The St. Austin Review (a Catholic lit mag) recently published my thoughts on Wagner’s Tannhäuser but the article is not available online. So here are two anecdotes for those of you who can’t access the article (or who read it and came here looking for more, unlikely as that may be…)
Wagner’s original title for Tannhäuser was Der Venusberg (The Mount of Venus or in Latin mons veneris) but a concerned friend talked him out of it: “He claimed that I was not getting out and about enough and had failed to hear the most frightful jokes that he thought must emanate from the staff and students of the Dresden medical school, as they involved a degree of obscenity that was common currency only in those quarters,” explained RW in his autobiography. It turns out he had more delicate sensibilities than the medieval Minnesänger, who enjoyed an occasional dirty pun.
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Tannhäuser has the most improbable stage direction I’ve ever seen in an opera:
Wolfram: Elisabeth, may I not accompany you?
Elisabeth: (expresses to him once again through gestures that she thanks him and his faithful love with all her heart; but her path leads towards Heaven, where she has a lofty duty to perform; therefore he should let her go on unaccompanied, and not follow her either.)
How is poor Elisabeth to express all this through gestures alone? In the link below you can see Gwyneth Jones trying it, but I don’t think she managed to cram in all that information: