Myth and Legend in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Part Three

Click here to read Part One and here to read Part Two of the series.

Vintage postcard of the Wartburg

The castle of the Wartburg was a symbolic touchstone for German nationalists of the Romantic era. In 1521, after Martin Luther had been declared an outlaw for defying the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms, he hid at the Wartburg under the protection of Saxon elector Frederick the Wise and threw his inkpot at the devil who tried to distract him from his new project – a German translation of the Bible.

On the three hundredth anniversary of Luther’s Reformation, young radicals of the 19th century rebranded the castle from a symbol of the struggle for religious reform to one of their own struggle for political freedom when the Wartburg was the site of the first large-scale, inter-state student political protest. The Wartburg was a well-known symbol of German nationalism as Wagner was finishing his Tannhäuser libretto, six years before his own involvement in the Dresden uprising of 1849.

Wagner makes the political symbolism of the Wartburg in his opera quite clear. When Elisabeth greets the hall, the “beloved place,” in which only the songs of Tannhäuser can awaken her from “gloomy dreams,” Wagner is also saluting the nationalist cause and positing himself as the artist who can write the music of the revolution. This messaging continues with the chorus that subsequently enters, singing “Joyfully we greet the noble hall.” To make his intentions absolutely transparent, Wagner gives a third salute to the hall when the Landgrave sings “A great deal, much of great beauty, has been sung already here in this hall.”

There is nothing particularly subtle about lines such as “Wenn unser Schwert in blutig ernsten Kämpfen stritt für des deutschen Reiches Majestät.” This is exactly the type of Wagnerian rhetoric that gives Woody Allen the urge to conquer Poland.

In addition to being the location of the legendary song contest, Luther’s dealings with the devil, and the student demonstration, the Wartburg was the home of Saint Elisabeth. This Hungarian princess was, while still an infant, betrothed to the son of Landgrave Hermann. After her husband died while crusading for Christ, the twenty-year-old widow left her comfortable life in the Wartburg and became the first of her social class to follow in the footsteps on Saint Francis of Assisi, who had died only the year before. She became a lay member of the Franciscan order and chose to spend the rest of her life in hard poverty, doing charitable works.

Saint Elisabeth of Hungary

She was widely known and was quickly canonized a saint only four years after her death. She is the subject of forty-one chapters in the book by Bechstein that gave Wagner the idea of combining the Tannhäuser legend with the song contest of the Wartburg. In the opera, Wagner includes her saintliness, but fundamentally transforms her story. There is no husband, no crusade, no life of service. Instead, Elisabeth’s journey from princess to saint is centered on her love for Tannhäuser.

Elisabeth was the last of the opera’s central characters to be conceived by Wagner. Her role in the second act is indebted to “Kampf der Sänger,” an 1819 short story by E.T.A. Hoffmann – the author, composer and music critic whose work also inspired Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann and Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker. From Hoffmann, Wagner borrowed the scene of the hunters’ arrival, Wolfram’s kindness to the prodigal Heinrich, the idea of love as the contest’s subject, the striving between the two for the love of a beautiful young countess of the court, the lady’s protection of Heinrich after his bizarre performance, and the image of the knights of the court drawing their swords on the errant poet.

These cribbed concepts comprise much of the basic action of from the end of Act 1 through the end of Act 2, but a mere human countess could not provide the necessary weight of meaning Wagner needed for the conclusion of the second act and all of the third. The location of the Wartburg in Act 2 provides a counterbalance to the Venusberg in Act 1, but Wagner needed a character in the third act to balance Venus in the first.

Elisabeth & Tannhäuser by Willy Pogany (1911)

In the original ballad, after the pope spurns Tannhäuser’s request for absolution, the knight bids farewell to the Mother of God as he had done to the goddess of love:

He went forth from the city’s gate
in grief and sick at heart.
“Maria, mother, Holy Maid,
from you I now must part.”

Unwilling, perhaps, to bring the Virgin Mary onstage as a singing role, Wagner found a simple solution: he combined Mathilde von Falkenstein – the countess of Hoffman’s story – with the Catholic Saint Elisabeth. While again playing fast and loose with the original sources, this decision solved Wagner’s dramatic problems.

As for the drama of the contest itself, Wagner was determined that the competition be about conflicting ideas, not which opera star could sing the most impressive showstopper. When Wolfram steps to the fore and sings his song, Wagner uses very sparse orchestration in order, as he wrote in his autobiography, “to force the listener, for the first time in the history of opera, to take an interest in a poetical idea, by making him follow all its necessary developments.”

Lithograph of Franz Betz as Wolfram (c1860)

Continuing the association of the hall with German nationalism, Wagner prominently places the word deutsch in Wolfram’s salute to those in the hall on a high note and a downbeat. Although Wagner’s nationalism is willfully obscured by the usual supertitle translation of noble or upright, the original lyric again underscores the Deutschtum or Germanness of the hall.

Tannhäuser now sings a fourth verse of his “Song to Venus.” Where the earlier verses concluded with Tannhäuser’s “let me go” demand, this final verse ends with an exulting call that the others should join him in a return to the Venusberg. He has given himself fully to the enchantments of Venus. He is now her knight, and he sings her praises to the world:

To thee, goddess of love, shall my song ring out!
Now let thy praise be sung aloud by me!

Even through the foggy lens of loose translation, the words sung here by Tannhäuser echo the words of Venus in the medieval ballad:

Tannhäuser, you may take your leave;
though you must lend your tongue
and sing my praises through the land.

To the medieval mind, Tannhäuser’s mortal sin was not breaking the bonds of chastity, which would have been forgivable through penitence. His true transgression is that of apostasy – of defecting from Christianity back to heathenry. Seriously singing the praises of a pagan goddess would indeed have caused consternation in a Christian court.

Mural of the song contest at Neuschwanstein by Joseph Aigner

The idea of Heinrich being saved from the wrath of the knights by the lady and then being given a grace period to make amends occurs in the version of the Wartburg song contest that appears in the Deutsche Sagen of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm of 1818.

Although Wagner cut down Elisabeth’s Act 3 prayer for his niece Johanna, who played Elisabeth in Dresden, he insisted that the song represented the culmination of Elisabeth’s character arc. From her pangs of love for Tannhäuser through the confusion of the contest, all leads – according to Wagner’s essay “On the Performing of Tannhäuser”– to this moment of “the final efflorescence of the death-perfumed bloom” of Elisabeth’s short life.

In “the simple outlines of this tone-piece, completely bare of musical embroidery,” Wagner shows the young woman turning from the world to the “self-offering and death” of a pure, spiritual love. Wagner calls upon the sympathetic acting ability of the soprano – not the mechanical flourishes of grand opera singing technique – to bring out the meaning of the prayer; “only the highest dramatic, and particularly the highest vocal art,” he wrote, “can make it possible to bring this sensibility to outward operation.”

Structurally, the prayer provides a conceptual counterpoint to the words of Venus in the first act. Elisabeth sings: “Let me perish in the dust before thee, oh, take me from this earth! Make me, pure and angel-like, enter into thy blessed realm!” Nothing could more clearly portray the difference between the world-affirmation of the old heathen religion and the world-denial of medieval Christianity.

Vintage postcard of Geraldine Farrar as Elisabeth

Wolfram’s third showcase of the opera, like those in the first and second acts, is a restrained tribute to Elisabeth as an unreachable star. The first section centers on Wolfram’s presentiment of Elisabeth’s death. Wolfram’s melody reaches its high point on the word soars; his heart is breaking as the object of his long-hidden love leaves the world.

Wagner’s source materials sometime shine through rather clearly. In The Ring’s libretto, some passages are quite close in wording to German translations of the Icelandic Poetic Edda that Wagner had been studying. Here, as Tannhäuser tells Wolfram of his pilgrimage to Rome, his opening words echo a corresponding scene in Ludwig Tieck’s The Faithful Eckart and the Tannenhäuser of 1799, reprinted in 1828. Wagner’s Tannhäuser says, “Nun denn! Hör an! Du, Wolfram, du sollst es erfahren.” Tieck’s Tannenhäuser says, “Nun, so mag dein Wille erfüllt werden, du sollst alles erfahren.”

The pope’s condemnation of Tannhäuser and reference to his staff appear in the original medieval ballad:

The pope was leaning on a staff
and it was dry and dead.
“This shall have leaves ere you receive
the grace of God,” he said.

In the opera, after Tannhäuser declares his intention of returning to the realm of the goddess, Elisabeth’s corpse is carried onstage, and Tannhäuser dies before it. A triumphant hymn concludes the work.

Wagner has radically changed the ending of the medieval legend. In the original, Tannhäuser does indeed return to the Venusberg from Rome and is welcomed back by Venus. Messengers from the pope do seek Tannhäuser throughout every land to proclaim the miracle of the budding staff. However, Tannhäuser definitely does not fall down at the feet of a dead maiden and experience salvation.

Pope Urban IV

Rather, the final verse of the poem is as irreverently humorous as the works of the young historical Tannhäuser himself:

But he was in the mountain there
with Venus as before,
and so the pope, Urban the Fourth,
was lost forevermore.

The original ballad shows German disdain for the power of the Vatican two and a half centuries before Martin Luther nailed his theses do the door of the Wittenberg church in 1517. Interestingly, the ballad of oral tradition first appeared in print in a broadside of 1515; the 13th-century tale ridiculing the pope found a new audience in the age of the Reformation. The punchline of the poem damns the pope for failing in his duty as father confessor, for denying the limitlessness of God’s capacity for forgiveness, and for placing himself as a judge of men higher than the Heavenly Father Himself.

German anger at Urban IV in particular grew from the pope’s continuation of Vatican action against the Hohenstaufen dynasty. Urban used his ecclesiastical powers to manipulate German politics, at one point excommunicating the son of Emperor Friedrich II and giving his kingdom to a French count. The poems of the historical Tannhäuser, while not delving too often into politics, make clear his sympathy for the Hohenstaufens – a sympathy which may have influenced his choice as hero of the ballad.

Richard Wagner in Lucerne (1868)

Wagner explains his Wagnerian ending in Wagnerian terms:

When he returns from Rome, he is nothing but embodied wrath against a world that refuses him the right of Being for simple reason of the wholeness of his feelings; and not from any thirst for joy or pleasure, seeks he once more the Venusberg; but despair and hatred of this world he needs must flout now drive him thither, to hide him from his “angel’s” look, whose “tears to sweeten” the wide world could not afford to him the balm. 

Thus does he love Elisabeth; and this love it is that she returns. What the whole moral world could not, that could she when, defying all the world, she clothed her lover in her prayer, and in hallowed knowledge of the puissance of her death she dying set the culprit free. And Tannhäuser's last breath goes up to her, in thanks for this supernal gift of Love. Beside his lifeless body stands no man but must envy him; the whole world, and God Himself – must call him blessed.

Elisabeth’s self-sacrifice on the altar of pure love releases Tannhäuser to become free through his own death. Of course, this idea of freedom through “love-death” continued to fascinate Wagner in his later works. In light of Wagner’s own philosophy, it is interesting that the historical Tannhäuser yearns for a pure death in one of his poems: “Give me, I pray, a happy end, and let my soul in rapture dwell, a gentle death afford me. May I be saved by purity, that hell may be no danger.”

According to Wagner’s autobiography, his radical rewrite of the ballad’s conclusion – from (1) Tannhäuser returning to the pleasures of Venus as the pope goes to hell to (2) Tannhäuser’s salvation through the intercession of Saint Elisabeth – drew the ire of Protestant Germany. A rumor made the rounds that Wagner had been bribed by the Catholics to glorify their side in the latest struggles between Germany and the Church. J.G. Theodor Grasse, head librarian in Dresden while Wagner lived there, wrote about the changed ending in terms that make it sound like a criminal act, calling it “the sanctimonious emendation of the sublime and highly poetic return of Tannhäuser to Frau Venus (as we have it in the German folk-ballad) perpetrated by Wagner in the text of his well-known opera.”

The architect Gottfried Semper attacked Wagner as “the representative of medieval Catholicism” until the composer, who had been baptized a Lutheran, had a chance to explain his position. Wagner writes:

I eventually succeeded in persuading him that my studies and inclinations had always led me to German antiquity, and to the discovery of ideals in the early Teutonic myths. When we came to paganism, and I expressed my enthusiasm for the genuine heathen legends, he became quite a different being, and a deep and growing interest now began to unite us in such a way that it quite isolated us from the rest of the company.

Wagner in London (May 24, 1877)

In A Communication to My Friends, Wagner makes absolutely clear that his opera is no tale of Christian salvation:

How absurd, then, must those critics seem to me, who, drawing all their wit from modern wantonness, insist on reading into my “Tannhäuser” a specifically Christian and impotently pietistic drift! They recognize nothing but the fable of their own incompetence, in the story of a man whom they are utterly unable to comprehend.

Tannhäuser’s motivation for his self-imposed sufferings during his pilgrimage to Rome comes not from worry about his eternal soul, but from his deep love for Elisabeth. In an 1842 letter, Wagner writes:

In the parish church at Aussig I asked to be shown the Madonna of Carlo Dolci: it is a quite extraordinarily affecting picture, and 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.

Lest there be any doubt about the supposedly Christian nature of the work, Wagner explains his use of religious symbols in a remarkable passage from A Communication to My Friends:

[I]t is a fundamental error of our modern superficialism, to consider the specific Christian legends as by any means original creations. Not one of the most affecting, not one of the most distinctive Christian myths belongs by right of generation to the Christian spirit, such as we commonly understand it: it has inherited them all from the purely human intuitions of earlier times, and merely molded them to fit its own peculiar tenets. 

To purge them of this heterogeneous influence, and thus enable us to look straight into the pure humanity of the eternal poem: such was the task of the more recent inquirer, a task which it must necessarily remain for the poet to complete.

In other words, Wagner uses Christian myth like he uses Germanic myth; not for religious meaning, but for his own philosophical ends. He viewed his source materials as just that – materials to be re-forged into new forms as he saw fit. To Wagner, medieval literature was merely a dream of yesterday that led to what he saw as the true reality – his artwork of the future.

Tannhäuser runs through March 6 at Lyric Opera

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Grimm, Jacob. Teutonic Mythology. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2004.

Newman, Ernest. The Wagner Operas. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Spencer, Stewart and Barry Millington, trans. and ed. Selected Letters of Richard Wagner. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987.

Thomas, J.W. Tannhäuser: Poet and Legend, with Texts and Translations of his Works. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974.

Wagner, Richard. Tannhäuser. London: Overture Publishing, 2011.

_________. A Communication to My Friends. 1851. Available online.

_________. My Life. 1870. Available online.

_________. On the Performing of Tannhäuser. 1852. Available online.

_________. Overture to Tannhäuser. 1853. Available online.

Watson, Derek. Richard Wagner: A Biography. New York: Schirmer Books, 1979.

Weston, Jessie L. The Legends of Wagner Drama: Studies in Mythology and Romance. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1903.

Myth and Legend in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Part Two

Click here to read Part One of the series.

Tannhäuser & Venus by Willy Pogany (1911)

The concept of a man being seduced by a supernatural creature – whether goddess, elf or fairy – and spending time in her mystic realm before (in some cases) returning in a somehow transformed state to the everyday world is one that seems to be have been quite widespread. Thomas the Rhymer of Scotland has his Queen of Elfland, Lord Nann of Celtic Brittany has his Corrigan, and Oisin of Ireland has his Niamh. Sigurd’s visit to the mountain of Brynhild can also be seen as a variation on this theme.

Likewise, the Tannhäuser ballad is but one version of the ancient idea that a man who stays with a beautiful woman of the Other World is taken out of the normal flow of time’s passing. Either nine years in Elfland takes place in then space of one of our nights, or a single night in Elfland lasts through one of our decades. The Tannhäuser of the opera laments, “The time I have sojourned here, I cannot measure. Days, moons mean nothing to me any more.”

Throughout the Venusberg scene, the words of Wagner’s Venus seem directly inspired by the goddess of the Tannhäuser ballad. In the opera, her invitation to Tannhäuser to join her for some lovemaking in a comfortable grotto echoes a verse from the medieval ballad:

Tannhäuser, do not babble so,
what are you thinking of?
Let’s go into my chamber now
and play the game of love.

Venus’s cry “Begone, madman, begone!” signals the beginning of the new material Wagner wrote for the Paris performance in order to strengthen his characterization of the spurned goddess. As she angrily mocks Tannhäuser’s dream of the world above, the music shows her anarchic nature.

Wagner in Paris for the 1861 Tannhäuser performances

When Wagner gives Venus the words “Fly hence to frigid men, before whose timid, cheerless fancy we gods of delight have escaped deep into the warm womb of earth,” he is tapping into the folk traditions mentioned earlier. Venus – like the other holdovers from the heathen age – has fled from the encroachment of Christianity and sought refuge in the hidden places of the world.

Tannhäuser escapes Venus – physically, at least – by calling upon the Virgin Mary. This idea goes back to the historical Minnesinger, who calls upon the Mother of God in verses two, three and four of his “penitent song.” In the old Tannhäuser ballad, it is exactly this naming of the Virgin that finally convinces Venus to release the knight:

Dame Venus, that I shall not do;
I’ll never stay in here.
Maria, mother, Holy Maid,
In my distress be near!

With Tannhäuser’s naming of the Virgin in the opera, the orchestra evaporates into the upper musical range as the magical world of the Venusberg fades. In the absence of the ensemble, all we hear is the sound coming from the stage itself: sheep bells and the medieval shawm played by the young shepherd (or at least the backstage English horn representing it). Maybe it was the sound of these tinkly bells that drifted into Tannhäuser’s dream in the Venusberg. The simple and folkish instrumental tune leads to the starkly unaccompanied song of the shepherd, which includes the words “der Mai” (the month of May) echoing back from the sides of the valley.

It is significant that the first sound Tannhäuser hears after leaving the Venusberg is the Shepherd Boy’s song to Lady Holda. The song of the shepherd outside the mountain parallels the songs of Tannhäuser within, as the boy sings of longing, of the mixture of dream and reality, and of the coming of the warmer season

"The Northland Goddess of the Earth"
by Willy Pogany (1911)

Jacob Grimm directly connects Holda to springtime celebrations in Christian times:

To Christian zealots all dancing appeared as sinful and heathenish, and sure enough it often was derived from pagan rites, like other harmless pleasures and customs of the common people, who would not easily part with their diversion at great festivals. Hence the old dancings at Shrovetide, at the Easter fire and May fire, at the solstices, at harvest and Christmas.

Grimm also directly addresses the connection of shepherd boys and Holda:

But as Holda is spell-bound in the mountain, so it is preeminently to white women, white-robed maidens, that this notion of mountain banishment becomes applicable: divine or semi-divine beings of heathenism, who still at appointed times grow visible to mortal sight; they love best to appear in warm sunlight to poor shepherds and herd-boys. German legend everywhere is full of graceful stories on the subject, which are all substantially alike, and betray great depth of root.

After this innocent outpouring of folk belief, Wagner gives us the entrance of the Elder Pilgrims. The orchestra remains silent as the pilgrims slowly enter, singing in church-like four-part harmony. The shepherd answers the earnest seriousness of their phrases with his jaunty piping. When the pilgrims sing “Alas, the burden of my sins weigh me down,” their melody is that of “remorse and penitence” from the opera's overture. Even the shepherd boy feels the weightiness of this music, and he ceases his interjected tootling.

Robert Gambill as Tannhäuser – San Diego Opera 2008

After the departure of the Pilgrims, Tannhäuser is discovered by the Landgrave and his Minnesingers. Following many exclamations, declarations and interrogations from the assembled men, Tannhäuser begs that they let him travel on: “My way bids me only… hasten onward.” He is firm in his resolution to keep away from the Wartburg, from the courtly world he left to enter the Venusberg – until the Minnesinger Wolfram calls out, “Stay by Elisabeth!” As Venus’s will to hold Tannhäuser was broken by naming the Virgin Mary, his own will to travel on is broken by naming Elisabeth.

To convince Tannhäuser to stay, Wolfram explains that Tannhäuser’s songs, performed before he left the court, have wrought great changes upon the maiden. This performance by Wolfram foreshadows his later songs – his entry in the Wartburg contest and his ode to the “Evening Star.” All three focus on the Minnesinger ideal of the unattainable maiden of virtue, all use the same star-metaphor for Elisabeth, and all exhibit restrained melodies that stand in stark relief to the intense passion of Tannhäuser.

With Tannhäuser’s decision to return to the Wartburg, we reach a decisive moment in his tragic downfall. Here in the valley between the Venusberg and the Wartburg is the only place where Tannhäuser may be able to find something approaching happiness. The valley is a place of balance. On one side is the Venusberg – a feminine and heathen place. On the other side is the Wartburg – a masculine and Christian place.

Gazing at the Wartburg by Willy Pogany (1911)

Venus – the pagan goddess of love – rules in a cave beneath a mountain. More than half a century before the publication of Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, Wagner was well aware of the sexual connotations of the setting. In 1845, his agent – the music publisher appointed to the court of Dresden – warned Wagner about against using his original title for the opera. Wagner writes:

The only thing that Meser was absolutely opposed to was the title of my new opera, which I had just named Der Venusberg; he maintained that, as I did not mix with the public, I had no idea what horrible jokes were made about this title. 

He said the students and professors of the medical school in Dresden would be the first to make fun of it, as they had a predilection for that kind of obscene joke. I was sufficiently disgusted by these details to consent to the change.

On the other side of the valley from the mons veneris is the Wartburg – the castle with its prominent tower – from which Hermann the Landgrave, ruler of the land, issues forth with his knights to hunt. Venus sings of “the downiest of cushions” in the “abode of sweetest delight”; the Landgrave sings of swords raised in “battles grim and bloody… for the majesty of the German realm.” Wagner isn’t exactly subtle in his presentation of the gendered duality.

Between the grotto and the tower is the valley, a place where neither side rules supreme. Everyone passes through on their way to another location – to the Venusberg, to the Wartburg or to Rome. Only one character inhabits the valley – the Shepherd Boy, who is neither wholly pagan nor fully Christian. After singing his song to the goddess Holda, he calls out to the Pilgrims, “Pray for my poor soul!” This blending of heathen and Christian belief among the country folk of northern Europe was a historical reality, one documented by Grimm and many others.

Elisabeth Schumann as the Shepherd Boy (1909)

Wagner places the shrine to the Virgin in the valley, reflecting the common Christian reassignment to Mary of heathen sites sacred to goddesses. In addition, the Shepherd Boy is neither completely female nor solely male. In both the Dresden and Paris premieres, the young boy was played by a young woman. This is a liminal character in every way, one who fully partakes of neither of the opposing worlds that border the valley.

Here, too, is the natural place for Tannhäuser, the “forest-dweller” who cannot be fully himself in either the Venusberg or the Wartburg. In protesting to the men of the castle that he can never look backward, but must press ever onward, he is rejecting the extremes of both worlds. When the name of Elisabeth is invoked, however, he is pulled back to the Christian world with its ruler, its knights, and its moral codes.

In A Communication to My Friends, Wagner explains the personal meaning that he invested into the character of Elisabeth, in terms of his struggle to turn from the pleasures of worldly life:

If at last I turned impatiently away, and owed the strength of my repugnance to the independence already developed in my nature, both as artist and as man: so did that double revolt, of man and artist, inevitably take on the form of a yearning for appeasement in a higher, nobler element; an element which, in its contrast to the only pleasures that the material Present spreads in modern Life and modern Art, could but appear to me in the guise of a pure, chaste, virginal, unseizable and unapproachable ideal of Love. 

What, in fine, could this love-yearning, the noblest thing my heart could feel – what other could it be than a longing for release from the Present, for absorption into an element of endless Love, a love denied to earth and reachable through the gates of Death alone?

Wagner would explore this concept further in his later operas, yet he here creates a woman with a soul as divided as that of the Minnesinger she loves. For much of the second act, she is torn between her desire to be with Tannhäuser and her concern for his immortal soul.

Nadja Michael as Elisabeth – Deutsche Oper Berlin (2008)

In her first appearance, Wagner portrays the first half of Elisabeth’s divided character. Not yet a suffering saint, “Dich , teure Halle” shows her as a young woman feeling the first joyful pangs of innocent love. As with the first words we heard from both Tannhäuser in the Venusberg and the Shepherd Boy in the valley, Elisabeth in the Wartburg first sings of being awakened from a dream – reminding us yet again that Wagner intends us to understand this as more than a simple love story.

The climax of Elisabeth’s duet with Tannhäuser is the most conventional theatrical moment in the opera; Wagner later denounced its excessively “operatic” character. Wolfram joins in to lament his lot as the third wheel. Even for those coming to the opera for the first time, it’s fairly obvious that the man who was unsatisfied with the attention of the goddess of love herself will not be content with this kind of chaste lovemaking.

Later in the Hall of Song, after the knights, nobles, pages and ladies have been assembled, Wagner presents his major philosophical themes in one neat package. The Landgrave sings of the power of the theater, militant nationalism, the importance of the creative artist, and love as the highest goal. The musical high point occurs when the Landgrave – channeling Wagner’s own beliefs – sings of the great value and indispensable social role the artist.

None of what has transpired in the opera since Tannhäuser left the Venusberg has any root in the poetry or legend of the historical Minnesinger. In the ballad, Tannhäuser goes straight from the Venusberg to Rome. So what is this contest of song, why are we in the Wartburg, who is Elisabeth and why does everyone keep calling Tannhäuser by the name Heinrich?

The song contest at the Wartburg – Codex Manesse (early 14th century)

The origin of the song contest is in the early-13th-century collection of poetic fragments known as the Wartburgkrieg, which places actual and imaginary Minnesingers in a competition at the court of the historical Landgrave Hermann of Thuringia at the Wartburg in 1207. The real Minnesingers Walther von der Vogelweide and Wolfram von Eschenbach vie with the fictional Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Hermann was greatly respected as a patron of the literary arts, and it was this reputation that no doubt led to the tale being set at his court.

To be absolutely clear, there is nothing in the poems of the song contest that connects Heinrich von Ofterdingen to either the historical Tannhäuser or the legendary Tannhäuser. In any case, the timeline simply doesn’t work; the historical Tannhäuser belongs to a later generation of Minnesingers.

The subject of the contest has nothing to do with the nature of love, as it does in the opera. In the original, each poet must defend his choice of prince as the ruler superior to all others. Walther von der Vogelweide and his companions champion Hermann; Heinrich von Ofterdingen, the outsider, sings of the Duke of Austria. Biterolf, Reinmar von Zweter and Heinrich der Schreiber also take part in the contest. Wolfram von Eschenbach – the author of Parzival and one of the earliest to write on the Lohengrin legend– serves as umpire.

Wolfram von Eschenbach from the Codex Manesse

As in Wotan’s contest of wits with Mime, Heinrich von Ofterdingen stakes his head on the issue; such a bet was placed in Germanic wisdom-contests as far back as the Old Norse myths of Odin. Also following the tropes of mythic contests, Heinrich is defeated by trickery. He then calls upon the magician Klingsor for help – you may know him from Wagner’s Parsifal. The wizard engages in a riddle contest with Wolfram and – interesting in light of Wagner’s own mash-up of separate legends – announces the birth of Saint Elisabeth.

Ultimately, the heroic Minnesinger’s Christian faith overcomes the dark arts of the Hungarian magician. Heinrich von Ofterdingen disappears from the narrative as the fragments of the poem move on to other subjects.

Although Wagner’s autobiography mentions that the first inspiration for his Tannhäuser opera was a 16th-century “Volksbuch” he stumbled across in Paris, the book seems to have actually been Ludwig Bechstein’s Die Sagen von Eisenach und der Wartburg, dem Hörseelberg und Reinhardsbrunn of 1835.

Bechstein appears to have been quite a bold fellow who freely filled in details as fit his fancy. He conflated the Venusberg of the Tannhäuser legend with the Hörselberg – according to folklore, the home of Frau Holle (Lady Holda of Wagner’s Shepherd Boy song) – and suggested that Tannhäuser basically bumped into Venus on his way to the Wartburg competition. The fact that the setting of the song contest was a half-century before the historical Tannhäuser’s heyday as a Minnesinger did not seem to bother Bechstein a bit.

Tannhäuser illustration by Willy Pogany (1911)

Wagner’s wholehearted adoption of this hamfisted admixture of two unrelated legends is made clear by the opera’s unwieldy final title: Tannhäuser and the Contest of Song on the Wartburg. His manipulation of mismatched myth drew down the wrath of scholarly celebrities including the noted German mythologist Karl Simrock.

The idea of focusing on an outsider entering a song contest was clearly something that appealed to Wagner. In addition to this opera on a 13th-century contest, you may also be familiar with a piece he wrote based on a 16th-century contest of Mastersingers in Nuremberg. What made the Wartburg contest especially attractive to him was its location.

To be concluded in Part Three.

Myth and Legend in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Part One

Tannhaäuser runs through March 6 at Lyric Opera of Chicago

This series of posts presents an abbreviated version of lectures that I gave on Richard Wagner's Tannhäuser at the Lyric Opera of Chicago (August 7, 2014) and the Wagner Society of America (January 28, 2015). I have removed all discussion of musical elements, as it makes little sense without audio excerpts. Instead, this series focuses on the roots of Wagner’s Tannhäuser libretto in myth, legend, literature and history.

The Lyric Opera of Chicago is currently presenting a production of the opera that runs February 9 through March 15. If you can’t make it to Chicago but would like to hear the music, I recommend the 1971 recording by Georg Solti with the Vienna Philharmonic. The final installment of this series at The Norse Mythology Blog will include a bibliography of sources used – a list which can also serve as a guide for further reading.

1844 daguerreotype of Richard Wagner

In order to understand the nature of Wagner’s magic mountain, we must turn to the scholarship of his time. Wagner writes in his autobiography that, in 1843 – the year he finished the poem then titled Der Venusberg – he was inseparable from his copy of Jacob Grimm’s Teutonic Mythology. First published in 1835, Grimm’s attempt to bring the scattered bits of Germanic heathen lore together into a coherent system had an outsized impact on Wagner, who wrote:

Formed from the scanty fragments of a perished world, of which scarcely any monuments remained recognizable and intact, I here found a heterogeneous building, which at first glance seemed but a rugged rock clothed in straggling brambles. Nothing was finished, only here and there could the slightest resemblance to an architectonic line be traced, so that I often felt tempted to relinquish the thankless task of trying to build from such materials. And yet I was enchained by a wondrous magic. 

The baldest legend spoke to me of its ancient home, and soon my whole imagination thrilled with images; long-lost forms for which I had sought so eagerly shaped themselves ever more and more clearly into realities that lived again. There rose up soon before my mind a whole world of figures, which revealed themselves as so strangely plastic and primitive, that, when I saw them clearly before me and heard their voices in my heart, I could not account for the almost tangible familiarity and assurance of their demeanor. 

The effect they produced upon the inner state of my soul I can only describe as an entire rebirth. Just as we feel a tender joy over a child's first bright smile of recognition, so now my own eyes flashed with rapture as I saw a world, revealed, as it were, by miracle, in which I had hitherto moved blindly as the babe in its mother's womb.

Wagner relied heavily on Grimm while writing The Ring of the Nibelung, and Grimm’s idiosyncratic combination of philology, folklore, literature and legend can help to explain the mythological elements of Tannhäuser, as well.

The Hörselberg in Germany

Grimm writes that the Hörselberg of Thuringia was still considered in the 10th through 14th centuries to be the residence of the German goddess Holda and her host. He cites legends of “night-women in the service of dame Holda” who “rove through the air on appointed nights, mounted on beasts,” and asserts that they “were originally dæmonic elvish beings, who appeared in woman’s shape and did men kindnesses.”

During the orgiastic Bacchanale that follows the overture, Wagner presents us with naiads, nymphs, satyrs, fauns and other creatures of Greco-Roman mythology. Why would a composer as nationalistic as Wagner have replaced the native figures of German legend with their southern counterparts? The answer lies in the two characters portrayed in the opera’s first scene.

The historical Tannhäuser was a Minnesinger – a composer and performer of songs dealing with courtly love. There are many conflicting theories about his life, some of them quite fanciful. However, in the words of J.W. Thomas, “Nothing is known of the life of the thirteenth-century poet and composer Tannhäuser except for what can be learned from the relatively few lines of verse which have been ascribed to him by medieval anthologists.”

"Der Tanhuser" from the Codex Manesse (Early 14thC)

Seventeen poems survive. In four of them, the poet calls himself “tanhusere.” The name may mean “the one from Tannhausen,” and there are several places with this name. It may also mean “the backwoodsman” or “forest-dweller,” an apt nickname for a poet whose works are marked by ironic humor that pokes fun at the conventions of courtly society. The language used in the poems suggests that Tannhäuser was originally from Austria or Southern Germany, but attempts to place him more specifically are mostly speculative. He probably died sometime shortly after 1266.

What makes the poems by Tannhäuser so interesting is their irreverence for the accepted mores of Minnesong. Everything expected is set on its head. Other Minnesingers compose odes to unattainable courtly ladies; Tannhäuser writes celebrations of successfully bedding rustic women. Not bedding, exactly, since his conquests take place out-of-doors. Where other poets sing of the delicate features of their beloved and steer well clear of impropriety, Tannhäuser famously sings the praises of every part of his beloved-of-the-moment – including the bits under her skirt. His work is not pornographic or leering; everything is done with a knowing wink and an obvious delight in subverting the expectations of his listeners. It is this “joyous challenge” that Wagner portrays in his overture.

Nadja Michael as Venus in Deutsche Oper Berlin's Tannhäuser (2008)

Like the figures of the Bacchanale, Venus is imported from Greco-Roman mythology into a German setting. This is not a new idea of Wagner’s. As far back as the writings of Julius Caesar in the first century BCE, Romans were making the interpretatio romana – interpreting the native gods of the Germanic tribes they encountered in terms of their own pantheon. In the first century CE, the Roman writer Tacitus famously wrote that Germans worshiped Mercury, Hercules and Mars – figures that later scholars consider to be equivalent to Odin, Thor and Tyr.

The northern tribes made their own interpretatio germanica – relating the foreign gods of the invading Romans to their own deities. The most famous example of this – and one that survives in modern English – is the Germanization of the Roman weekday names. Mars’ day became Tyr’s day (Tuesday), Mercury’s day became Woden’s day (Wednesday), Jupiter’s day became Thor’s day (Thursday), and Venus’s day became Frigg’s day (Friday).

Wagnerians know Frigg as Fricka, the consort of Wotan. However, the attributes of Venus line up more clearly with the goddess Freya than they do with Frigg. Since at least the early 1900s, scholars have argued for an original identity for Frigg and Freya that – at some unknown point – split a complex female goddess into a mother figure and a maiden figure, into a goddess whose domain includes marriage and another associated with sexual love.

It is Freya’s characteristics that most closely conform to Wagner’s Venus. The Icelander Snorri Sturluson tells us in his 13th-century Edda that Freya “was very fond of love songs. It is good to pray to her concerning love affairs.” Indeed, it is Tannhäuser’s song in the overture that summons her. In the second scene, her first attempt at holding onto Tannhäuser is to tell him: “Come, my minstrel, up and grasp your lyre! Celebrate love, which you extol so marvelously in song, that you won the goddess of love herself for yours! Celebrate love, for its highest prize has become yours!”

Wagner's Freia by Arthur Rackham (1910)

In a discussion of the Venusberg legend, Grimm asserts that the identity of Venus with the German goddess Holda in these tales “is placed beyond question.” Wagnerians with a good ear for detail will remember that, in Das Rheingold, Freia is also referred to as Holde. By the transitive property, if Venus equals Holde and Holde equals Freya, Venus equals Freya.

If you are familiar with Norse mythology and are unhappy with the portrayal of Freya as a weepy teenager in The Ring – a characterization that owes more to Wagner’s impression of the fifteen-year-old Marie von Sayn-Wittgenstein than it does to the myths – here in Tannhäuser you can have a more powerful Wagnerian image of the northern goddess.

The direct lineal ancestor of the Venusberg legend is most likely the Italian folk legend, recorded by the French Antoine de la Sale around 1440, of an anonymous German knight who enters the Monte della Sibina (the Mountain of the Sibyl) in the Apennines and finds a sensual paradise within. After three hundred and thirty days of debauchery with the Sibyl and her retinue, he departs for Rome to confess his sins. The pope is sympathetic but publicly admonishes him and casts him out as an example to others. When the pontiff regrets his actions and sends for the knight, he finds that the German has decided to go back into the mountain.

For a story like this to have moved up from Italy to Germany, there were necessarily elements in the legend that struck a sympathetic chord for the new audience. The papal issue will be addressed later; the identification by the Germans of Venus with their own native goddesses should already be clear.

In his essay on the overture, Wagner describes the “drunken glee” of the Bacchantes: “a scurry, like the sound of the Wild Hunt, and speedily the storm is laid.” He thus links the orgy inspired by the Roman Bacchus to the tradition of spirits following Holda or Wotan’s flight through winter skies – a legend he returns to in The Ring of the Nibelungen.

The Bacchanale by Willy Pogany (1911)

After the overture and Baccahanale have run their course, Wagner gives us a hint that what we see is not what he is truly giving us – that we are not really watching an opera about nymphs and Nereids, but one about psychology and philosophy. The stage directions tell us that Tannhäuser lifts his head, “as if starting from a dream.” When Venus asks after his thoughts, he laments, “O, that I might now awake!” In Act 2, he will speak of his sojourn in the Venusberg in terms reminiscent of dreams: “Deep forgetfulness has descended betwixt today and yesterday. All my remembrance has vanished in a trice” – the time spent inside the mountain is the dream between his past and present life in the world. What is this dream – this illusion – within which Tannhäuser is trapped?

In A Communication to My Friends (1851), Wagner explains that behind his writing of Tannhäuser was his personal experience of “a conflict peculiar to our modern evolution.” The financial security and relative comfort of his appointment as Royal Kapellmeister in Dresden had led him away from his artistic ideals and goals. He writes:

Through the happy change in the aspect of my outward lot; through the hopes I cherished, of its even still more favorable development in the future; and finally through my personal and, in a sense, intoxicating contact with a new and well-inclined surrounding, a passion for enjoyment had sprung up within me, that led my inner nature, formed amid the struggles and impressions of a painful past, astray from its own peculiar path. 

A general instinct that urges every man to take life as he finds it, now pointed me, in my particular relations as Artist, to a path which, on the other hand, must soon and bitterly disgust me. This instinct could only have been appeased in Life on condition of my seeking, as artist, to wrest myself renown and pleasure by a complete subordination of my true nature to the demands of the public taste in Art.

Vintage postcard of Wagner's Wahnfried at Bayreuth

This internal conflict between worldly pleasure and intellectual striving continued throughout Wagner’s life. In 1874, he named his Bayreuth villa Wahnfried (“peace from illusion”), a name that was, according to Derek Watson, “intended to symbolize his having at last found refuge from the outer world.” The illusion from which Wagner sought respite late in life is the “passion for enjoyment,” the waking dream of pleasure in which we first find Tannhäuser. The Venusberg, Wagner later wrote, is the “realm of non-being.” We’ll leave aside for the moment that “non-being” is exactly the goal of Wagner’s later version of Schopenhauerian Buddhism.

Watching the opera, we witness a dream within a dream. Wagner’s philosophical ideas are presented to us in the guise of history and legend. In his Communication, he writes of the power of folk poetry and myth to present truths that history cannot. He asserts that the folk poem

ever seizes on the kernel of the matter, and brings it again to show in simple plastic outlines; whilst there, in the history – i.e. the event not such as it was, but such alone as it comes within our ken – this matter shows itself in endless trickery of outer facings, and never attains that fine plasticity of form until the eye of the Folk has plunged into its inner soul, and given it the artistic mold of Myth.

Wagner’s interweaving of mythologies with his own philosophies can be found throughout the opera. Tannhäuser, wakened (or not) from his dream of the Venusberg, says: “In dreams, it was as if I heard – a sound long stranger to my ears – as if I heard the joyful peal of bells!” Tannhäuser’s determination to leave the Venusberg begins with this dream-sound, leading Ernest Newman to write of the disastrous Paris performances: “The average Parisian could not understand how the mere sound of a bell could tear Tannhäuser out of the arms of Venus.”

Jacob Grimm

To understand the significance of the bell, we must again turn to the work of Jacob Grimm. He writes in Teutonic Mythology that, according to Germanic folklore, the heathen beings that survive into the Christian age have a great dislike of bell-ringing. Elves, dwarves, giants and witches hate to see churches built, because the sound of bells “disturbs their ancient privacy.” In his imagination, Tannhäuser hears a sound inimical to heathen beings. It is entirely fitting that this is what first sets him on the path out of the Venusberg. As a Minnesinger – a singer of songs – it also makes complete sense that a sound would resonate so deeply and meaningfully within his spirit.

Wagner again hints at the illusory nature of what we – through the mediation of Tannhäuser himself – are seeing and hearing. In the Bacchanale music, there is a striking passage for tambourine, triangle and cymbals. Was this what Tannhäuser heard in his dream-state and mistook for the sound of church bells? Throughout the opera, we watch Tannhäuser vacillate between desires for physical pleasure and spiritual love. The idea that the mishearing of heathen percussion as Christian bell would be the impetus for the drama fits well within Wagner’s schemata.

Given Tannhäuser’s confusion, it is noteworthy that most of what he longs for in this first dialogue is not overtly Christian. Between the imagined bells at the beginning of the scene and the naming of the Virgin Mary at the end, Tannhäuser yearns for sun, stars, grass, birds, spring, summer, woodlands, skies, meadows, pain and death. Everything he lists is part of the natural world, not Christian civilization.

Tannhäuser (Robert Gambill) and Venus (Petra Lang)
San Diego Opera (2008)

While we may understand how the opera reflects Wagner’s own internal conflicts, we have yet to address the source for the debate between the poet and the goddess of the opera. The roots of the scene can be traced back to a four-stanza poem that appears under the name “Der tanuser” in the surviving medieval manuscript – a poem that is strikingly different in subject and tone from the other works attributed to the historical Minnesinger.

Here, instead of addressing a courtly audience and extolling the pleasures of country girls, he addresses God in the form of the “penitent song” and begs forgiveness for the sins of his youth: “I’ve spent my life in sinfulness and never been repentant, as I should. Thy suffering and divinity will surely give me aid that I may break my bonds and leave this life of sin, and make amends for all at last.”

Other late poems suggest that Tannhäuser experienced financial hardship after his jubilant youth due to his inability to secure a wealthy patron after the death of his original sponsor. It is most likely the contrast between the celebration of pleasure in Tannhäuser’s earlier works and the solemn penitence in this later poem that inspired the medieval legend of Tannhäuser in the Venusberg.

"Das Lied von dem Daneüser" (1850 edition)

J.W. Thomas presents a convincing argument that the original ballad of the Tannhäuser-in-the-Venusberg legend was composed in the decade after the death of the historical Minnesinger and survived in various versions until the appearance in 1515 of “Das Lied von dem Danheüser,” the earliest printed version of the story. After an introductory stanza, the narrator of the Lied tells us that

Tannhäuser was a knight who sought
adventure everywhere,
he entered Venusberg to see
the lovely women there.

The next thirteen stanzas comprise a dialogue between Tannhäuser and Venus in which the goddess makes varied attempts to convince the hero not to leave. The ballad is not unique in its placement of a historical Minnesinger in a fantastic situation; similar medieval compositions were written of other popular poets.

There are a myriad of theories regarding the connection between the historical poet and the subject of the ballad. For Wagnerians, the most enjoyable (if intellectually unsustainable) theory is surely the one proposed by Adalbert Rudolf in 1882. According to Herr Rudolf, Tannhäuser was originally Wotanhäuser, a knight who abandoned Christianity, returned to heathenry, and was named for the Holy Mountain of Wotan – in which the god lived with his wife Freya, of course.

A less fantastic theory suggests that Tannhäuser was attached to the legend because of the nature of his poetic work. J.W. Thomas writes that the poems “portray a man who demands a joyous affirmation of life, who describes merry dances, who tells of his enjoyment of love’s delights, and all in all reveals a livelier sensuousness than do his contemporaries – who, however, in later songs, laments his fate and blames himself for his grievous situation.” The character of the historical Tannhäuser – at least as presented in his poems, which are all we truly have – made him a prime candidate to be slotted into a medieval Christian version of the traditional “into the mountain” narrative.

Barbarossa with beard and ravens inside the mountain

Grimm’s Teutonic Mythology has a long section on the Germanic idea of a mystic dweller inside a mountain. Notable in the list of heroes who were believed to live on inside rocky cliffs were Frederick Barbarossa and Siegfried; Wagner began an opera about the first and completed several about the second. Grimm suggests that, according to folk belief, the ancient heathen divinities lived on in wild places: “the pagan deities are represented as still beautiful, rich, powerful and benevolent, but as outcast and unblest, and only on the hardest terms can they be released from the doom pronounced upon them.” In the Tannhäuser ballad, Venus maybe be beautiful, but she is not quite benevolent. The Christian doom that damns her also extends to the knight in her service.

The German writer Heinrich Heine addresses these issues in Elementargeister (“Elemental Spirits”). This 1837 essay deals with the Tannhäuser legend and focuses on folklore ideas of pagan gods retreating from the onslaught of Christianity to resist medieval mores of guilt and self-denial from their underground fastnesses. This was clearly a concept that appealed to Wagner, whether he would admit to being influenced by the ideas of a Jewish author or not.

To be continued in Part Two.

Images of Norse Gods

Heather Greene, Managing Editor of The Wild Hunt, recently asked me a couple of interesting questions about Ásatrú and images of the Norse gods as background while writing her fascinating piece on the religion-inspired art of Dina Goldstein. Since her article only used a small part of my answers, she's kindly given me permission to post her questions and my answers here.

You can read Ms. Greene's full piece on "Art, Religion and the 'Gods of Suburbia'" by clicking here.

What is the general opinion of Heathenry on the visual representation of Gods? Are they used? Are their religious limitations to this?

Visual depictions of divinity in Northern Europe go back as far as we have archeological records. Rock carvings in Sweden from around 1800 BCE show figures that may be earlier versions of concepts of godhood that eventually evolve in to what we think of as Thor, Odin, Frey and other Germanic gods. The carvings show axe- and spear-wielding figures that are larger than the other people represented, suggesting analogues to Thor and Odin. However, we have to be careful about drawing too direct a line of descent; these congruencies probably reflect more a continuity of thought-patterns than a linear development of specific divinities.

Bronze Age carving of axe-wielding figure blessing couple (Sweden)

Physical objects representing gods and supernatural beings can be found throughout the rest of the history of Heathenry, whether through descriptions in written records or actual archeological finds. Examining the illustrations in books like H.R. Ellis Davidson's Pagan Scandinavia and James Campbell's The Anglo-Saxons will give you a good sense for the continuity of imagery over great distances of space and time.

Modern-day Heathens often physically realize descriptions of sacred objects in written sources like the sagas of Icelandic settlement. There are some wonderfully wrought god-poles, idols and other figures being made today, either for local use by the creator with his or her group of practitioners or for commercial sale. Some are direct and detailed recreations of archeological finds, others are new creations inspired by the past or made from individual impulse.

The most common representations today are probably small figures (like a seated Thor) and god-poles with features of a specific deity carved into the wood. Non-anthorpomorphic objects can include things like, for instance, the Thor's Oak in my backyard. There's a wide range of representations, just as there is a wide variety of belief and practice in the Heathen community.

How do you feel personally about the use of Heathen deity imagery for worship purposes, reverent expression or inspiration (a painting on the living room wall, etc.), non-reverent expression (such as in commentary on religion or politics), and for commerical purposes (movies, books, posters, games, costumes)?

Speaking only for myself, I think that the use of deity imagery is an integral part of the tradition. Records from archeology, history and literature show its use in worship and ritual settings over the past 4,000 years. Some depictions were actually integral parts of the living space, like the carved high-seat pillars. Others were portable, like the small metal figurines thought to represent Thor or Freyr. When today's Heathens incorporate these objects into their rituals or living spaces, they're following in a the steps of a grand tradition.

Usually thought to represent Thor, this figure is from Iceland c1000 CE

The use of god-images as part of religious or political commentary will usually anger the person who disagrees with the statement being made and be supported by the one who agrees. I don't think Heathens are usually the type to fly into a tizzy and make accusations of sacrilege. Thinking some goofy usage of the gods and symbols is moronic, yes. Saying so, yes. Pearl-clutching, not so much.

Personally, I dig Marvel's Thor comics. As a wise sage once said, "I'm a grown-ass man, dawg." I'm old enough to be able to tell the difference between entertainment and religion. Marvel's Thor has built up its own internal mythology over more than half of a century. In terms of pop culture, I think that's great, just as I think Tolkien's Middle-earth mythos is fantastic. It doesn't mean that I blót to Frodo of the Nine Fingers. If someone wants to sacrifice a Grape Nehi to a pile of Loki comics, more power to them. It's not for me, but it does me no harm. Every tub must sit on its own bottom.