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CHAPTER 1
Wagner's Venusberg
Bayreuth, 1891. Eight years after Wagner's death, his widow, Cosima Wagner, defends her admittance of Tannhäuser to the Bayreuth Festival against critics who deem this early work unworthy of the shrine of Wagner's mature Gesamtkunstwerk.
Not so, she argues. Producing Tannhäuser presented "the task par excellence, because [this opera] was about the battle of life and death between opera and drama." Her reasoning suggests that Tannhäuser (premiered in 1845) offers a particularly focused perspective on Wagner's artistic struggle to break free of operatic conventions in order to devise the features of his future music drama. Indeed, shortly after completing his signature treatise Opera and Drama in 1851, the composer himself had construed Tannhäuser as a transitional work that provided the decisive step forward from Der fliegende Holländer's first forays into a "new direction" (in 1843) to his "latest" period, which started with Lohengrin (1850) — a direction he hoped would one day be consummated with his projected Ring cycle at a special festival. There was, then, a direct line from Tannhäuser to Bayreuth. Unlike Rienzi (1842), which — as I discussed in the introduction — the composer later disavowed for its blatant adoption of the technologies of grand opera (and which Cosima Wagner would indeed bar from the festival), Tannhäuser showed his "original" hand at work. It therefore earned admission to the Bayreuth temple.
Apart from reinforcing Tannhäuser's seminal position within Wagner's oeuvre, though, Cosima Wagner's statement allows for a second interpretation. If the style and structure of Tannhäuser reflect Wagner's music-dramatic quest, the plot itself symbolically enacts this fight between opera and drama, between inherited forms and fresh approaches. The opera's artist-hero, after all, is torn between two fundamentally different realms of existence, the tabooed underworld of the Venusberg and the social sphere of the Wartburg; upon leaving the former, he embarks on a utopian search for an individual mode of expression that integrates both worlds. This trajectory resonates with Wagner's own creative project, as he implied once more when confessing in 1851 that "the figure of Tannhäuser ... sprang from my innermost heart" and represented the essence of "a human being, right down to our own day, right into the heart of an artist longing for life." The mood in which Wagner professed to have conceived the opera — "a state of burning exaltation that held my blood and every nerve in fevered throbbing" — also corresponds revealingly with Tannhäuser's emotional turmoil, erotic subtext included. Not surprisingly, it has become common coin to associate Tannhäuser the singer with Wagner the composer. Scholars have drawn parallels, for instance, between Tannhäuser's Venusberg experience and Wagner's painful sojourn in Paris, or between both artists' cultural outsider positions, their grappling with sociopolitical norms, and their psychological developments. Nike Wagner even dubbed Tannhäuser "a kind of ingenious self-therapy," since Wagner during the years of this opera's genesis "is Tannhäuser." Both the score and the plot seem to hold special potential for an understanding of Wagner and his larger artistic agenda.
This is not to say that allegorical associations between Wagner and his operatic heroes are unique to Tannhäuser. Wagner as Sachs (or Stolzing), Wagner as Wotan (or Siegfried), Wagner as Parsifal: the composer's self-concocted mythic plots as well as his abundant theorizing have fostered this interpretive move, more so than with other nineteenth-century composers. And while the correlation holds particularly for Tannhäuser, with its poet-musician as single male protagonist, the identification of Wagner with Tannhäuser has its limits. At the end of the opera, Tannhäuser dies without witnessing his earthly rehabilitation — hardly a future Wagner would have wished for. Moreover, as my introduction has shown, Wagner saw himself as not merely a composer (let alone a performing musician) but as an all-round theatrical artist. As such, his creative program did not follow a single, unified trajectory that could be represented onstage by a sole artist's undertaking: too many were the contradictions, opposing pulls, and changes over time that drove his ideas.
These complexities are evident in the fate of Tannhäuser itself. Not only was this the most popular as well as the most frequently transcribed and parodied of Wagner's works in Germanic theaters through World War I, but it was also the work Wagner revised the most, and over the longest period of time. Starting immediately after the Dresden premiere of 1845, he effected myriad changes that were eventually reflected in the published score of 1860. For the Paris production of 1861, he added and revised large parts (particularly in the Venusberg scenes), which he then retranslated and modified for the Munich performance of 1867 and his "model production" in Vienna of 1875. Over the course of three decades, Wagner thus left what boils down to four different versions. That these reflect a good deal of his artistic development can be gleaned from the changing genre label: it morphed from "große romantische Oper" (betraying indebtedness to both French "grand" and German "romantic" opera) via the nondescript "Opéra" (1861) to "Handlung" (Action) — a moniker linking the Tannhäuser of 1867–75 to Wagner's mature music dramas as epitomized by the "Handlung" Tristan und Isolde (1865).
In addition to revising the score, Wagner was directly involved in several productions at major theaters. And for no other opera did he dedicate more ink to influencing stagings elsewhere. At the same time, Tannhäuser remained the opera that troubled him the most: his thoughts during his last years returned again and again to what he came to consider an unfinished project. In 1877, for example, Cosima Wagner reported that he was very preoccupied with the opera, considering further revisions to the Venusberg scenes; and merely three weeks before his death she famously noted: "He says he still owes the world Tannhäuser." This opera, in other words, reveals a composer paradigmatically refining a work both on page and onstage throughout the better part of his career, in the face of his evolving creative thought as well as changing practical experiences and conditions. It can therefore shed new light on the emergence of Wagner's artistic ideals prior to and in parallel with their theoretical formulation, in addition to their onstage realization. Tannhäuser, in short, provides a unique starting point for addressing nineteenth-century attempts at "completing" and preserving an opera in (and as) performance.
More specifically, Tannhäuser's opening, set in the legendary Venusberg, is particularly well suited to demonstrate the importance of technologies for manifesting opera as an illusionist multimedia entity — an ideal promoted most efficiently, of course, by Wagner himself. With their gradual medial engagement, I suggest, Tannhäuser's Venusberg scenes are an epiphany of Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk. In the depths of the Venusberg, Wagner first displayed a music drama as fully enacted and embodied: Venus's magic grotto seamlessly merges various art forms into an alluring multisensorial spectacle that fully absorbs its visitor. Yet it does so not within a diegetic play-within-a-play staged for onstage audiences. Instead, Venus's spectacle emerges — and is perceived — as part of a natural setting within the opera. A proto-Gesamtkunstwerk in miniature, the Venusberg scenes thus afford precious glimpses into the ideal result Wagner desired for the stagings of his multimedia works, along with the strategies for their creation as well as their anticipated perception. Not coincidentally do these scenes evoke some of the major stage effects that Wagner and other composers consistently employed and refined throughout the nineteenth century (some of which will be addressed in my next chapters), including sudden transformations, lifelike simulations of nature, veiling mists, and a contested gong strike. Moreover, the Venusberg discloses the extent to which every detail of its (staged) appearance is minutely managed for utmost effect. It is hardly surprising, then, that the Venusberg scenes were the part of the Tannhäuser score Wagner retouched the most. As such, they emblematize his persistent attempts to reconcile his Gesamtkunstwerk ideal with the material conditions of nineteenth-century operatic practice by retrofitting both.
In reading the Venusberg as an archetypal anticipation of the Gesamtkunstwerk, this chapter explores what happens if we associate Wagner not with Tannhäuser, the singer, but with Venus, the director. It traces the shift from composer to total director that Wagner and others sought to attain during the nineteenth century. By expounding and expanding this association, I take a fresh look at Wagner's theatrical aspirations away from the well-trodden (and sometimes misleading) paths of his written utterances, or from the practicalities of actual, always-contingent stage productions. This approach fleshes out my introduction's brief sketch of the theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk with a view to its ultimate stage appearance. Like a prophetic dream, I maintain, the Venusberg scenes capture Wagner's music-dramatic vision in vivid multimediality. In so doing, they also indicate the practical directions Wagner would explore for his future stage productions: Tannhäuser's opening simultaneously foreshadows the means deployed by Wagner to realize his concept and their inevitable failures. Put differently, the Venusberg symbolizes — and helps explain — Wagner's lifelong yet ambivalent pursuit of absolute directorial powers, his voracious appetite for stage technologies, and his desire for his own theater.
To be sure, this chapter illuminates Wagner's creative objective as pars pro toto in order to buttress the core themes of Curtain, Gong, Steam. It does not explicate the related ambitions of other composers, nor does it discuss the technologies employed in actual stagings: all these will be subjects of the following chapters. Likewise, I do not submit an exegesis of Tannhäuser as a whole, nor am I concerned with minute differences between the various versions: it will suffice to concentrate on the Venusberg scenes in what is commonly called the "Dresden version" (reflecting Wagner's revisions between 1845 and 1860) or, when specified, the "Paris version" (first performed in its entirety in Vienna in 1875). By thus zooming in on a Wagnerian ideal in its pure and abstract state, undeterred by material actualizations, I offer a lively backdrop for the individual technologies and stage-practical issues that my subsequent case studies will address. To this end, I weave increasingly specific links between the Venusberg scenes and Wagner's theoretical writings, between the Venusberg and Bayreuth, between Venus and Wagner. Observing the composer in his Venus grotto, in short, I expose the conceptual breeding ground of his multimedia approach to opera, a safely confined laboratory in which he tested those music-dramatic ideas and technological ideals that his later productions would famously seek to deliver openly to the world. Ultimately, my allegorical reading both explicates and complicates our understanding of Wagner's persona and artistic aspirations as well as of the broader, deeply troubled nineteenth-century utopia of total medial control in opera.
THE VENUSBERG SCENES AS GESAMTKUNSTWERK
Let us, then, imagine ourselves in the Dresden Court Theater in 1845, for the premiere of Tannhäuser. After a substantial overture, the curtain rises, but not onto the busy introductory chorus that we as mid-nineteenth-century operagoers would expect. Instead, the title hero and Venus, one of the opera's two leading ladies, are immediately disclosed. Yet we do not hear these singers. It takes roughly a minute and a half (or 112 measures) of iridescent orchestral music before the onset of any singing, albeit only the gentle backstage chorus of invisible sirens inviting love. Wagner allows a further four minutes (172 measures) before the protagonists open their mouths. (The Paris version would have us wait even longer: almost seven minutes for the sirens and over twelve for the first solo.) During this exceptionally extended singing-free time, however, we see and hear a good deal else. After all, we are inside of the Venusberg, and the goddess of love does not live poorly. Her grotto is animated by sirens and loving couples arranged around its sides, with bathing naiads in the background; at center stage, dancing nymphs are soon joined by a train of bacchantes. In Paris, youths, fauns, satyrs, the three Graces, and cupids also participate: they hustle and bustle, dance and chase each other to chromatically charged and dazzlingly fluctuating orchestral music in a bright E major, with dominating high strings and winds accented by sparkling cymbals and triangle. Instead of an opening chorus, in a word, we are faced with a glittering ballet.
Yet Wagner did not envision "dance as is usual in our operas and ballets." As he explained in his 1852 "Notes on the Performance of Tannhäuser," he had in mind "a consolidation of everything the highest art of dance and pantomime can accomplish: a seductively wild and enchanting chaos of groups and movements ranging from the softest delight, yearning, and longing to the most delirious impetuosity of frenzied riot." About the much more lavish Paris version, the composer similarly confessed that what he demanded in "the huge and unconventional dance scenes of the first act ... was unheard-of and departed radically from traditional choreographic practices" — a remarkable claim for a production in Paris, the European capital of ballet. After all, fusing dance and pantomime was not uncommon. In France it had most recently yielded the independent genre of ballet pantomime (or ballet d'action), which during the 1830s and 1840s was arguably as important to the Paris Opera as grand opera proper. Some French operas also included pantomime in addition to (or as part of) their obligatory ballet, a practice Wagner had adopted in Rienzi to adorn the celebratory act 1 finale. In underlining the otherness of Tannhäuser 's beginning, however, he did have a point. Its wistful evocation of chaos (in Paris of "utmost fury" and "extreme rage") seemed a far cry from the "ballet du genre noble et gracieuse" for which the Opera had the prerogative among nineteenth-century Parisian theaters. Moreover, pantomimic elements were typically included at the ends of acts to suspend tension, and ballets would usually occur in the second (and never in the first) act, as Wagner's Parisian detractors gleefully reminded him. Flying in the face of these conventions, the Venusberg opens Tannhäuser with a closed dramatic scene — a miniature enactment of mythic nature's orgiastic power — that sets the stage both visually and allegorically for the ensuing action.
For the Paris Tannhäuser, Wagner animated his stage with a further type of artistic expression, in addition to dance and pantomime. After the frolicking couples have dispersed, two successive visions of erotic mythological scenes appear in the background: the abduction of Europe by Zeus in the form of a bull, and the seduction of Leda by Zeus as a swan. Labeling these visions Nebelbilder, or "dissolving views," Wagner alluded to their seeming immateriality, as he pictured them emerging from the "scent" of the grotto. Yet the term also referred to the homonymous optical medium popular in London since 1839 and introduced to Germanic spectators in Vienna in 1843. This new entertainment produced dissolving views through two (or more) magic lanterns that enabled the fading of one image into the next, thus simulating animation and change over time. It seems deliberate that Wagner likewise prescribed not one but two related Nebelbilder, separated by a period of "fade" (albeit an extended one to allow for the backstage set-up of the second vision) during which the three Graces "interpret" the first vision in dance. In turn, the dissolving views correlate with the siren chorus and its echo, providing a visual commentary on, or dramatic motivation for, the sudden outburst of acousmatic vocal music that, in the Dresden version, had merely interrupted the dance. In the Paris Venusberg, Wagner merged dance, pantomime, and live enactment of a recent optical medium with orchestral and choral ambient music to generate a minutely choreographed multimedia experience.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Curtain, Gong, Steam"
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