LITMIR.BIZ

FIGURE 1.4. The Venusberg rendered as an inverted theatrical curtain in Werner Herzog’s production of Tannhäuser, act 1, scene 2 (Teatro San Carlo, Naples, 1998; set design: Maurizio Balò; costumes: Franz Blumauer; Tannhäuser: Alan Woodrow; Venus: Mariana Pentcheva). TV director: Walter Licastro; Image Entertainment, 1998 (screenshot).

      These readings of Venus as goddess of (stage) technologies lead us back to Wagner, whose lifelong pursuit we might now construe as becoming Venus, the total director. The Venusberg vision captured Wagner’s dream of easily summoning all theatrical media into a smooth multimedia surface. Yet in real life (even in his own theater), this dream could be realized only cumbersomely and partially—as was the case for every composer. Aside from the inevitable contingencies of musical performance, staging required ample technologies, which in turn entailed money, collaborators, and ingenuity. Ironically, this dependence on technology and its masters applied particularly to the Venusberg scenes. Granted, Wagner’s meticulous stage directions as well as his 1852 pamphlet (in which he pleaded with directors to take seriously his scenic imaginations) provided a solid baseline for the stage design and layout. Moreover, the composer had been actively involved in shaping the set designs for the 1845 Dresden premiere, and—uniquely among his operas—during the 1850s he imitated the French practice of publishing production books by having copies of the original decoration plans, sketches, and costume designs for Tannhäuser sent to German-language theaters. He even recommended these materials as a starting point for the stagings in Paris (1861) and Vienna (1875) that he guest-directed.⁷⁸ This tradition was continued by Cosima Wagner for the 1891 Bayreuth premiere, which in turn became the model for German productions for decades to come.⁷⁹ Albeit featuring an increasing amount of exotic floral detail, the Venusberg’s basic color scheme and setup—a richly decorated stalactite cave, with Venus’s luxurious couch tucked to the front left—thus remained remarkably constant.⁸⁰

      And yet, the Venusberg scenes were particularly difficult to codify and actualize. We have already seen how concerned Wagner was about the execution of the ballet pantomime—which would remain a focus of directors and critics (and a gateway for experimental, avant-garde choreography) through the 1891 Bayreuth premiere and beyond.⁸¹ Wagner was similarly preoccupied with the rosy scents veiling the pantomime, and in his “Notes on the Performance of Tannhäuser” (as chapter 2 will show) he detailed the various procedures he had tried to achieve the desired natural fades.⁸² For the Venusberg’s brief “spectral apparition” in act 3, by contrast, he simply described the intended result and appealed to “the inventive talent of the scene-painter and machinist . . . [to] devise some contraption whereby the effect may be produced as though the glowing Venusberg were drawing nearer, and stretching wide enough—being transparent—to hold within it groups of dancing figures.”⁸³ Wagner did not possess the gifts to magically conjure up such animated apparitions, nor did he command full knowledge of the mechanics that could stand in for Venus’s powers.

      Realizing his Venusberg vision would instead become a lifelong work in progress that evolved with each production. Yet Wagner remained disappointed with the outcomes, and he accounted for this dissatisfaction with his limited control over the execution. “The orchestra lifeless, the ballet quite out of keeping with the music, the singers inadequate, the decorations deficient, the stage mechanics bungled”—thus did Cosima Wagner sum up her husband’s impression of the 1875 Viennese dress rehearsal for the last production he was to see. “Only in Bayreuth,” she had already anticipated, “will he ever achieve a really good performance of Tannhäuser.” Indeed, a mere week before his death, Wagner named Tannhäuser as the first opera after Parsifal to be produced at the Festspielhaus.⁸⁴ All this explains why Cosima Wagner went to the mat over the 1891 production. Beyond being legitimized by the work’s enactment of the struggle for music drama, the Bayreuth premiere was also a quest to achieve Tannhäuser’s ultimate stage realization. Hence her desire to inform her staging with as many documents and eyewitness accounts as she could gather from performances in which Wagner had been involved. Gestures, blocking, number of dancers, cuts, and mechanical procedures were among the details she painstakingly requested, above all from the Paris Opéra, “in order to recover the authentic Tannhäuser, that which it is my obligation to represent in Bayreuth.”⁸⁵ In other words, similar to Peter Gelb’s PR strategy for the Metropolitan Opera’s 2010–12 Ring cycle discussed in the introduction, Cosima Wagner carefully promoted her staging as faithful—the ultimate fulfillment of Wagner’s dream that could only be achieved in Bayreuth. Yet this did not deter her from flouting the composer’s instructions where such disrespect might help her push the opera further toward music drama. Nor, in the production’s 1904 revival, was Siegfried Wagner averse to incorporating spectacular stage effects (such as a Rheingold-like thunderstorm and rainbow in act 2) that had meanwhile become tokens of Wagner’s mature works and their Bayreuth stagings. That is, Cosima and Siegfried essentially continued Wagner’s project of revising and adapting Tannhäuser in accordance with changing production standards and advancing technologies.⁸⁶

      My brief preview of actual stage practices thus highlights the rift between the faculties of Venus and Wagner, between a multimedia vision and theatrical reality. In turn, this gap explains why technologies became so central to Wagner’s project of actualizing the Gesamtkunstwerk, and why he was so devoted to communicating to collaborators, fellow directors, and posterity both his audiovisual ideas and the means for their closest onstage approximation. The entire transference of his ideal from allegory to real space might be viewed as a technological undertaking. And yet, Wagner’s attitude to technology remained as ambivalent as was Tannhäuser’s relation to the Venusberg. Just as the singer would initially veil his sojourn there as a peregrination “far, far afield,” the composer (as we have seen in this book’s introduction) sought to keep his machineries shamefully (if elaborately) hidden in

Скачать книгу