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Updated: May 10, 2025
"Peace to the soul" the words come floating, "just escaped from the clay of the saintly sufferer!" Wolfram understands but to well. "Your angel pleads for you now before the throne of God. Her prayer is heard. Heinrich, you are saved!" With a cry of "Woe! Lost to me!" the apparition vanishes of Venus and her train; the hill-side mysteriously engulfs them.
In vain Wolfram urges and appeals; Tannhäuser will not yield his purpose. He breaks from his friend, and is rushing to meet the extended arms of the goddess, when Wolfram adjures him once more by the sainted memory of Elisabeth. At the sound of that sinless name Venus and her unhallowed crew sink with a wild shriek into the earth.
This story tells that in the thirteenth century there lived at a castle in the heart of these mountains a nobleman called Wolfram Herzog von Bergendorf; and being no freebooter like most of the other German barons of the time, but a man of very pious disposition, he was moved during the prime of his life to forsake his home and join a body of crusaders.
Let his demand be bold as he will, the Landgrave's care it shall be to see his wish granted. Lots are drawn. Fortune appoints Wolfram to open the song-feast.
In the last hundred lines of the last book of his epic poem to which Wagner went for the fundamental incidents, not principles, of his "Parsifal," Wolfram von Eschenbach tells the story of one of the Grail King's sons whom he calls Loherangrin. When he had grown to manhood, there lived in Brabant a queen who was equally gifted in beauty, wealth, and gentleness.
Biterolf challenges him; the Venusberg music boils up once more we almost see the vision that is about to break on Tannhäuser's inner sight; he sings more passionately still the joys of a human love; Wolfram again contends, giving us this time a really glorious song, and the storm breaks: the Venusberg is before Tannhäuser's eyes; the violins sweep to their highest register, and remain there boiling and dancing in a kind of divine fury; and in mad exaltation he chants his hymn to Venus.
The Middle Ages, so full of fashions in literary matters, possessed no classics; the minnesingers knew nothing of the stern old Teutonic war songs; the meistersängers had forgotten the minnesingers; the trouvères and troubadours knew nothing of "The Chanson de Roland," and Villon knew nothing of them; only in Italy, where the Middle Ages came to an end and the Renaissance began with the Lombard league, was there established a tradition of excellence, with men like Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, handed down from generation to generation; even as, while in the north there came about the strange modification which substituted the French of Rabelais for the French of Chrestien de Troyes, the German of Luther for the German of Wolfram von Eschenbach, the Italian language, from Ciullo d'Alcamo almost to Boiardo and Lorenzo dei Medici, remained virtually identical.
Here, too, in our poem it stands directly on the shore. "Zazamanc", a fictitious kingdom mentioned only here and a few times in Parzival, Wolfram probably having obtained the name from this passage. By fish such amphibious animals as otter and beaver were often meant.
Tannhäuser makes his appearance. A long declamatory dialogue ensues between himself and Wolfram, in which he recites the story of his pilgrimage. The scene is one of extraordinary power, and calls for the highest vocal and dramatic qualities in order to make it effective. From this point on, the tragedy hastens.
One half of those vain follies were puffed into mine ear by that perfidious Abbot Wolfram, and you may now judge if he is a counsellor to be trusted. Since these plots were set in agitation, I have had nothing but hurried journeys, indigestions, blows and bruises, imprisonments and starvation; besides that they can only end in the murder of some thousands of quiet folk.
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