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.
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