Although Tannhäuser had the most difficult gestation of any Wagner opera, undergoing repeated revisions after its Dresden première in 1845, it became the composer's first incontestable international success. Its overture and other excerpts first introduced British and American audiences to Wagner; the famously scandalous Tannhäuser performance in Paris in 1861 established his French fame. It was designated a "große romantische Oper," a grand Romantic opera, and its sumptuously memorable musical materials proved more pleasing to many nineteenth-century ears than the more challenging work that followed. Mark Twain described the Pilgrims' Chorus, with which the overture begins and ends, as “music to make one drunk with pleasure, music to make one take scrip and staff and beg his way round the globe to hear it.” The opera's battle royale between sacred and profane forces, with the latter providing titillation and the former eventually victorious, gratified Victorian and Wilhelmine sensibilities. What the opera lacks is the dramatic and musical cohesion that distinguish The Flying Dutchman before it and Lohengrin after it. Wagner admitted late in life that he had failed to achieve his goal; the opera remained his problem child.
Henri Fantin-Latour, "
Wagner's operas have their share of improbable occurrences, but the plot of Tannhäuser may be the most perplexing of the lot. Two distinct tales are fused: one describing how the goddess Venus lured the minstrel-knight Tannhäuser into her grotto, the Venusberg; and the other recounting a singers' contest at the Wartburg, the fortress above the town of Eisenach. The overture begins with the stately strains of the Pilgrims' Chorus, one of Wagner's most indelible melodic inspirations. In the Paris version, the overture leads directly into the Bacchanale — an orgiastic ballet of youths, nymphs, bacchantes, satyrs, fauns, graces, and cupids. Tannhäuser longs to escape this welter of endless lust and pleads his cast to the possessive Venus. Finally, by uttering the name of the Virgin Mary, he is expelled from the Venusberg and lands in the vicinity of the Wartburg. Passing pilgrims sing their chorus, and the company of the Landgrave of Thuringia welcomes the errant knight back into the fold. In Act II, we meet the pure-hearted Elisabeth, who loves Tannhäuser while worrying over Venusian strains in his vocalism. There is a singing contest on the topic of love; Tannhäuser's chief rival is the noble, resigned Wolfram von Eschenbach, also smitten with Elisabeth. Pagan lust resurfaces in Tannhäuser's discourse, causing general horror. Elisabeth intervenes, and Tannhäuser is allowed to go on a penitential pilgrimage. In Act III, Elisabeth resolves to sacrifice herself to heaven to save her beloved, while Wolfram salutes her lustrous innocence. Tannhäuser returns from his pilgrimage to Rome: the Pope has refused forgiveness, saying his staff would sooner burst into bloom. Bereft, the knight goes back into Venus's arms, whereupon Wolfram utters the name of the now upward-departed Elisabeth, triggering Tannhäuser's salvation. A new band of pilgrims arrives, bearing the Pope's miraculously green staff.
John Collier, "Tannhäuser in the Venusberg," 1901.
The most conspicuous different between the initial versions of the opera and the 1861 Paris revision is Wagner's spectacular expansion of the Venusberg sequence. The Opéra de Paris traditionally required a big ballet scene, and Wagner complied in his own idiosyncratic way, bringing to bear the onrushing, harmonically destabilized intensity of his later, Tristan und Isolde style. The exchanges between Venus and Tannhäuser are also elaborated. The effect of all this was to strength the "profane" side of the equation. It was this aspect that fascinated Charles Baudelaire, whose essay "Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris" marks the more or less official beginning of Wagnerism as a cultural phenomenon. By all reports, the Bacchanale of 1861 was not particularly orgiastic, at least by modern standards. Perhaps the most startling realization of the extreme sensuality appeared in John Neumeier's choreography for the 1972 Götz Friedrich production at BayreuthL
In the previous decade, Wieland Wagner brought the African-American soprano Grace Bumbry to sing Venus. The casting precipitated some blatantly racist discourse in the German press, and Wieland's intent was not without exploitative intent, as the scholar Kira Thurman has shown. Nonetheless, Bumbry's appearance proved to be a breakthrough for the festival — decades after Cosima Wagner had cast the mixed-race singer Luranah Aldridge as one of the Valkryies in 1896 (see Chapter 6) — and considered purely in musical terms it was a tremendous feat of vocalism, giving unusual heat and depth to the character.
"Dich, teure Halle, grüß' ich wider" ("Dear hall, I greet you again"), Elisabeth's salute to the Wartburg Singers' Hall in Act II, is a signature piece for sopranos, routinely sung at gala concerts and other festive occasions. None has given it more blazing beauty than Jessye Norman:
The great German baritone Christian Gerhaher sings the most famous vocal setpiece from the opera, "O du, mein holder Abendstern," known in English as the Song to the Evening Star. It appears in Act III, as Elisabeth is sacrificing herself to heaven on Tannhäuser's behalf. Wolfram looks up at the night sky and asks the evening star to greet Elisabeth "when she soars above this mortal vale / To become a holy angel there!"
