner is supported by their kinship in the private sphere. Like Venus, Wagner dominated not just the physical domain but also personal relationships: the servile rhetoric of Cosima Wagner’s diaries and her submissive posture in Fritz Luckhardt’s famous 1872 photograph of the couple—with a seated Cosima adoringly gazing up at the composer—are just two resonant evocations of Tannhäuser’s half-kneeling pose.61 Like Venus, moreover, Wagner was enamored of all things rosy. In the 1860s, for instance, he repeatedly ordered ample lengths of pink sateen while fussing about its hues. The darker shade, he warned, was not to be confused “with the earlier violet pink, which is not what I mean here, but genuine rosa [pale pink], only very dark and fiery”; a decade later, he commissioned brocade in “my pink, very pale and delicate.”62 More than light blues, yellows, beiges, and whites, he favored the rose color for those luxurious clothes he liked to don at home, and that inspired him both erotically and compositionally. Ribboned bedspreads and pillows, waistcoats and breeches, dressing gowns and undergarments were tailor-made in various shades of rosa, while some of his outerwear concealed, Venusberg-like, his fetish on the inside—as pink lining.63 By 1880, Wagner joyfully admitted “that life in fact begins with rosa” and “rosa is life itself.”64 Pale pink, that is, represented the least artificial and most animate—even primal—color for the composer. As such, it offered an intimate yet vital link between Wagner’s Venus grotto, his weltanschauung, and his private self.
More tellingly yet, the composer was obsessed with rosy scents. The quantities in which he ordered rose oils, rose powders, and rose essences astounded even his London supplier, who worried about detrimental influences on Wagner’s health.65 In the late 1870s, Wagner kept urging his amour Judith Gautier not to hold back on the amounts of fragrance sent from Paris; among other reasons, he confessed that his bathtub was below his studio and he liked “to smell the perfumes rising.”66 Roses themselves also served as stimulants. In 1863–64, Wagner personally had the boudoir of his opulent Penzing lodgings near Vienna furnished with, among other luxury items, lush satin rose garlands as would decorate the Venusberg of the 1867 Munich Tannhäuser or the Venus of the opera’s Bayreuth premiere of 1891; the “colorful magnificence” of the room, to which he rarely admitted anyone, afforded an aphrodisiac just like Venus’s grotto.67 Gautier, too, was later asked to send silk “strewn with threads of blossoms—roses” for his chaise longue, where he would spend his mornings composing Parsifal—perhaps sprawling like (the Paris) Venus on her “sumptuous couch.”68
The Venusberg’s affinity with Wagner’s effeminate sensual materialism was not lost on contemporaries. As early as the 1850s, Wagner himself had dreamt of sharing “a little Venus chamber” (Venusstübchen) with his first wife, Minna Wagner, whom he wished dressed “in velvet, silk, and satin”; just weeks before his death, Cosima Wagner’s comparison of his Venice room with a “blue grotto” led to the couple ruminating on Wagner’s “desire for colors, for perfumes, the latter having to be very strong, since he takes snuff.”69 More acerbically, in 1865 a Munich satirical journal featured a “new-German composer” named Rumorhäuser who is unable to work unless his colored stockings, silk nightgowns, Oriental carpets, and exotic flowers are all impeccably arranged; to this end, Rumorhäuser issues orders from a “gorgeous bedroom” with velvet tapestries, silk curtains, and “a rocky grotto planted with fragrant moss, ivy, and box,” complete with streamlets and goldfish.70 Away from Wagner’s oft-ridiculed material life, the rose-scented Venusberg thus presented a safe space for the composer: a place where he could enjoy his private fantasies and activate his artistic potency. In a sense, the Venusberg functioned as a technological supplement to amplify his creativity. And ironically, this technical link, too, was symbolized by the Venusberg’s pink hue: Wagner’s quintessence of life was actually foreign to natural color schemes—a synthetic derivative whose rise in both painting and fashion since the seventeenth century was intimately tied to the growing chemical industry.71
Overall, the Venusberg’s gear revealed and simultaneously fulfilled Wagner’s innermost creative needs, just as Venus personified some of his most clandestine traits. The latter, in turn, intriguingly matched the effeminate, sensuous, or erotic qualities often associated with Wagner’s music—and nowhere more so than in the soundscape of the Paris Venusberg.72 To be fair, the mid-nineteenth century did not yet associate pink exclusively with the female wardrobe. By the 1840s, however, the fad for early Romantic dandies to sport bright colors—including pink—as coat linings as well as for scarves and other accessories was giving way to the use of pastel colors for women’s dresses. (That pink underwear and stockings were often utilized by prostitutes made matters worse.73) Sure enough, caricaturists of the 1870s delighted in the discovery of Wagner’s fabric-and-clothes-obsessed letters to his milliner by casting him as a megalomaniac cross-dresser (figure 1.1).74 Yet they could more aptly have depicted him as Venus herself.
FIGURE 1.1. “ ‘Atlas’ in Music,” in Puck. Humoristisch-Satyrische Wochenschrift (Leipzig, July 1, 1877), 205. The title plays on the name of the Greek Titan who carried the heavens (or the musical heights); in contemporary German usage, “Atlas” also referred to satin cloth. In another pun on Wagner’s fetish for luxurious rosy fabrics, the caption has the composer secretly (“sub rosa,” here literally under a rose garland) esteem his political influence as higher than that of German chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek, Klassik-Stiftung Weimar.
While scholars have tended to elide this tantalizing kinship, some productions of Tannhäuser have alluded to it in ways that may help us gauge more deeply the implications of Wagner’s Venus fantasy.75 Wolfgang Wagner’s Bayreuth staging of 1985, for example, heaved Venus onto a stage-like pedestal, where she was bedded on nothing but Wagner’s pale-pink satin. As she rises during her showdown with Tannhäuser, the pink cloth appears as an overlong cape she seductively wraps around herself (figure 1.2). It is when she abandons it (and the pedestal) to approach Tannhäuser imploringly that her strength suddenly fails and she collapses onto her knees in front of him, inverting his opening pose: the pink drapery (Wagner’s artistic stimulant), or so this staging suggests, constituted Venus’s power. At the Baden-Baden Festspielhaus, Nikolaus Lehnhoff in 2008 expanded this play on Wagner’s fetishism and the concomitant materialization of the Venusberg’s scent as pink fabric to explicate the theatrical self-construction of Venus herself. The more Tannhäuser withdraws, the more she sacrifices her artificial image: first her statuesque and elevated pose, then her rosy silken gown (figure 1.3) followed by her light pink dress (which henceforth replace her as the object of Tannhäuser’s sexual fantasies), and finally her wig and hairdo. The goddess deflates before our eyes into an ordinary, fragile woman by casting off all synthetic body enhancements, thereby divulging them as such—and as appendages of theatrical seduction.