ct
expression of pure sensuality which has ever been reached in the world
of music; it is the complete translation of sensual craving and sensual
rapture into the language of music. In the Venusberg music composed for
the performance in Paris, this motive is still more richly elaborated,
and the recently published "sketches" for the scene in the Venusberg
contain a number of details which were eliminated from the later
version. Here bestial and demoniacal sensuality, not content with human
couples, nymphs, maenads, sirens and fauns, calls for beings half-brute,
half-human, represented by centaurs and sphinxes, for black goats, cats,
tigers, panthers, and so on, finally for obscene representations of
antique legends, such as Leda and the Swan, Europa and the Bull, symbols
and illustrations of the climax of perversion. It is a magnificent,
poetico-musical picture of untrammelled sexuality, whose queen is Woman,
the priestess of voluptuousness, represented by Venus. Tannhaeuser's
yearning for humanity and divinely pure love gives to this world a tinge
of the demoniacal, for the latter is nothing but natural sensuality
regarded from a higher standpoint, in this case from the point of view
of spiritual love. Whenever it is opposed to the transcendental, the
natural is conceived as dangerous and diabolical. At the moment of the
abrupt inner change in Tannhaeuser, Venus and her world must vanish like
a phantom of the night. "A consuming, voluptuous excitement kept my
blood and nerves tingling while I sketched and composed the music of
_Tannhaeuser_...." says Wagner in one place, and in another he confesses
that sensual pleasure, while attracting and seducing him, filled him
with repugnance. He speaks of his longing to "satisfy my craving in a
higher, nobler element which, unpolluted by the sensuality so
characteristic of modern life and art, appears to me as something pure,
something chaste and virginal, unapproachable and intangible. What else
can this longing for love, the noblest feeling I am capable of, be, than
the yearning to leave this world of facts behind me and become absorbed
in an element of infinite, transcendental love, to which death would be
the gate...."

The dualism in the music of _Tannhaeuser_ is consistently maintained. The
two elements war against each other without ever merging into one. Those
parts of the music which characterise Elizabeth are full of noble pathos
and a little sentimental. At the beginn