Richard Wagner: A Life in Music

by Martin Geck

  Such speculations have no place in the Ur-Holländer, for the Dutchman does not find mercy, but only redemption, through his own annihilation. Tannhäuser is the first and—with the exception of Parsifal—the last work in which Wagner uses the motif of grace, and as a result it almost goes without saying that he draws on a whole range of devotional rituals. Of course, such rituals are an inevitable aspect of a legend grounded in Christian Catholicism, and there is little doubt that they will have been well received by the Catholic court that had Wagner on its payroll. And yet it was by no means a foregone conclusion that a composer brought up in the Protestant faith would have warmed to his subject to such an extent, treating the Virgin Mary and the pope as key figures in his narrative and at the end inviting his audience to share in the spectacle of Elisabeth—once motivated by feelings of earthly love—becoming a saint. Sieghart Döhring has pointed out that the appeal to the Virgin Mary is a part of the world of ideas associated with the utopian socialism that Wagner could have discovered in Paris,11 but, quite apart from the fact that this appeal is already found in Ludwig Bechstein’s version of the Tannhäuser Ballad, we have to ask ourselves whether it is really necessary to know such an arcane context to understand that Wagner needed the figure of the Virgin Mary to intercede and bring out the contrast between pure and sinful love in the opera.

  Writing in 1851, in his Communication to My Friends, Wagner speaks somewhat cryptically of his own “deeply trivial encounters” and subsequent “disgust” at all that “our modern world has to offer by way of sensuality and life’s pleasures in general.”12 And, as we have already seen, he told Liszt that the following passage represents the “nub of the entire drama”:

  Zum Heil den Sündigen zu führen,

  die Gott-Gesandte nahte mir:

  doch, ach! sie frevelnd zu berühren

  hob ich den Lästerblick zu ihr!

  O du, hoch über diesen Erdengründen,

  die mir den Engel meines Heil’s gesandt,

  erbarm’ dich mein [. . .].

  [To guide the sinner to his weal, the God-sent woman drew close to me: but, ah! to touch her sinfully I raised my impious eyes to her! O God who high above this earth sent me the angel of my salvation, have mercy upon me.]

  The first phrase is directed at Elisabeth, the second at the immaculate Mother of God as intercessor. Both imply the extreme condemnation of all forms of sexuality.

  Even in Der fliegende Holländer, redemption had been possible only because the couple, infatuated with one another, has renounced sexuality and is content to be united in death. But this falls a long way short of the situation in Tannhäuser, which explores almost every aspect of the topic of sinful love. Not only is the “love” that Tannhäuser feels in the Venusberg sinful, so too is the “impious” look that he casts at Elisabeth in act 2. In his letter to Liszt, Wagner explained that Tannhäuser’s “whole nature” is crystallized in these lines as he becomes conscious of his “dreadful crime.”13 Perhaps Tannhäuser should have followed the lead of his alter ego, Wolfram, who in his song about the nature of love warns against sullying the waters of love’s fountain with “impious temerity” and counsels his audience to worship it, instead, in a spirit of rapt contemplation and prayer.

  But was Tannhäuser’s “sinful” gaze not directed, rather, at a loving woman who at this point in the opera was still hoping for a life of earthly happiness with him? This question leads us to a deeper level of the action, where the superficial, black-and-white contrast between sinful and pure heavenly love no longer exists. Let us start with the Venusberg, the world ruled over by the self-styled “goddess of love.” It remains unclear how Tannhäuser found his way here, and yet we are manifestly not dealing with a bordello but with a place of unending pleasure appropriate only to the gods. Does this make it a place of natural innocence or one of decadence? A scene of uncensored sexuality or one that is remote from God? Are the bowels of the earth a place whose denizens can live out their natural instincts to the full, instincts that pose a threat to “society,” however we choose to picture such a society? Or is all this chthonic physicality so compulsive and so obsessive that it needs to be tamed by civilization and turned into “love,” a process that is tantamount to ennobling it?

  Wagner’s treatment of this scene leaves the question open, and even Tannhäuser’s own attitude is contradictory, for his insistent entreaty that Venus should release him from her realm is not one that he seeks to justify by means of moral arguments. Rather, he claims that he has grown weary of a life of luxury and pleasure. While promising to continue to sing the goddess’s praises, he longs to escape from this timeless paradise and return to real life, with its temporal limitations, a life in which “battle” and “death” await him instead of “rapture and delight.” Only when his lover has risen to a paroxysm of anger at his rejection of her and cursed him does he finally speak of “atonement.” To the sound of what the stage directions describe as a “terrible crash,” he quits the Venusberg with the words: “Mein Fried,’ mein Heil ruht in Maria!” (My peace, my salvation rests in Mary!)14

  How are we to interpret this turn of events? After all, Tannhäuser has just announced that even in the outside world he will continue to play the part of Venus’s “bold warrior.” And he does in fact keep his promise when he first reappears at the Wartburg and Elisabeth asks him: “Heinrich! What have you done to me?” “You should praise the god of love,” he replies; “he plucked the strings and spoke to you from my songs, bringing me back to you!” In other words, only by meeting Venus has he learned to feel love in an all-encompassing way. Elisabeth is to be the first beneficiary of this newfound attitude. In the song contest, too, he champions the uninhibitedly sensual love that he enjoyed in the Venusberg—initially with Elisabeth’s “bashful” approval.

  But how is it possible that having launched into his song in praise of Venus, singing “in extreme rapture” and reducing his audience to a state of outrage at his blasphemous behavior, Tannhäuser should suddenly prostrate himself and, using words that Wagner himself called the “nub of the drama,” describe his changed attitude to Elisabeth as base and criminal? How is it that, losing all sense of self-esteem, he regards himself as “mired in sin” and calls on the Virgin Mary to intercede on his behalf?

  One explanation is that in combining the two disparate legends of Tannhäuser in the Venusberg and the song contest at the Wartburg Wagner tied himself in a knot.15 This would be the price that he paid for abandoning the single-stranded plot of Der fliegende Holländer and seeking, instead, to create a piece that would be dramatically effective onstage. As we have already observed, Wagner’s central message—physical fulfillment in love is impossible to find in this world of ours, where we are lucky to discover only self-sacrificial love at best—could have been explored without the need for an elaborate song contest. But can this really be Wagner’s central message for audiences today?

  There is no doubt that Tannhäuser can be read as a “Catholic,” antisensualist, bigoted work and, as such, a forerunner of Parsifal. It is no accident that in September 1878, while he was working of Parsifal, Wagner had a nightmare in which Nietzsche—with whom he had already fallen out at this date—“said a lot of malicious things to him and poured scorn on the melody of the ‘Pilgrims’ Chorus’ in Tannhäuser, that is to say, sang a lampoon on it.”16 By this time Nietzsche had not yet written his poem “Is That Still German?” that was to end his 256th aphorism in Beyond Good and Evil. And yet, as Dieter Borchmeyer has noted with some amusement, the poem can “with a little effort be sung to the tune of the Pilgrims’ Chorus”:17

  Aus deutschem Herzen kam dies schwüle Kreischen?

  Und deutschen Leibs ist dies Sich-selbst-Entfleischen?

  Deutsch ist dies Priester-Händespreitzen,

  Dies weihrauch-düftelnde Sinne-Reizen?

  Und deutsch dies Stocken, Stürzen, Taumeln,

  Dies ungewisse Bimbambaumeln?

  Dies Nonnen-Äugeln, Ave-Glocken-Bimmeln,


  Dies ganze falsch verzückte Himmel-Überhimmeln?

  —Ist Das noch deutsch?—

  Erwägt! Noch steht ihr an der Pforte:—

  Denn, was ihr hört, ist Rom,—Rom’s Glaube ohne Worte!

  [Out of a German heart, this sultry screeching? / a German body, this self-laceration? / German, this priestly affectation, / this incense-perfumed sensual preaching? / German, this halting, plunging, reeling, / this so uncertain bim-bam pealing? / this nunnish ogling, Ave leavening, / this whole falsely ecstatic heaven overheavening? / —Is this still German?— / You still stand at the gate, perplexed? / Think! What you hear is Rome—Rome’s faith without the text.]

  Although these lines were written with Parsifal in mind, they can also be applied to Tannhäuser—and not just with malice aforethought, for even the best-intentioned of directors will find it difficult to stage Tannhäuser as a superior version of the “Oberammergau Passion Play,” as Wagner jokingly referred to his Dresden oratorio Das Liebesmahl der Apostel (The Love-Feast of the Apostles).18 It will be hard for any director to avoid all mention of the world of religion, still less to ignore the alternative world of the non-sacred and profanely secular, a point already made by Baudelaire in 1861: “Tannhäuser represents the struggle between the two principles that have chosen the human heart for their chief battlefield; in other words, the struggle between flesh and spirit, Heaven and Hell, Satan and God.”19

  Described by René Wellek as “an atheist and modern Dante,”20 the décadent Baudelaire was acutely critical of Catholic romanticism, so that his response to Tannhäuser was not theological but existential. What was at stake was not morality but the most intense experience of all conceivable sense stimuli. In the face of the habitual tedium that he felt was the basic attitude of his age and embodied in grand opera,21 he was fascinated by the “serious” nature of the work, which demanded “sustained attention” with its “fiery and peremptory music” that seemed to “recapture the dizzy perceptions of an opium-dream.” In the music associated with the Venusberg, Baudelaire heard “the overflowing of a vigorous nature, pouring into Evil all the energies which should rightly go to the cultivation of Good; it is love unbridled, immense, chaotic, raised to the level of a counter-religion, a Satanic religion.”22

  For Baudelaire, the work’s “religious theme” forms a fascinating alternative to its “ineluctable Satanic logic”:

  an ineffable feeling [. . .] when Tannhäuser, having escaped from Venus’s grotto, will find himself once again amid the realities of life, between the holy sound of his homeland’s bells, the shepherd’s rustic song, the pilgrims’ hymn and the cross planted by the road, a symbol of all those crosses which must be carried on every road. In this latter case there is a power of contrast which acts irresistibly on the mind.23

  Wagner’s profoundly philosophical opera is ruthlessly aestheticized by Baudelaire, who also commits the mistake of treating it as a total artwork in the spirit of his own aesthetic ideal, with its goal of absolute expression. In February 1860, Baudelaire—inspired by the concerts that Wagner had just conducted in the city—wrote a letter to the composer in which he claimed to imagine the music as a “vast surface of dark red.” (According to Wagner’s later recollection, the music in question was the prelude to act 1 of Lohengrin.)24

  If this red represents passion, I see it gradually passing through all the stages of red and pink to the point where it acquires the incandescence of flames. One would think it difficult, if not impossible, to achieve anything more fiery; and yet a final flare casts an even whiter trace across the white of the background. If you like, it is the ultimate cry of a soul in a moment of paroxysm.25

  Baudelaire’s aestheticizing view of Tannhäuser as a work inhabiting a world between good and evil was expounded in an essay that appeared under the title “Richard Wagner” in the pages of the Revue européenne on April 1, 1861. Since it represents a complete reversal of the values that Wagner’s opera proclaims both superficially and on a much deeper level, it is all the more remarkable that the composer responded to the poet’s approaches with such sincere civility in his reply of April 15, 1861. Only once before, a clearly jealous Nietzsche complained in the context of his own Birth of Tragedy, had Wagner written “a letter of such gratitude and even enthusiasm.”26

  Of course, we need to remember that Wagner felt indebted to Baudelaire as one of the few Parisians willing to out himself as a Wagnerian prepared to champion Tannhäuser. At the same time there is much to be said for the suggestion that Baudelaire had brought out an aspect of the opera that Wagner may have felt had been underexplored in responses to it in Germany, not least because it was not until 1861 that he had rewritten the Venusberg music for Paris and raised it to a compositional level that according to Adorno has turned this scene into “the phantasmagoria par excellence.”27

  In the words of Baudelaire, the worlds of “Heaven and Hell, God and Satan” meet as equals here, for all that they are scarcely comparable. Even after he had revised the score for Paris, Wagner remained dissatisfied with the result, and at the very time that he had just started working on the score of Parsifal he told Cosima of his intention of “shortening the new first scene considerably, it weighs the rest down too much, there is a lack of balance, this scene goes beyond the style of Tannhäuser as a whole.”28 And although he was delighted by the Venusberg music whenever Josef Rubinstein played it to him, Cosima famously noted in her diary only a few weeks before her husband’s death: “Chat in the evening, brought to an end by R. with the ‘Shepherd’s Song’ and ‘Pilgrims’ Chorus’ from Tannhäuser. He says he still owes the world Tannhäuser.”29

  In general, Wagner’s later comments on Tannhäuser sound like nothing so much as a desire to return to his roots in Dresden and to a version of the opera that was marked by Christian ideology, with the opening Venusberg scene rewritten as a prelude whose siren sounds would not be sufficiently magical to distract attention from the soteriological events that are later celebrated onstage. When the German musicologist Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich suggests that Tannhäuser may “also” be seen “as a Christian mystery,”30 he is not going as far as this, and yet his reading of the piece is still more plausible than that put forward by the social scientist Udo Bermbach, who sees in our hero “an artist at odds with society and prone to interpret every organizational tie as an obligation that risks destroying his freedom and autonomy.” According to Bermbach, Tannhäuser is ultimately destroyed by his opposition to church and state and dies a martyr’s death.31 Although Wagner himself inveighed against those “foolish” critics who wanted to impute “a specifically Christian and impotently pietistic drift” to the work, he wrote these lines in 1851, when, as a failed revolutionary, he felt only contempt for the institutions of church and state and was keen to insist that in creating the character of Tannhäuser he had been driven only by the “yearning for love, a very real kind of love seeded in the soil of the fullest sensuality.”32

  Regardless of this remark, to which Bermbach, too, refers, there is no denying that Tannhäuser ultimately feels that he belongs to the world of “institutions” and that although his redemption does not have the pope’s approval, it is achieved through the intercession of two saints: the Virgin Mary and Elisabeth. And Wagner depicts the faith of those pilgrims who have been absolved by the pope in an entirely positive light. Not even the Wartburg is seen as a negative entity: although the court and its followers may be appalled at a crime from which Wagner himself increasingly distances himself in the course of the second act, there are signs of their greater understanding. And if we ignore the bleak ending of the very first version of the opera, which Wagner revised almost straightaway, it is clear that the Wartburg finally makes its peace with the rebel, albeit only after he has been humbled:

  Der Gnade Heil ward dem Büßer beschieden,

  nun geht er ein in der Seligen Frieden!

  [The salvation of grace has been granted the penitent, and now he finds the peace of the blessed
.]

  No one, surely, will think that Wagner was trying to distance himself from this statement. Such an act of deconstruction must be left to today’s audiences.

  When seen through Wagner’s eyes, the work’s message raises many questions. If the opera is about “redemption,” then the action seems to me to be far less coherent than the relatively simple tale of the Flying Dutchman as a Wandering Jew in search of salvation, quite apart from the grand operatic ballast that threatens to weigh it down: among these features are the Chorus of Sirens, the Pilgrims’ Chorus, the song contest, the preghiera, the magical reappearance of Venus and her retinue to the strains of onstage music that is merely illustrative in character, the death knell, the miracle of the burgeoning crosier, and so on.

  This wealth of images and metaphors helps to set Tannhäuser apart not only from its predecessor but also from its successor, Lohengrin, in which the action is concentrated on a single otherworldly apparition in the guise of the eponymous hero. And his miraculous appearance is more skillfully incorporated into an otherwise realistic, historical plot than is the case with Tannhäuser. Whether as doubters or believers, we are confronted in Tannhäuser with Christian truths, whereas Lohengrin offers us a coherent fairy-tale motif within an otherwise rational plot: we accept that motif and empathize with it without being obliged to take a stand on it. And, according to Opera and Drama, we do so involuntarily in that the action is presented to our feelings through the agency of the music.

  The plot of Tannhäuser can best be salvaged if we view the hero as a man driven by forces beyond his control and if we see his actions as the result of his compulsive adherence to certain rituals. Although this interpretation of the work may not reflect Wagner’s own intentions, it does not—on the other hand—presuppose any act of deconstruction on our part. In his extended set of instructions on how to perform the opera, Wagner described as follows the principal feature of his hero’s character: