The claims that are made by Wagner’s domesticators, which I enumerated in the last chapter, are not to be lightly dismissed, if only because so many intelligent people believe them. But I don’t intend to confront them directly, and in general terms. Rather I shall look at some particular cases of Wagner’s presentation of what he undoubtedly saw as the human condition, and leave readers, who would be engaged in a pointless exercise if they were not also listeners, to draw their own conclusions.
There is no question that Wagner uses all his resources to depict figures who are larger than life. That is something that is also true of Homer, Shakespeare, and many other great epic and dramatic artists. Why do they do it? Does it serve a useful, as opposed to a thrilling or wish-fulfilling purpose? A simple question to which there is no simple answer. It seems to be felt that in the case of Homer and the Greek tragedians, if not of Shakespeare and Racine, there is no real issue to be confronted, because they lived in a period when it was in some way more natural to see life in those terms, as containing heroes whose dimensions were justified, permissible. They were thought, or thought themselves, to be living under a group of gods who gave them a status which can’t be claimed for men who live in a secular world, or under a Christian dispensation, where there may be saints, but not heroes. Some of Wagner’s characters think that they are living in the same kind of world as the Greek heroes, with gods in charge of their destinies, but Wagner didn’t believe in those gods, as Homer presumably did. Does that fact in itself make the crucial difference? It seems that it does, because the whole portrayal of the relationship between gods and men in Wagner betrays his self-consciousness about the nature of mythology.
He is often, I think rightly, praised for the prodigious labours of research that he undertook into Norse and Germanic myths before he distilled their essence for his purposes. But that can also be taken in a different way, as showing a mistaken attitude towards myth in general. For Wagner was a very sophisticated, very intellectual person, and his raids on ancient myths resulted in a product that was so far from the spirit of the original that it is not difficult to argue that it merely cosmeticises, with enormous skill and still greater panache, stories containing contemporaneous figures or rather types, whose predicaments are not seriously to be illuminated by placing them in some contrived mythical dimension.
That, yet again, is the gravamen of Nietzsche’s charge against Wagner, when he caustically remarks,’ “But the content of the Wagnerian texts! their mythic content! their eternal content!” – Question: how can we test this content, this eternal content? – The chemist replies: translate Wagner into reality, into the modern – let us be even crueller – into the bourgeois! What becomes of Wagner then? – Among ourselves, I have tried it…Would you believe it? all of Wagner’s heroines, without exception, as soon as they are stripped of their heroic skin, become almost indistinguishable from Madame Bovary!…Indeed, transposed into hugeness, Wagner does not seem to be interested in any problems except those which now occupy the little decadents of Paris. Always five steps from the hospital. All of them entirely modern, entirely metropolitan problems. Don’t doubt it.’ (The Case of Wagner, section 9). And he enumerates Wagner’s central figures, making parallels with ones in contemporary life and literature.
It is a game that Nietzsche is expert at playing, one of his fundamental strategies for dealing with the depressing nature of the world he saw surrounding him. Yet it is not a hard game to play; its chief snag, after a time, seems to be that it is too hard to lose. Why is Nietzsche prepared to trivialise and reduce Siegfried and Parsifal, but not Achilles, as Homer presents him in the Iliad? For this great hero, the centre of the world’s most powerful epic, is engaged for most of its course in a sulk, induced by Agamemnon’s unsporting refusal to let him have the spoils of war that he has earned. Must heroes always be heroic? Evidently not, if Achilles is one of them, and if not he, who?
The concept of the heroic clearly has to do with the way in which people are seen, not just with them in themselves. To the mean in spirit, nothing is heroic or worthwhile. Nietzsche was not au fond a mean-spirited man, but for his polemical purposes he was prepared, on occasion, to behave as if he were. He wanted to show his age (which is ours, only we might have rendered him speechless) that it was small, and so when it appeared to be large, as with Wagner’s creations, he had to show that there was something counterfeit about them. Even though the techniques are crude, they force us into thinking about what the criteria for greatness of soul are, and under what conditions they can be fulfilled.
Nietzsche’s strictures on Wagner are often accepted because we are embarrassed, now, at the mere thought of the heroic. We can, like him, accept it if the works in which it is incarnated are sufficiently remote, so that we become anthropologists in time, happy to grant a status to distant figures which we would never accord to ones nearer to us. Shakespeare, who was once thought to have invested a good deal in the heroic, is now felt to have hedged his heroes – Hamlet, Othello, Coriolanus, Antony – about with so many qualifications that we can cope with them as fascinating studies in immaturity, self-glorification, self-ignorance, and other things that make us feel comfortable. Wagner, by sharp and damaging contrast, has no reservations about his – not that he thinks them perfect, which everyone would agree would make them uninteresting, but about the scale of whatever qualities they possess. And yet his art seems to fit into the period in which it was created with a snugness which leads us to wonder how he can have lived in the centre of the age of the novel, that supreme form of the unheroic, and not shown more suspicion of his characters and the ambience he created for them to live in.
Let’s look cursorily at the central figures in his dramas, see which seem to have accorded to them heroic status, and then focus on some particular case. Der fliegende Holländer: the Dutchman himself, and Senta. Tannhäuser: the only candidate is the eponymous central figure, and as we shall see, he is marginal in one way to Wagner’s work, though central by intention. Lohengrin: again only the central figure, who may not be all that central. Tristan und Isolde: the two central figures. Die Meistersinger. no one, or perhaps Hans Sachs if we widen our criteria. The Ring: Siegmund, Brünnhilde, Siegfried, and perhaps Alberich. Wotan, as a god, and the dominating figure in the Ring, can be included if the contrast of gods and heroes is not taken as sacrosanct. Parsifal: the central figure.
So first back to the Dutchman, and the woman who saves him. How impressive a figure is Wagner’s first serious attempt to portray a man of heroic proportions? In the first place, as I remarked earlier, Wagner’s interest is typically in someone who has done something frightful but not straightforwardly evil – which is to say that he himself suffers more than anyone else on account of his action. The Dutchman’s oath to round the Cape at all costs is a blasphemy for which Satan punishes him. It is, again characteristically, an assertion of will taken with no regard to consequences – here Wagner’s heroes tally with ancient ones in their rashness, pursuing a goal without reckoning the cost. We now, living in what Adorno called with horror ‘the administered society’, are bound to regard things from the standpoint of accountants, wearily but tirelessly carrying out cost-benefit analyses. But we do look with nostalgia at people who were not so placed, and try to find areas of life where we might behave in this way ourselves. Hence the attraction of (literally) daredevil figures, and also no doubt the cult of the gangster-hero. And our imaginations also are caught by figures who are prepared to risk anything to get home – hence the permanent attractiveness of Odysseus. The Dutchman is one such, but the horror of his situation is that in his determination he vowed the very thing which would ensure that he never did get home – at least, not until he died, a consummation that Satan denies him.
That is the figure whom we encounter when he makes his first appearance, coming onto land again after seven years. He is set up to appear in the most glamorous light, since all we have had after the Overture and some ‘Halloho’-ing from Daland’s crew is the mundane conversation between Daland, one of Wagner’s most pithy portrayals of venality, and the charming Steersman, who falls asleep on watch while singing a catchy song to his girlfriend. As the Dutchman emerges, Wagner changes the atmosphere completely, with quiet, slumping strings alternating with lugubrious low winds. At last the Dutchman mutters his opening line, ‘Die Frist ist um’ (The time is up), and we are launched on the first of Wagner’s succession of monologues of exhaustion, a line which will continue through Tannhäuser’s Rome Narration in Act III; Tristan’s mighty pair of self-analyses in Act III; Siegmund’s in Act I, and Wotan’s vast act of self-communing in Act II of Die Walküre; Amfortas’s in Acts I and III of Parsifal, as well as Parsifal’s own in Act III. All of these monologues fall into sections in which understanding the plight the respective characters got into alternates with hopes and ideas for its alleviation, and further descents into despair at the impossibility of emergence. What is remarkable is the maturity of expression which the Dutchman’s plight forces Wagner to employ.
In the first section he rails, in recitative punctuated by rushing strings, at the ‘proud ocean’s’ throwing him up on land, only to lay claim to him once more after a brief spell; and he sings in more eloquent declamation of his eternal torment, lasting ‘bis…euer letztes Nass versiegt!’ (until you are drained dry!). The strings begin their restless heaving, as in the overture, which connotes the Dutchman’s travels, and he recalls how often he has sought death, driving his ship onto rocks, but always to no avail. To a despairing octave descent he cries, as so many of his successors will, ‘Nirgends ein Grab!’ (Nowhere a grave!), the dread command of damnation.
Four bars of pianissimo timpani rolls follow, always a portent of climactic anguish in Wagner, as at last the Dutchman begins a long, upward-moving melody of hopeless yearning: ‘Dich frage ich, gepries’ ner Engel Gottes’ (I ask you, blessed angel of God), a huge span which contradicts the despair from which it arises, but is cut off, in further cries of the futility of finding anyone on earth who will be faithful. After an orchestral outburst, still more strident, another theme of hope emerges, but now with impressive momentum; this time the hope is that the Day of Judgement will eventually arrive, when all things, even torment, will come to an end. And with a final effort the Dutchman sings ‘Ew’ge Vernichtung nimm mich auf!’ (Eternal destruction take me away!), a sentiment his crew echoes in a ghostly whisper.
This scena, which lasts more than a quarter of an hour, breaks new ground both in its dimensions – all the more striking in a relatively concise work, Wagner’s shortest by some way – and in its unremitting intensity. Great laments had been the order of the day since the birth of opera, but not on this scale, and not on this subject. The Dutchman’s plight is unconnected with any other person, though it is only another, as yet unspecified, person who will rescue him. He is, in the most basic terms, doomed to live, so unwillingly charged with energy that the peace he longs for is unimaginable. Apart from the qualifications for mythic, heroic stature which I have already noted, he has the all-important further one of not being presented with psychological depth – indeed psychology doesn’t come into it. That is no doubt the main reason for Wagner’s failing to give him a name; in the legend he is usually known as Vanderdecken, but here he simply is his defining characteristic. What we sympathise with – and I am taking it that we do feel sympathy – is a predicament, rather than a person. It is noteworthy that contemporary producers have gone in for various ‘interpretations’ of the opera, according to which it is someone or other’s dream, favoured candidates being Senta and the Steersman. But the Dutchman himself has been left alone: he is simply presented as a given, and there is nothing that producers can do about that. Although making the opera into a dream of the Steersman seems merely to trivialise it, making it into a dream of Senta’s seems more promising, because she is quite easily seen as a psychological study. Set in her social context, as the Dutchman very evidently isn’t (he doesn’t have one), we are led, if we have that kind of interest, into wondering why she alone, among the spinning maidens, is obsessed by the portrait of the Dutchman, why she finds her suitor Erik so boring, why she wants to devote herself to so foolhardy an endeavour as saving a man who may only be the subject of a ballad.
At the same time, the tendency recent producers have shown to rewrite Wagner’s drama for him reveals that they can’t believe that, as it stands, it can command the interest of contemporary audiences. Although the Dutchman is manifestly the central figure, they want him to be a wish-fulfilment, a projection, because he has no individuating psychological features. But to adopt their procedure is to beg the question: Is it possible now, or was it possible in 1842, to make a serious contribution to our understanding of anything by creating or re-animating a myth? I can’t see that the answer is so obviously negative that such creative adaptations of Wagner have to be made. The Satan-defying vow that the Dutchman has taken in the indefinitely distant past can be understood, was surely meant to be understood, as an act of typicality: something which one might have done, and which would determine that one would never find peace. To see life in such terms is not any longer something which most of us can manage; yet with his incomparable imaginative vitality and musical resources Wagner has rendered the possibility open to us. What Wagner is offering us, and what we are apparently unable to accept, is a vision of life in which we perform an act which can’t be gone back on and which sets the pattern for the whole of the rest of our existence. And if that existence is ghastly, the only hope is that we might find another person who is unconditionally ready to offer themself in order to free us.
But supposing there were such a person, how would the mechanism of salvation be effected? Beethoven, who was preoccupied with the same issue in his only drama, made it a straightforward matter of rescuing someone from imprisonment, no joke given the circumstances, but thoroughly intelligible in terms of what Leonore has to do. But Wagner is concerned with a different question, one which he devoted his life to locating and then trying to solve. He had, one can deduce from all the dramas, quite apart from the copious evidence of what he wrote in his discursive essays, the strongest sense that life as it is ordinarily lived, and apart from any specific set of social or political conditions, is not worth the pains and efforts that are involved. But to transcend the normal terms of life is inevitably to offend against community, and even in some way to offend against the constitution of the self, which depends on the community whose codes it needs to violate. His characters are often accused of being morbidly, or wickedly, self-obsessed. But the Dutchman, who could hardly be obsessed with anyone else, gives us in a virtually diagrammatic form a grasp of how inevitable that self-obsession is. By chance or instinct, Wagner hit upon as his first hero a person who represented for him the fundamental human lot, which is one of terrifying isolation.
The most obvious way, at least for the last few centuries, in which one might hope to overcome that isolation, if there is no religious option open to one – or even, maybe, if there is – is by erotic passion. That is not what the Dutchman wants, because it presupposes that life is worth living – it makes life worth living, or that is the idea. But the Dutchman can only see life, as his creator often only could, in terms of fearful striving. So his search, a highly original one in Western culture, is for someone who will enable him to die by dying herself, to show that she cares about him in the way he most wants to be cared about.
But at least as strong in Wagner’s make-up was the attraction of Romantic love, the idea that life could be made worth living if it achieved a pitch of incessant ecstasy. That is what his next central figure hopes to achieve. Tannhäuser is, all told, Wagner’s least successful work, but like the failures of other great artists, it is deeply illuminating to consider why. It is also interesting, and revealing, that Wagner never put his finger on the reasons for its unsatisfactoriness, thinking until the end that it was a matter of failure in getting the details right, rather than, as is in fact the case, a fundamentally flawed conception – his only one. The flaw is clearly seen in the broken-backed character of Tannhäuser himself, a passive figure of a kind that Wagner was not able to understand. True, Tannhäuser has, before the opera opens, taken a pretty big initiative: he has left the court of minstrels to which he belongs, finding it, as he is right to do, desperately insipid. Furthermore, he has gone to the Venusberg, the very seat of sin, and has made the most of the opportunities it offers, for an unspecified period.
The Overture, one of the Victorians’ favourite pieces, sets out the terms of the drama, or rather what Wagner took them to be, with unusual clarity. It begins with the Pilgrims’ Chorus, solemnly intoned by woodwinds; after the first time through, the ‘cellos enter with a heart-weary figure which immediately suggests the individual’s burden of sorrow. Typically, it rises only in order to fall, as though the weight were indeed too much for it. The pilgrims’ music re-enters in brassy glory, this time with the excited accompanying motif which Wagner called ‘the pulse of life’ on the strings, and then peters out in mid-phrase, and the wicked part begins. Wagner’s first grown-up depiction of sensuality is highly effective: darting, tumescent, chromatic figures, flickering accompaniments, suggestive of flames consuming the soul. And in its original form the Overture ends with a further thundering out of the pilgrims’ hymn.
If it sounds a bit corny now, compared to the eternal freshness of the Holländer Overture, it is still easy to ‘read’ and to feel that it serves its purpose. Although Wagner gives the pilgrims an easy victory in it, he skilfully conveys an ambivalence in the Venus central section. It has colouristic allure, and yet isn’t something one could live with for long. And the ballet which succeeds it in the original (1845) version is a short-winded affair, more of the same and failing to add anything. Wagner is not, despite his reputation, particularly good at depicting mere sensuality. Here, at any rate, his portrayal of post-coital tristesse is more convincing, indeed the slow encroachment of languour over the whole scene is striking enough to make Tannhäuser’s confession of weariness to Venus superfluous. Nor is her attempt to rekindle his interest in the least satisfactory. The composer himself correctly came to feel that it was the weakest music he had composed. Tannhäuser tries to rise to the occasion in his celebrated Hymn to Venus, already heard twice in the Overture, but once more there is a lack of conviction in it, no doubt partly intentional; also, I can’t help thinking, partly not. Wagner has trapped himself, as it were, between idioms. The music of the pilgrims, conventional in its piety, is one pole of Tannhäuser, that of the Venusberg, disturbingly chromatic, the other. Tannhäuser, caught in his allegiance between the two, has no idiom of his own, and his praise of Venus is as foursquare as it is hectic, employing one kind of means to celebrate another kind of end. Because Wagner has contrasted the two worlds between which he is torn so comprehensively, he is left without a convincing musical idiom for characterising his would-be hero, who is attracted to both. So, at least until his great Narration in Act III, Tannhäuser remains the one figure in Wagner on whom we can get no purchase.
Wagner wanted to contrast, it is all too plain, two kinds of love: sensual and spiritual. In doing, or trying to do, that, he showed himself to be an obedient child of his age in a way which is surprising and disconcerting. He often said, in later life, that the basic form of love was that between the sexes – an anti-Schopenhauerian claim which he disarmingly presented as a ‘modification’ of Schopenhauer. The great pessimist actually saw sexual love as the most blatant form of the Will to Live, which is in his view the root of all evil. Although Wagner had not yet read or heard of Schopenhauer when he wrote Tannhäuser, it tries to be a Schopenhauerian work. It fails, not as one might expect, by inadvertently glorifying the flesh, and making the spirit seem insipid. It is somewhat more complicated than that, since the heroine Elisabeth is no mere representative of spiritual, i.e. Christian, love. She is, in fact, against all expectation the major success of the work. But she is that interesting kind of success that ruins the work in which it occurs. She is the adored of all at the court in the Wartburg, but there is more to her than meets any of their eyes. They are so high-minded a crew that it is surprising they manage to reproduce themselves, as Tannhäuser acidly observes. Sanctimonious, self-righteous, vying with one another in the Contest of Song to celebrate chastity, it is not in the least puzzling that Tannhäuser finds them insufferable, and is driven by their songs to launch into his paean of praise, this time coming from the heart, to Venus. And Wagner shows them in the most vindictive light in their reaction to him. They round on him, swords drawn, and only Elisabeth’s superb moment of interjection saves Tannhäuser’s life.
That Elisabeth incarnates a conception of love that doesn’t regard the body as something to be frightened of is made clear even before she actually appears for her famous Entrance Aria in Act II. The orchestral introduction to it, which is often fidgeted through while audiences wait for the prima donna to arrive, is not only fine music but shows a lot about her character. After its opening, which takes up the concluding joyful strains of Act I, when the minstrels welcomed Tannhäuser’s return from they know not where, there is a feverish passage for the violins and violas which should advert us to the fact that Elisabeth’s excitement is no mere maidenly relief at the prospect of seeing an old friend again. In fact it is quite as erotically charged as any of the goings-on in the Venusberg, at any rate in the 1845 version. And when Elisabeth finally does launch her aria, it may be primarily directed to the Hall of Song, but her enthusiasm for that location would be excessive if she weren’t filled with the prospect of seeing him in it, and the music leaps obligingly when she sings of her increasing heart-rate.
The drop in musical and dramatic temperature when Tannhäuser arrives is in the first place indicative of the embarrassment both he and Elisabeth feel on being reunited, and given that he has to guard his secret, it is only to be expected that he should remain rather stiff, though one suspects once more that Wagner is at a loss for means to characterise a man without qualities. Anyway the main burden of the duet falls to Elisabeth, who tells Tannhäuser that while she used to listen to the other minstrels with pleasure, when she heard him singing, ‘Bald wollt’ es mich wie Schmerz durchbeben, bald drang’s in mich wie jähe Lust. Gefühle, die ich nie empfunden! Verlangen, das ich nie gekannt!’ (Now it would thrill through me like pain, now penetrate me with sudden joy. Feelings I had never experienced! Longings that were strange to me!) She goes on to say that she had been anxious about the effect of his songs, but he tells her to praise ‘den Gott der Liebe’ (the God of Love), using the masculine form rather disingenuously, since he is certainly not talking about the Christian God.
The Contest of Song follows, after the popular ceremonials which Wagner could produce with such warmth of appeal. But after Wolfram has delivered his elevated sentiments Tannhäuser comes into his own, linguistically and argumentatively if not musically. He points out, in apparent ignorance of the traditions of lofty hyperbole practised in these circles, that the terms in which Wolfram has characterised love should be reserved for God, that to talk of worship is to talk of the untouchable. Warming to his theme, Tannhäuser goes on to say that his interest is in the palpable, ‘was sich aus gleichem Stoff erzeuget, in weicher Formung an euch schmiegt, ich nah’ ihm kühn, der Quell der Wonnen’ (what is constituted of the selfsame stuff, in softer mould nestles to one – I boldly approach the fount of delight), and more to even stronger effect. This is excellent discussion, but abstract and not something that Wagner could set to music which would seem appropriate. The first half of Tannhäuser’s reply is semi-bald recitative, the second half flowing but irrelevant lyricism. It upsets the company, however, who have followed it more closely than one imagines audiences in the theatre ever doing, and Tannhäuser is accused of blasphemy by the beastly Biterolf, succinctly hit off in his mean-spirited primness by Wagner. Accusations and counter-accusations begin to fly around, though still at a level which leaves the musician in Wagner floundering. It is only when Tannhäuser throws caution to the winds that Wagner is able to marshal his resources, albeit traditional ones, to produce a reaction of revulsion from the court which rings true.
The full-scale unmasking of the minstrels and their attendants as a collection of smug ignoramuses must have given Wagner great satisfaction, but having failed to present a plausible Venus in Act I, and created this insufferable and claustrophobic society in Act II, it is unclear what Tannhäuser is torn between. Insofar as Wagner manages to create him at all, it is as an homme moyen sensuel, but Wagner is never interested in them, so he felt, as someone who was only drawn to extremes, that his hero must have nothing of the moyen about him. Whereas his true heroes tend to the demonic, or the radiantly spontaneous, Tannhäuser has about him a passivity of character, even if, as with many fundamentally passive people, he is given to violent outbursts to prove that he is a genuine agent. When Elisabeth steps between him and his would-be murderers, we are much more moved by the tensions within her, genuine and nearly uncontrollable, than by her relation to this broken reed who is only worthy of her protection because the crowd of assailants is so detestable.
The passage in which she defends him, rounding on these cruel would-be judges, is great drama, wonderfully set, and in isolation perhaps the finest thing Wagner had yet achieved. And when she sings, ‘Seht mich, die Jungfrau, deren Blüte mit einem jähen Schlag er brach, die ihn geliebt tief im Gemüte, der jubelnd er das Herz zerstach!’ (See me, the maid whom he broke in one quick blow in her youth, who bore him deep love in her soul, whose heart he exulted in piercing!), there is no question that Wagner has found a character whose inmost being he can create in superb words and shattering music. No wonder the company is humbled, singing in praise of her with utter conviction, though they have inevitably to turn her into ‘an angel’ to do it. But this is the grandest of all grand opera ensembles, huge and justified in its massiveness. With all its longueurs and ineffectualities, Tannhäuser is an indispensable work for the completeness with which Wagner has created, against heavy odds, a heroine in whose realisation there is no false note.
The reason why Wagner is so successful with Elisabeth, much more even than with the heroines who immediately succeed and follow her, Senta and Elsa, is that she is both vulnerable and courageous, and that those qualities spring from a single and deep source: her desire for Tannhäuser, which she can acknowledge even though it goes against the ethos of her society. We have seen that she was troubled by it, in her scene with Tannhäuser; but what upset her was that she didn’t understand her feelings, not that she thought them wicked. By the time we get to Act III, Wagner seems to have realised that the dramatic balance of the work has been lost. Tannhäuser has to be made interesting, and for that to occur it seems that Elisabeth has to be made uninteresting. At any rate what happens is that after a long and very graphic Prelude, of a kind unique in Wagner – it amounts to a travelogue, the precise content of which we learn only later – which forcefully redirects our attention to Tannhäuser, there is a scene between Wolfram and Elisabeth in which they try to outdo one another in selfless concern, and before she makes her departure Elisabeth has her second aria, this time a prayer to the Virgin, in which she seems to have forgotten what her personality is, and to have become a full member of the Wartburg society. ‘Make me, pure and angel-like, enter into thy blessed realm,’ she begs, and hopes that she has managed to ‘kill’ all sinful longings. This is no longer the Elisabeth whom we admired in Act II for having the courage of her strong feelings, but a new creation, designed to make us remember that the subject of the opera is the battle for Tannhäuser’s soul. The music Wagner awards her here is of a predictable kind, virginity being best expressed by oboes and other pure-sounding wind instruments. It is not a boring number, quite, but it is impossible not to feel that Wagner has disowned his most convincing female creation to date. The atmosphere of sanctimony, though it is not of the spiteful variety we witnessed in Act II, is carried still further by Wolfram’s launching into his apostrophe to the Evening Star (Venus, of course, but the point is not laboured, or perhaps even made). Such conventionalities would be hard to forgive if they were not the preparation for something truly momentous; Wagner’s musical dramaturgy is hardly subtle here, but it packs a punch. As the suave melody of Wolfram’s prayer comes to its end, it is cut off by a jagged, assertive but desperate phrase which marks the return, once more, of Tannhäuser, but from the opposite direction to Act I – from Rome, where he has gone, under orders, to seek absolution, only to receive as unforgiving a reception from the Pope as he had from the denizens of the Wartburg. No wonder he feels that he might just as well have stayed at home. But his religious damnation, as at this stage it seems to be, is his dramatic salvation. As an unabsolved penitent he has at last acquired a personality, even if it is still at bottom a reactive one. Bored in the company of Venus, he was boring. Contemptuous of the prigs in the Wartburg, he was abstract, then ranting. But rejected by the Pope, he has gained his own idiom of bitterness and recrimination. His long Narration, though it comes too late to retrospectively revivify him, or make him heroic, at least makes him interesting, as justifiably embittered people are. His wilful decision to return to Venus, who is more likely to be forgiving than any of the Christians he has encountered, is expressed in a cry that comes from depths he has only recently discovered, or been forced to create. The struggle that ensues between Wolfram and Venus, the latter making a surprise guest appearance, is compelling drama, though once more we feel that the person who shouts loudest for him will win, and his final abdication of agency makes him little more than a sad carcase to be fought over. The dénouement is swiftly effected by Elisabeth’s having died in the meanwhile and having her prayers answered by God, once more prepared to accept a sacrificial victim. Wagner grafts onto a most un-Holländer-like action the same conclusion, except that things are much more explicitly Christian here.
Commentators who feel that Tannhäuser’s plight is not as fascinating as it might be have tended to see in the work Wagner’s dramatising of the artist at loggerheads with his society, but that was a theme he was not to take up till later. Wagner himself said that Tannhäuser was a human being, Wolfram being a poet. But if he intended to create in Tannhäuser a purely human figure, in his sense, one can only say that on this occasion he portrayed the average rather than the mythically typical. No doubt myths have their simplicities, but Tannhäuser is crudely schematic, as the character of Elisabeth, at least in Act II, reveals by contrast. If Wagner was really concerned with the duality of flesh and spirit – it seems to me to be one of his distinctions that he was not, or was much less concerned than the vast majority of victims of the Platonic-Christian tradition – then he stumbled on the solution in his creation of Elisabeth, only to fail to recognise that he had, or to go back on it because it robbed him of his subject-matter. But in fact the central unsatisfactoriness of Tannhaüser shows that he was not dealing with an issue which mattered to him: hence the cardboard nature of Venus and the minstrels, and therefore of the man who is undecided between them.
Some of this became plain to him when he came to rethink and rewrite the opera for Paris at the beginning of the eighteen-sixties. He felt that Venus and her environment needed more sophisticated and extended treatment, which was true. But while the music and the added text which he created then are hideously impressive – there is no more disturbing music than the revised version of the Venusberg scene, which colonises, with repulsive success, the realm of pathological sexuality – he failed to make appropriate adjustments elsewhere. Admittedly he was, in the first place, providing a ballet to gratify his Parisian audience, but his artistic integrity would never have allowed him to do merely that. But the crucial cause of unease – the status of Tannhäuser – was left untouched. Anyone who could survive, as he does, the orgies of the revised Venusberg clearly has remarkable stamina, and his decision to move to a healthier climate becomes more plausible. But what balance the work had before – one kind of inadequacy countering another – was ruined. There is no need to make a fuss about stylistic incongruities, since it is entirely in keeping with the Venusberg that its idiom should be so decadently sophisticated, and what immediately follows it, the song of the Shepherd, is the more moving by virtue of its fresh innocence. But the Wartburg music is rendered still more colourless, so that Tannhäuser is now caught between the devil and the shallow grey sea. Meanwhile, the character of Elisabeth remains unaffected by the changes that were made elsewhere. She emerges, somewhat to one’s surprise, as the most completely drawn woman in Wagner until Sieglinde in Die Walküre, and in a few economical but confident strokes. She rarely receives her due, perhaps because her creator betrayed her in Act III. But listen to the first and last twenty minutes of Act II, and there is a figure of rare delicacy and strength.
What Wagner was probably trying to create in Tannhäuser was one of his ongoing succession of characters plagued by almost unendurable guilt, but the evidence (in the work) is that abandonment to sexual excess is not a fault which he could really believe to be all that bad, especially in view of the unappetising alternative. So whereas in his first drama the interest resides in the doomed man, and only secondarily in his redemptrix, the situation is reversed in Tannhäuser.