rise of music as the core of all art.97 This analogy obviously resonates with the second Venusberg scene, where Tannhäuser rouses “as though starting from a dream” and instinctively refers to sound as cause and emblem of his unfulfilled desires. Accordingly, his awakening is ceremonially followed by the opera’s first aria—a stage song, moreover, in which he articulates his longing for true nature we observed above. Wagner’s later theoretical move thus reinforces Tannhäuser’s complaint that real life cannot be generated or replicated by amassing artificial media.
In the end, Wagner might have wanted it both ways, identifying with both Venus and Tannhäuser, seeking to reign over the staging while simultaneously breaking free of Venus’s directorial tyranny in search of expressive musical freedom. Within the opera, though, Tannhäuser’s dream remained elusive, and the Venusberg experience became a nightmare for both Tannhäuser and the goddess.98 The failure to reconcile their positions signals, perhaps, the crucial dilemma of Wagner’s career, as well as of nineteenth-century opera at large: the impossibility of incorporating the staging into works to the same extent as music and text. For all of Wagner’s sly promotion of the Gesamtkunstwerk in theory and practice, my allegorical reading suggests that he may have known all along that he would ultimately fail to forge a complete—and completely natural—multimedia unity, and that it was unfeasible to regulate its presentation and reception entirely, even in his own theater. Perhaps it was this hunch that (along with his discovery of Schopenhauer) motivated his conceptual return to music as the total artwork’s primal seed, and that eventually caused him to abandon revisions of Tannhäuser as well—an opera whose plot structure would always thwart the integration of the theatrical as crystallized in the Venusberg.
When Wagner professed at the end of his life that he still owed Tannhäuser, then, he may have referred not only to further changes to the score but also to his overall failure to fully live up to his vision and outdo Venus—that is, to attain total control over both stage and audience. Small wonder that both he and Cosima Wagner were so eager to produce Tannhäuser at Bayreuth: they must have thought that the allegory of the Gesamtkunstwerk might be redeemed in (and by) the Venusberg incarnate. And yet, figuratively speaking, Wagner had already devoted the Festspielhaus to nothing other than bringing the Venusberg aboveground. From this perspective, his efforts to veil the stage technologies on which he so heavily relied (just like his hiding from the public eye the stimulating pink silk inside his cloaks) appear as a struggle to repress the Venusberg scenes’ premonition of failure. Like the magician Nietzsche accused him of being, Wagner knew the mechanism behind his creations, the pretense on which his claims rested. And in order to mask this inconvenient truth (or his own darker side), he all the more doggedly sought to make his vision appear plausible in writing and onstage.
Arguably, the closest he came to achieving this goal was not with any production of Tannhäuser but with his last work, Parsifal (1882). This was the only opera written specifically for Bayreuth, and Wagner’s original staging was preserved there exclusively for an unprecedented administrative eternity (the thirty years’ duration of contemporary copyright protection). Tellingly, Parsifal’s plot inverts seminal aspects of Tannhäuser’s trajectory and its relation between nature and artifice, society and underworld. Once again—though this time in the middle act—(dark) magic appears as perfected theatrical wizardry to conjure an occult and dimly lit artificial realm, complete with tropical vegetation, charming maidens, and an ageless seductress emerging from the depths of the earth. (So similar are Venus’s and Klingsor’s dominions that the Brückner studio’s original set for the magic garden clearly rubbed off on their design for Bayreuth’s 1891 Venusberg.99) Once again this enclosed magical fortress is contrasted with the religious sphere, chanting believers, sunny meadows, and the redeeming sounds of the “Dresden Amen.” But Parsifal’s Venusberg no longer provides the source and frame of the drama, or the nucleus of multimedia enchantment. Dramaturgically, it remains mere episode; dramatically, it gets undone once and for all; musically and visually, it appears as the most traditionally operatic scene. As Wagner himself admitted, he was using his “old paintpot” while composing act 2—a metaphor for “sensuous intervals” that nevertheless evokes both the Venusberg’s colorful interior and its overall artifice.100 The redeeming Gesamtkunstwerk proper has meanwhile been aired out and transformed into a truly natural, even sacred, landscape. In the Holy Grail meadows, time famously “turns into space” and visitors are free to come and go. Nature and art, time and space, ritualistic performance and audience here fuse. By the end of his life, Wagner’s artwork was no longer in need of allegorical seclusion. Not even Tannhäuser might have fled this gracious (and spacious) landscape—just as critics tended to be less polemical about Parsifal than about any previous Wagner opera.
In Parsifal, in short, Wagner confidently pursued the Gesamtkunstwerk’s victory over artifice. Innocence, compassion, and faith overcome the magic castle and its technological wonders that were built on—and symbolic of—modern society’s capital offense against nature, Klingsor’s self-castration: no operatic moment illustrates more literally (and ghoulishly) media scholar Marshall McLuhan’s claim that “[a]ny invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies.”101 Klingsor’s magic realm is a prosthesis to take the place of his virility, the epitome of a manmade mechanical effect displacing the organic power of nature. By implication, its rejection and destruction reinstate nature’s principles. As Wagner had outlined in his early theories, the newfound return to nature enacted in Parsifal thus not only opens up a space for his total artwork, but also heralds—at least on the level of plot—the salvation of mankind. Moreover, the simple belief exhibited by Parsifal, “pure fool made wise by compassion,” might suggest the attitude an ideal audience was to assume for this salvation to take place—and for the illusionist staging to succeed.
Still, this victory could be made perceptible onstage only through those same technical means that Wagner (like other contemporary composers and practitioners) had honed, with variable success, throughout his life. Even the overcoming of technics by nature had to be staged within the realm of technē. Let us descend, then, into opera’s technological Venusberg, the mechanical underbelly of Wagner’s theories and practices, and peer at the instruments he and others wielded in the attempt to turn into a directorial Venus. Just like Tannhäuser, though, we shall eventually resurface to full daylight at the end of each of the following chapters, taking a bird’s-eye view of the durability of technologies and stage effects, the perpetuity composers at least implicitly desired for aspects of their stagings, and these facets’ Venusberg-like transformations over time. Having used Wagner’s Tannhäuser as a lens through which to view the nineteenth-century desire to achieve multimedia fusion on the opera stage, we shall now zoom in on select material practices and mechanical procedures by which composers sought to realize—and force onto stage—this metaphysical utopia.
2
Curtain
Berlin, 1858. The popular satirist David Kalisch starts a parody of Wagner’s Tannhäuser: “The curtain rises slowly.”1 His mention of an opening curtain would seem unremarkable were it not that it occurs not in the stage directions but in the rhymed verses proper, where the narrating singer describes the curtain’s motion before evoking Venus “sprawled out on roses.” As chapter 1 has shown, Tannhäuser’s first scene might well have incited scorn among contemporaries, given its long initial vocal silence—something perhaps alluded to by the slowness of Kalisch’s curtain. But the curtain’s opening was, one should think, standard theatrical fare. And yet, other Wagner skits similarly spoofed the curtain. In 1890, a much- performed sendup of Der Ring des Nibelungen by Martin Böhm (another successful author of Berlin farces) listed as central dramatic components “completely new decorations, machines, and bright lights, as well as a curtain made of Filet [finely laced cloth] that neatly separates the four days’ works.” The stage directions later explain that this Filet-Vorhang falls “quasi as a drop scene; thus, while the backstage is being changed, one can see everything through it.”2 In other words, the specially announced Filet curtain is revealed as a red herring and, hence, ridiculous. In