Richard Wagner

by Martin Geck

  an active and extreme willingness to be consumed by the present situation, while the liveliest contrast that is produced by the violent changes in his situation is revealed through the ways in which he expresses that sense of fulfillment. Tannhäuser is nowhere and never “a little” anything, but is always everything, fully and entirely. He has luxuriated in the arms of Venus in a state of utter ecstasy; and it is only with the keenest feeling of the need to break free from her that he severs the bonds that had fettered him to her, without for a moment railing at the Goddess of Love.33

  It requires little or no effort to reinterpret this image in psychoanalytical terms and see Tannhäuser as a man who from first to last is driven by figments of an unrealizable imagination. First he wishes to enter a paradise that will meet all his erotic needs and help him to find endless pleasure. When he tries to escape from this “paradise” and compete with his rivals in order to win the hand of the woman he desires most of all, he needs another’s help to break free from Venus’s embrace, which is when—completely without motivation—he calls on the Mother of God. In the company of his potential rivals for Elisabeth’s hand, he initially reacts with supercilious arrogance but, following his hymn to Venus, he becomes acutely conscious of his guilt. When Wartburg society demands that he go to Rome, where he is sent packing by the pope, he vacillates with almost unconscious irresolution between the different possibilities that are open to him: should he return to the Venusberg, as the folk tale demands in consequence of what the stage directions describe as his “appalling lasciviousness,” or should he entrust his salvation to Elisabeth, who is already with the saints in heaven? Demonstrating the same lack of will as he must have shown in the Venusberg at the start of the opera, he finally allows Elisabeth to intercede for him.

  Tannhäuser is no active hero but a passive, anxious figure torn between self-destruction and delusions of grandeur, and able to invest his existence with a semblance of stability only by following certain rituals: his dealings with Venus have been ritualized, and the competition at the Wartburg, which is about a true understanding of the world, is specifically laid out along the lines of another such ritual. The pilgrimage to Rome is a single extended ritual, and even Tannhäuser’s end, which recalls the final scene of Parsifal, has ritual features to it.

  If we ignore the “happy ending,” which seems to have been imposed on the work from outside, and examine the figure of Tannhäuser from a biographical point of view, then we shall see parallels between him and Wagner himself, a man who, as an unsuccessful bohemian artist in Paris, suffers from an identity crisis. Fleeing from this hotbed of godlessness, he seeks to regain that sense of identity in the German Catholic ritual of the Middle Ages but ends up in a medieval world marked by the pagan ritual of the cult of Venus, forcing him unexpectedly to side with Baudelaire, who not unreasonably was to see in Wagner a brother in arms in the spirit of an atheistic, albeit amoral, aestheticism.

  It is no accident that Tannhäuser’s ambivalence as a character fascinated two such different individuals as Albert Schweitzer and Bertolt Brecht, in each case during their turbulent adolescence. Schweitzer recalled that

  together with my veneration for Bach went the same feeling for Richard Wagner. When I was a schoolboy at Mülhausen [sic] at the age of sixteen, I was allowed for the first time to go to the theatre, and I heard there Wagner’s Tannhäuser. This music overpowered me to such an extent that it was days before I was capable of giving proper attention to the lessons in school.34

  Brecht was probably fifteen when he attended a performance of Tannhäuser in 1913—the centenary of Wagner’s birth—and was inspired to write a poem to which he gave the title “Autumn Mood from Tanhäuser [sic].” Unsurprisingly, he was attracted above all by the hero’s feeling of homelessness:

  Oft ritt er mit gesenktem Speer

  In dem schwarzen, trauernden Kleid

  Durch herbstliche Felder und Wälder weit

  Versunken schwer

  In Leid. [. . .]

  So ritt er dahin jetzt bald sieben Jahr

  Und immer stumpfer wurde das Licht

  Der Augen.

  Und die weißen Schläfen sanken ein.

  Grau wurde der Stirne blendendes Weiß

  Und feine Furchen zogen sich leis

  In das Gesicht mit Fleiß.

  Die Stirne schien ganz grau versteint

  Und die Augen waren stumpf verweint

  Da glomm ein Sehnen nach Frieden heiß

  Nach Frieden.35

  [He often rode with lowered spear in sable mourning garb through autumn fields and woods, his head bowed low in grief. [. . .] And so he rode for almost seven years, and ever duller grew the light within his eyes. And temples that had once been white were sunken, his forehead’s dazzling white turned gray, and lightly furrowed was his face. His brow seemed turned to grayish stone, his eyes were dull and tearful, and yet there glowed in them a burning wish for peace, for peace.]

  The mixture of fear, loneliness, inhibition, and ritualized action that marks long sections of Tannhäuser, including each and every one of its characters, would be difficult to endure if it were not for the music. Of course, we can appreciate this music only if we recognize that Wagner wrote a romantic opera, not a music drama. Whereas the Ring, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger, and Parsifal can all claim to be effective as coherent musical structures, Tannhäuser fascinates us thanks to the intensity of its individual numbers and tableaus and its sophisticated mixture of tone colors. There is as yet no trace of the “art of transition” that Wagner was to see as his ideal from the time of Tristan und Isolde; and his leitmotif technique plays an even less significant role here than it had done in Der fliegende Holländer. As Carl Dahlhaus has pointed out, the score “does not explain or connect but asserts and establishes,” and yet in spite of—or because of—“the lack of dramatic coherence,” the work “succeeds in giving the appearance of necessity to what is unmotivated, and credibility to what is absurd and inconsequential.”36

  We should not be doing the opera a disservice if we were to attend a performance in much the same way that we might visit the Louvre, moved by individual pieces that produce an overall impression but which are not related to one another in any logical way. It is no accident that in September 1842, just after he had completed the prose draft of Tannhäuser—still called Der Venusberg at this date—Wagner wrote to his friend Ernst Benedikt Kietz in Paris:

  In the parish church at Aussig I asked to be shown the Madonna by Carlo Dolci: it is a quite extraordinarily affecting picture, & if Tannhäuser had seen it, I could readily understand how it was that he turned away from Venus to Mary without necessarily having been inspired by any great sense of piety.—At all events, I am now firmly set on Saint Elisabeth.37

  In short, not even Wagner himself was able to explain the contradictions in his hero, and so an external image was required to make it clear to his emotional understanding what exactly was involved here. Later, when he started work on the score, this external image was replaced by music that likewise eschews all rational arguments but uses its own inherent power to triumph effortlessly over all argumentative doubts.

  Paradoxically, Wagner achieves this aim not simply through musical numbers that can be described as crowd-pleasers in a positive sense—namely, Tannhäuser’s Hymn to Venus (“Stets soll nur dir mein Lied ertönen”), Elisabeth’s Greeting to the Hall of Song (“Dich, theure Halle”), the Entry of the Guests (“Freudig begrüßen wir die edle Halle”), the Pilgrims’ Chorus (“Beglückt darf nun”), Elisabeth’s Prayer (“Allmächt’ge Jungfrau”), and Wolfram’s Ode to the Evening Star (“Wie Todesahnung”). Of course, Wagner banked on the effectiveness of these numbers and had no objections when his Dresden publisher, C. F. Meser, brought out arrangements of them for voice and piano. But, as he told Hans von Bülow in the context of his “Lyric Pieces for Voice from Lohengrin,” he ultimately regarded such publications simply as “fripperies” designed “to make some money.”38
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br />   And yet the music of Tannhäuser has more to offer than this—namely, a use of color that for long stretches operates with novel refractions, shadings, and shifting hues. In this, the score reveals a degree of refinement appreciably greater than anything found in Der fliegende Holländer. And it is a feature that from now on was to be a hallmark of Wagner’s music. In his chapter “Sonority” in his book on Wagner, Adorno looks briefly at the “unstable” and “ambiguous” aspects of Wagner’s use of sonority,39 but he is guilty of neglecting the significance of tone color in its relation to the harmonic writing and of ignoring Wagner’s own insistence that “anyone who, when judging my music, separates the harmony from the instrumentation does me as great a wrong as the man who separates my music from my poem and my vocal line from the word.”40 But this is precisely what Adorno is guilty of doing when he complains that Wagner was not really master of his own compositional handiwork and that he often confused the progressive with a hankering after empty, superficial effects designed to dazzle his audience. In short, it was the triumph of appearance over substance.

  Of course, Wagner was the great illusionist even in Tannhäuser. And yet today’s audiences are more skeptical toward the sort of “true” or “great” music said to have crystallized in the works of Bach, Beethoven, and Schoenberg and as a result are more likely to dismiss Tannhäuser on aesthetic grounds than accuse its composer of charlatanism. And even those listeners who quickly tire of Wagner’s music and especially of Tannhäuser will scarcely deny that the overture, for all its Teutonic coarseness, affords evidence of great refinement: “expressive elements of anguish and suffering” merge in complex ways with the “ecstatic experience of strength and confidence.”41 We do not have to agree with Adorno when he refers dismissively to “enjoyment of pain” and to “pleasure as sickness”42 but instead may admire the cloudy admixture of the tonally pure and the distorted as an expression of the fact that human existence is damaged beyond repair.

  Such mixtures have something searing and seething about them and have left their mark on whole sections of the score, drawing into their sway listeners who are as responsive as Baudelaire evidently was, so that we forget the inconsistencies in the action and allow our attention to be drawn, instead, to the complex psychological stirrings about which we would have remained unaware, had they not found expression in the music.

  This is true not least of the Bacchanal that opens the Paris version of the opera. Wagner’s aim was to create an archetypal picture of orgiastic excess, and by drawing on the musical idiom of Tristan und Isolde he is strikingly successful, at least from a purely musical point of view. Of course, it can be argued whether a phantasmagoria of action, singing, and dancing can in fact be realized as grippingly as Wagner may have imagined, but for the most part the music can meet these expectations as it does not have to be pinned down to concrete images but can inhabit a world beyond good and evil and play with sound figures to which we can all apply our own individual ideas of just what constitutes an orgy. In this context, Wagner’s harmonic writing is innovative and even avant-garde. Thanks to its chromatic and enharmonic procedures it is in a state of constant change, forever modulating to other tonalities and giving listeners—not least Wagner’s own contemporaries—the feeling that the ground is being taken from under their feet.

  The traditional theory of harmony naturally offers pointers to ways of incorporating these novel sounds into the existing system, so that the D-sharp on the first syllable of “Strande” in the Chorus of Sirens, “Naht euch dem Strande,” may be analyzed as a suspension of the chord of a diminished seventh over a pedal point on B. And yet this suspended chord, which is made up of a major and a minor triad, acquires so much weight as a result of its length that its sheer idiosyncrasy leaves a far greater impression on the listener than its subsequent resolution. To borrow from the language of arithmetic, the sirens’ sound is both real and imaginary, or, to quote the Wagner scholar Werner Breig, it is “a simultaneous pulling away and an urge to rest.”43

  7. The sirens’ call from act 1 of Tannhäuser.

  As enthusiastic Wagnerians, we may regard this art of illusion as the ne plus ultra of the genre, or we may follow Adorno and claim the moral high ground by accusing Wagner of “ambiguity” and, hence, untruthfulness.44 Yet again we may agree with Walter Benjamin and Claus-Artur Scheier when they claim that the artistic product is being “technologically produced” here in a way that turns Wagner’s idea of metaphysical redemption into a commodity that as such negates itself, while “restoring” that quality “and, as it were, raising it to a higher power.”45 This comes close to the media theory of Marshall McLuhan, according to which the medium is the message, which in the present case would mean that Wagner’s music conveys no “higher” meaning of the kind that we find in the score of Beethoven’s Fidelio, for example, but that the stimuli of the music, when divorced from the visual spectacle, are devoid of meaning and capable, therefore, of docking with all possible synapses. But leaving aside all modern media theory, we can still express astonishment at the unique ideas that Wagner presents here in drawing his listeners into the undertow of the action and lending an entire scene a wholly distinctive and unmistakable color.

  The same is true of the introduction to act 3, a passage often described as “Tannhäuser’s Pilgrimage.” It represents an inspired attempt to depict Tannhäuser’s failed journey to Rome and his feelings up to his return to the Valley of the Wartburg in autumn not as those events might unfold onstage but as a purely instrumental tone painting, a term that Wagner was not in fact to use until the time of the prelude to Lohengrin. Toward the end of his life, he was fond of asking Josef Rubinstein to play such tone paintings—especially those drawn from the Ring—on the piano. According to a much later reminiscence by Wagner’s publisher, Ludwig Strecker, the composer explained that such tone paintings “give people the essence of the drama and, indeed, everything, to the extent that it is not only interesting without words but also intelligible.”46

  The original version of Tannhäuser’s Pilgrimage was 155 bars long and included “recitative-like orchestral phrases.” In writing it, Wagner already had in his head a complete “picture of the events” that take place during his hero’s journey to Rome.47 But in the light of the first performance of the opera, Wagner cut more than a third of it because he felt that many of its details would inevitably remain unclear. And yet even in its shorter version, for which he set out a detailed “program” in a note he wrote for a series of performances of this orchestral introduction in Zurich in May 1853,48 Wagner plays eloquently with motifs from the earlier acts that help to characterize Tannhäuser’s state of mind. These include Elisabeth’s appeal “ich fleh’ für ihn, ich flehe für sein Leben” (I plead for him, I plead for his life), phrases from the Pilgrims’ Chorus such as “Zu dir wall’ ich, mein Jesus Christ” (To you I come, my Jesus Christ) and the atonement motif already heard in the overture and later set to the words “Ach schwer drückt mich der Sünden Last” (Ah, the weight of sin weighs heavily on me). But there is also a pre-echo of a phrase later found in the closing scene of the opera at the words “Erlösung ward der Welt zu Theil” (Redemption was granted to the world) and previously used to underpin Tannhäuser’s Rome Narration: it recalls the “Dresden Amen” that will later acquire significance as the Grail motif in Parsifal.

  8–10. The motifs associated with penance, redemption, and contrition. The redemption motif looks forward to the Grail motif from Parsifal.

  Wagner demonstrates supreme artistry in combining these motifs and adding a new one in the form of a theme associated with remorseful contrition,49 thereby granting listeners a glimpse of Tannhäuser’s emotions during his pilgrimage to Rome, as fear and despair contend with a sense of hope that ultimately becomes euphoric. The sophistication of this tone painting may be illustrated by at least one detail: the chromatic motif associated with atonement and first heard in the overture in bar 17 creates an impression more especially by dint o
f its eccentric harmonies (E minor—G minor—B-flat minor—the area of E major).50 In bars 23–30 of Tannhäuser’s Pilgrimage it then migrates in a curiously tentative and brooding manner from the horns via the clarinets to the first oboe, while being subjected to a remarkably nuanced treatment even within the horns: the second valve horn enters first of all with the motif, after which the sequencing continues with the second natural horn, while a further sequence is entrusted to the first valve horn. This process leads to a constant recoloring of the sound and creates the impression that the mood is perpetually changing in a subtle and almost indefinable way. (That modern orchestras draw no distinction between natural horns and rotary valve horns means that this effect is considerably impaired.)

  To the true composer music willingly reveals its secrets. He grasps its talisman and with it commands the listener’s imagination, so that at his summons any scene from life may pass before the mind’s eye, and one is irresistibly drawn into the colourful swirl of fantastic images. It may well be that it is in the knowledge of these mysterious charms and their proper application that the true art of musical painting lies. Melody, choice of instruments, harmonic structure—all must work together. [. . .] On the other hand there are certain melodies which suggest solitude, or pastoral life, for example; a certain combination of flutes, clarinets, oboes, bassoons will intensify this feeling with extreme vividness.51

  These reflections on “musical painting” were penned by E. T. A. Hoffmann in 1812, but not until Wagner arrived on the scene was the compositional promise contained within them finally made good, not least in Tannhäuser’s Pilgrimage, which on the one hand represents a traditional entr’acte, while on the other anticipating Wagner’s later “orchestral melody.” When he discussed this last-named concept in Opera and Drama and declared that it conveyed the inner action of his musical drama, Wagner will have had not only the future Ring in mind but also those passages in Tannhäuser that reflect this ideal—in other words, episodes such as the Rome Narration, which even Adorno was willing to acknowledge as “music of the greatest power.”52