In The Education of Henry Adams the author, referring to himself in the third person as he does throughout the autobiography, likened himself twice to the hero of one Wagnerian opera. The comparisons contain an explicit French connection. Wagner’s Tannhäuser debuted in Dresden in 1845. Only more than fifteen years later, in 1861, did the musical drama have a contentious opening night in Paris—and it was a fiasco. Not until 1895 was the piece revived there. Shortly after its reintroduction, Gaston Paris
makes the German composer’s libretto the point of departure for a study on the legend of Tannhäuser.
The title character in Wagner’s plot is a knight kept captive on Venusberg, the German for Mount Venus. At length, longing for liberty, spring, and church bells, he sings a cri de coeur for his freedom. When the goddess after whom the hill is named tries to reinforce her hold upon him, the knight declares: “My salvation rests in Mary, the Mother of God.” To heighten the Marianism, the action takes place in the month of May, and a picture of Our Lady stands at the front of the set. Such explicit promotion of the Virgin was a relatively new phenomenon in operas of the mid-nineteenth century. Tannhäuser’s words break the spell of profane love that has secured him, and causes the female deity of love and her suite to vanish. Eventually the knight follows a nobleman and a bevy of singers to the hall of the Wartburg, a medieval castle that overlooks the Thuringian town of Eisenach; there his faithful Elisabeth awaits, whom he left high and dry to woo the divinity.
Thanks to the healthiness of the operatic component in the high culture of the early nineteenth century, the rudiments of the story were widely known to the public not only in Germany but on the other side of the Atlantic too. Henry Adams became well acquainted with the Wartburg on his first trip to Germany, and in Dresden he encountered Wagner’s musical drama set in the castle. Did he envisage Elisabeth as his wife Clover, and the goddess as his intimate friend Elizabeth Cameron? Or are such identifications far-fetched? Whatever we conclude, Adams was well aware of the eroticism embedded in the scene and naturally identified himself with Tannhäuser, in whom Wagner may have represented himself in his capacity as a musician. Small wonder also that King Ludwig II of Bavaria incorporated a minstrels’ hall into his fantasy fortress of Neuschwanstein, constructed between 1868 and 1892 in southern Bavaria. The space was modeled at first upon the ceremonial chamber of the Wartburg, in which the singers’ contest in Tannhäuser took place. Subsequently, the throne room was gradually reconceived as the hall of the Holy Grail. The king, a prodigal patron of the composer, came to see himself and to be seen by the German songwriter and his clique as a latter-day reincarnation of the hero Parsifal, who through purity and sinlessness became Grail King (see Fig. 1.9).
To most viewers, Ludwig’s architectural extravaganza, built in the Romanesque revival style, is less recognizable nowadays for its Wagnerian connections than as the original for the Sleeping Beauty castle in Disneyland. Yet originality is tricky to determine. Upon closer inspection, the king’s stone fantasy turns out to be a case of
“déjà vu all over again.” The design was inspired by his visit to Pierrefonds, a chateau near Compiègne in France. This structure had been razed in 1617 and had rotted for more than two centuries afterward. Between 1857 and 1885 it was restored, and in many regards created out of whole cloth (if the metaphor may be permitted in this connection) by Viollet-le-Duc and his successors. For more than a century, the building that emerged from the architect’s drafting table has stoked viewers to draw contrasts
between the medieval and the modern, as can be verified in postcards that set off the wedding-cake stonework of the country house against the technological novelty, at least at the time, of a dirigible blimp or railroad (see Figs. 1.10 and 1.11).
Fig. 1.9 Stage design for Act 3 of Wagner’s Parsifal. Drawing by Paul von Joukowsky, 1882, https://
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Parsifal_1882_Act3_Joukowsky_NGO4p119.jpg
Fig. 1.10 Postcard of a Clément-Bayard airship flying over Château de Pierrefonds (Pierrefonds, France: G. Duclos, 1904).
Fig. 1.11 Postcard of Château de Pierrefonds, pond, and train station (Paris: Lévy et Neurdein Réunis, ca. 1920–1932).
The intuition behind this visual compare-and-contrast in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries seems conveniently to ignore the newness of the country mansion itself, and instead to construe the battlements and turrets as forming the opposite of innovations that were then contemporary.
Disneyland could be faulted for being pseudo and unreal, inauthentic and insincere—anachronistic. Guilty as charged. At the same time, it could be esteemed for conjuring up what is felt to be the best of the past as a relief from modernity. The Disney theme park in Southern California is a third link in a chain that begins with Pierrefonds and then adds Neuschwanstein. Putting the paradigmatically American destination in this context deepens our understanding. Consequently, we appreciate better how the nostalgic distortion of the Middle Ages is nothing new at all. On the contrary, the phenomenon has appeared and reappeared across time for centuries and across space from one continent to another.
The Mount Venus episode was taken in many directions (see Fig. 1.12). One extreme romanticized the scene in a medievalesque way. In this guise, the world is seen through pastel-colored lenses, with all the minstrels and the innocence often associated with the medieval era. In it, too, the devotion to the Roman love goddess looks not radically dissimilar to adoration of the Virgin Mary. Another pole of interpretation and staging to which the scene was subjected bordered on soft-core erotica or even pornography (see Fig. 1.13).
Fig. 1.12 Postcard of a parade float from the Hudson-Fulton Celebration, to commemorate the tercentennial of Henry Hudson’s discovery of the Hudson River and the centennial of Robert Fulton’s commercial use of the paddle steamer. Tannhäuser in Venus’s cave (New York: Redfield
Brothers, 1909).
Fig. 1.13 Postcard of Josef Aigner’s Tannhäuser in the Venus Grotto, Mural in the Study, Neuschwanstein Castle (Stuttgart: Farbenphotographische Gesellschaft, early twentieth century).
In a painting in the Neuschwanstein castle and images deriving from it, the grotto looks nothing like the crypt to which the performer in Our Lady’s Tumbler would retreat for his devotions, or the replicas of Lourdes that have been reconstructed at the University of Notre Dame, as elsewhere. On the contrary, it resembles the faux cave that King Ludwig had constructed in the landscape garden surrounding his Linderhof Palace in southwest Bavaria. The completely artificial Venus Grotto there contained arc lights powered by two dozen dynamos that could illuminate it in changing colors.
In the depiction, the cavern is depicted as rife with naked putti, bow-and-arrowless Cupids. The spectator cannot help but notice the more titillating full-frontal nudity of Venus and her attendants. In this representation, the only clad figure is Tannhäuser himself, who rests his cheek on his hand and gazes pensively across the bare abdomen of the voluptuous goddess. If the context were an art studio full of budding artists, we could talk about the practice in studio classes that has been known in the jocular jargon of undergraduates as “crotch watching.” The middle ground between the two pictorial extremes of cloying romanticism and seamy eroticism would have been occupied by instances in which the opera was staged. Those too left a mark upon the visual arts (see Fig. 1.14).
Fig. 1.14 “Tannhäuser im Venusberg.” Woodcut by Richard Bong after painting by Friedrich Stahl, ca. 1890. Published in Moderne Kunst: illustrierte Zeitschrift 7.18 (ca. 1890): plate 59.