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Updated: June 26, 2025
As the whirring sounds grow fainter and fainter, the pilgrim's song is again heard gradually approaching, and at last closing the overture in a joyous burst of harmony. The first act opens with the scene in the Venusberg, accompanied by the Bacchanale music, which was written in Paris by Wagner after the opera was finished and had been performed. It is now known as "the Parisian Bacchanale."
Scarcely were these tasks accomplished, when I started off in my old boyish way on a ramble of several days on foot through the Bohemian mountains, in order that I might mentally work out my plan of the 'Venusberg' amid the pleasant associations of such a trip.
'Tis the carol of the Venusberg itself redeemed from curse of impiousness, this cry we hear amid the hymn of God. So wells and leaps each pulse of life in chorus of redemption, and both dissevered elements, both soul and senses, God and nature, unite in the atoning kiss of hallowed love. The traditions of French opera called for a ballet in the third act.
Again there is, as it were, a glimpse of the Venusberg fire in the orchestra, and Tannhäuser sings another song, more intense, again, in passion than his first, and ending with an aggressively fierce declaration of his creed.
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.
My annoying discussions with the management on the subject of a big ballet had determined me to make extensive additions to the scene of the 'Venusberg. I thought that this would give the staff of the ballet a choreographic task of so magnificent a character that there would no longer be any occasion to grumble at me for my obstinacy in this matter.
With the battle between the two motives, with the frenzy of the Venusberg theme and its ripping of strings, there came to me an overwhelming sense of the waste and wear we are so powerless to combat; and I saw again the tall, naked house on the prairie, black and grim as a wooden fortress; the black pond where I had learned to swim, its margin pitted with sun-dried cattle tracks; the rain gullied clay banks about the naked house, the four dwarf ash seedlings where the dish-cloths were always hung to dry before the kitchen door.
This eminent authority gave it as his unhesitating opinion that the Wenuses were not fit persons to associate with actors, actresses, or dramatic critics, and that if, as was announced, they had been engaged at Covent Garden to lend realistic verisimilitude to the Venusberg scene in Tannhäuser, it was his firm resolve to give up his long crusade against Ibsen, emigrate to Norway, and change his name to that of John Gabriel Borkman.
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