the Venusberg scenes paved the road toward the Gesamtkunstwerk by developing a vision of its onstage appearance, they also already prefigured a central aesthetic conundrum, a challenge that Wagner would painfully encounter when seeking to realize this ideal in actual theaters, even—and specifically—in those productions over which he had the most control. For although Venus qua goddess commands her technologies flawlessly, she does not succeed in capturing Tannhäuser for good. This might seem paradoxical. Inasmuch as the Venusberg shares crucial structural traits with the Gesamtkunstwerk and Venus herself so closely resembles Wagner, why does Tannhäuser, the representative spectator, not appreciate it? Why does the effect of Venus’s media magic wear off even in the elaborate Paris version? And what does this failure mean for the validity of Wagner’s theatrical project overall?
By way of concluding my allegorical reading, let us ask Tannhäuser himself. “Too much! Too much!” (Zu viel! Zu viel!), he laconically responds before explaining in his Venus song what exactly this overkill consists of. There is, first, the daunting prospect of eternity—the timelessness that Venus’s grotto congeals into endless space. This eternity, along with the perpetuity of a single sensual pleasure, makes Tannhäuser long to return to temporality and its rhythms, to the natural changes of feelings, seasons, light, and life. His rejection of infinity can easily be translated into musical terms and associated with the ubiquitous charges levied against Wagner’s works (and his diva-like megalomania) from the 1840s on. Key was what Wagner later sanctified as “endless melody” (unendliche Melodie) and linked to the continuous orchestral flow of emotional expression.88 Critics tended to find this seemingly unending, artificial declamation boring. Instead, they wished for traditional musical numbers with their clear melodic phrases and hummable tunes, the time- honored change between recitative and aria (along with their different modes of temporality), and a variety of forms—which is to say, the same ebb and flow of emotions and appearances whose absence Tannhäuser laments. Not coincidentally, commentators missed such temporal structures particularly in the “aphoristic” Venusberg music.89 By contrast, the remainder of Tannhäuser consists mostly of traditional operatic scenes, complete with arias, ensembles, and grand finales. To begin with, though, there is tranquility after the musical dissolution of the Venusberg into ethereal high strings and flutes (the “blue skies and serene sunlight” of the “beautiful valley” indicated in the score).90 The pit orchestra keeps silent for almost five minutes (seventy-three measures), inverting its long, voice-free presence at the opera’s opening. Instead we hear a rare succession of purely diegetic music—sounds that emanate quasi-naturally from the onstage world: a shepherd’s song, piping, and an a cappella pilgrims’ chorus. Only in anticipation of Tannhäuser’s reaction does the pit orchestra sneak back in. Its temporary muteness outside the Venusberg thus underlines its affinity to technology we observed in the introduction to this book. It also renders audible just how central Wagner’s orchestra was for his effort to overwhelm audiences with the Venusberg-Gesamtkunstwerk.
Ironically, then, Tannhäuser seems to side with Wagner’s critics, questioning the artistic premises of his music drama by suggesting that breaks in the stream of orchestral data are required to maintain audience attention. More importantly in our context, Tannhäuser’s flight from monotonous eternity may also challenge Wagner’s efforts to tightly prescribe the productions of his operas, which imbued stagings with “workness” and, by implication, with a claim to quasi-timeless validity. Does the Venusberg scenario insinuate that a natural emergence and life cycle of productions could be more satisfying? Did Wagner sense, perhaps inadvertently, that spectators would long for change not only during one operatic evening but also in the staged experience of a single work over time? And is this why Tannhäuser initially buries his head in Venus’s lap, to avoid seeing too much and to safeguard his own inner vision?
Tannhäuser’s second stanza substantiates this suspicion. Too much, he now says, of “rosy scents,” as opposed to “forest airs.” Too much, that is, of intoxicating perfumes, just like many critics felt anesthetized by Wagner’s ceaseless and chromatically suffused music. Too much, more generally, of artificiality, which simply cannot replace what Tannhäuser misses: natural light and the warmth of sunshine, “fresh green meadows” and “the clear blue of our skies,” birdsong and the peal of bells—in other words, the touches, sights, and sounds of a pastoral landscape. Venus here learns what Wagner would later experience in Bayreuth: no matter how perfectly her technologies function, her Venusberg theater cannot fully simulate nature, cannot indefinitely pretend to present “real life.” By the same token, even the best-equipped nineteenth-century theater would ultimately prove unable to stage 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