I.

We are shown in the Ouverture of Tannhäuser the power which contended

for the young knight and minstrel's soul: the appeal of good is

symbolised by the solemn chant of the pilgrims; of evil, by the

voice of Venus, the song of the Sirens, the Bacchic dance.

We are not informed how he came into the Hill of Venus, but when

we see him at the Landgrave's court, which we are told he forsook

of yore in offended pride, we think we divine. He is more greatly

gifted than any of his associates. By his sense of superiority he

is made--young and hot-blooded as he is,--haughty, quick, impatient.

They cannot suffer his overbearing way. We can imagine how upon an

occasion he left them, after a round quarrel, in a fury of vexation,

sick with disgust at the whole world of such slow, limited creatures,

the whole world of petty passions and narrow circumstances, in a

mood to sell himself to the Devil for something in life which should

seem to him worth while, of satisfactory size, peer to himself. And

so his feet had come in the familiar valley suddenly upon a new

path, and been led to the interior of the mountain where Venus,

driven from the surface of the earth by the usurping Cross, had

taken refuge with all her pagan train. There the Queen of Love

herself had contented him, and his thirsty youth had thought this

no doubt a sufficient crown of life; this had met all his vast

desires, appeased all his boundless pride. He had lived in the

rosy atmosphere there he knew not how long, existence one feast,

at which everything in man was satisfied, heart, imagination,

senses--everything but his soul.

We first have sight of him lying at the feet of Venus, his head

pillowed on her lap. There are dances and revels for their delight,

but he has fallen asleep,--and in his dream he hears, through the

song of stupefying sweetness in which the Sirens hold forth enkindling

promises, a fragment of anthem, the long-forgotten music of

church-bells. He starts awake. The tender queen draws down-his

head again with a caress. "Beloved, where are your thoughts?" But

his neglected soul has in dream made its claim. The sweetness of

all this other is found by sudden revulsion cloying to the point of

despair. "Too much!" he cries wildly, "Too much! Oh, that I might

awaken!" At just that touch, that sound in sleep of bells, his

whole poor humanity has flooded back upon him, and at the goddess's

indulgent "Tell me what troubles you?" his weak infinite homesickness

breaks bounds. "It seemed to me, in my dream, that I heard--what so

long has been foreign to my ear!--the pleasant pealing of bells.

Oh, tell me, how long is it that I hear them no more? I cannot

measure the length of my sojourn here. There are no longer for me

days or months, since I no longer see the sun or the sky's friendly

constellations. The grass-blade I see no more, which, clothing

itself with fresh green, brings in the new summer. The nightingale

I hear no more announcing the return of Spring. Am I never to hear

them, never to see them more?"

Venus, mildly amazed at folly so prodigious, reproaches him for

this complaining, these regrets. What, is he so soon weary of the

marvels with which her love surrounds him? Discontented so soon

with being a god? Has he so soon forgotten the old unhappiness? "My

minstrel, up! Take your harp! Sing the praise of love, which you

celebrate so gloriously that you won the Goddess of Love herself."

Tannhäuser, thus bidden, seizes the harp and warmly entones a hymn

of praise to her, which from its climax of ardour, suddenly--as

if his lips were tripped by the word "mortal" occurring in the

song,--turns into a prayer to her to release him. "But mortal,

alas, I have remained, and your love is over-great for me. A god

has the capacity to enjoy perpetually, but I am the creature of

change. Not joy alone can satisfy my heart, after pleasure I yearn

for sorrow. Forth from your kingdom I must fare. Oh, Queen, Goddess,

let me depart!"

Reproachful questions succeed on her part: Of what neglect has her

love been guilty, of what can he accuse her? In reply, grasping

his harp again, he adds fiery praise to praise of her greatness,

the wonders of her kingdom,--to drop again into his prayer for

release: "But I, amid these rosy perfumes, I yearn for the odour

of the forest, yearn for the pure blue of our skies, the fresh

green of our sward, the sweet song of our birds, the dear sound of

our bells! Forth from your kingdom I must fare. O Queen, Goddess,

let me depart!"

The beautiful queen's surprise is turning to anger, without ceasing

to be surprise. "You sing the praise of my love, and wish at the

same time to flee from it? My beauty, is it possible, has brought

surfeit?" He tells her, disarmingly as he may, what must fall

incomprehensibly on her pagan ears, that it is that over-great

beauty of hers he must shun, that never was his love greater, never

sincerer, than in this moment when he must flee from her forever.

She drops chiding then, truly alarmed, and tempts. She paints to

him with glowing art the delights awaiting them; to these she bids

him with the persuasive voice of love. When the goddess of beauty thus

invites a mortal, she feels secure in counting upon his forgetting

all else. But this Tannhäuser, with the dreamy echo in his earth-born

ears of the church-bells of home, he catches, instead of her beautiful

form to his breast, his harp again. He grants that her beauty is

the source of all beauty, that every lovely marvel has its origin

in her: against the whole world, he promises, he will thereafter

be her champion, but--back to the world of earth go he must, for

here he can but become a slave. Freedom, for freedom he thirsts!

Battle and struggle he must have, though he should meet through

them defeat and death. Forth from her kingdom he must fare! Queen,

Goddess, let him depart!

"Go, then, madman, go!" she bids him in lovely wrath. "Traitor,

see, I do not hold you back! I leave you free, go your way, go

your way! Let your doom be to have that which you yearn for! Go

back to cold mankind, before whose gross dismal delusion we Gods

of Joy fled deep into the warm bosom of the earth. Go back to them,

infatuated! Seek your soul's welfare and find it never! Not long

before your proud heart will surrender. I shall see you humbly

draw near. Broken, trampled, you will come seeking me, will invoke

the wonders of my power!" Unheedful of the remainder, he seizes

avidly upon his dismissal. "Ah, lovely goddess, farewell! Never

will I return!" What--never return? She threatens with her curse,

if he shall not return, him and the whole human race: in vain let

them go seeking for her miracles, let the world become a wilderness

and have for its hero a slave! But yet--he cannot have meant what

he said, he will come back, let him say that he will come back!

"Nevermore!" cries the captive of this suffocating prison-house

of love, as he pants upon the threshold of freedom, "nevermore let

joy of love delight me!"--"Come back" she desperately entreats,

"when your heart impels you!"--"Forever your beloved flees!"--"Come

back when the whole world rejects you!"--"Through penance I shall

be absolved from sin!"--"Never shall you gain forgiveness! Come

back if the gates of salvation close to you!"--"Salvation!... My

hope of salvation lies in the Blessed Mary!"

At that name, Venus uttering a cry vanishes, and with her the dim-lit

subterranean kingdom....

Tannhäuser finds himself standing in a sunny well-known valley,

near to a road-side shrine of the Blessed Mary at whose hem he

had caught. The Wartburg is in sight, where he was used in former

days to take part in song-tournaments. In dim distance looms the

Hörselberg, concerning which a sinister rumour ran: that in the heart

of it the pagan goddess Venus still lived and held her court. All the

landscape smiles, the trees are in blossom, nature is altogether at

her loveliest. Oh, so sweeter to the ears of the resuscitated knight

than the song of sirens, comes the homely tinkle of sheepbells.

A little shepherd pipes and sings in joy over the return of May.

Tannhäuser stands statue-still, as if he feared by the slightest

movement to wake himself, to dispel the vision.

A band of penitents, starting on a pilgrimage to far-off Rome,

defile past the Virgin's shrine, saluting her and asking her grace

upon their pilgrimage. Their pious chant stirs in Tannhäuser deep,

long-untouched chords. At the same moment that the aroused sense

of pollution would overwhelm him, the reminder shines forth to

him in the pilgrims' words of the possibility of forgiveness and

regeneration through repentance and penitential practices. A very

miracle of God's grace it seems to him, by which he sees the door

of hope open to him anew. The weight of his emotion forces him

to his knees; he makes his own the words of the pilgrims wending

their way out of sight: "Ah, heavily oppresses me the burden of

sin, no longer can I carry it. No more will I therefore of ease

and rest, but choose for my portion pain and effort." The pilgrims'

voices come drifting more and more dyingly, the breeze wafts sounds

of church-bells. With tears Tannhäuser bows his head and sinks

into prayer.

Cheerful hunting-horns breaking upon the air do not rouse him, nor

the approach of the hunters. They are the Landgrave and a group

of his favorite minstrel-knights. Catching sight of the kneeling

figure, they stop to observe it. The minstrel Wolfram recognises

their old companion, Heinrich, who had left them, time gone, to

disappear utterly. The circumstances of their parting are suggested

by the first words uttered when Tannhäuser starts to his feet and

faces them. "Is it truly yourself?" asks the Landgrave; "Have you

come back to the community which you forsook in impatient

arrogance?"--"Tell us what is implied by your return?" says the

minstrel Biterolf; "Reconciliation? Or renewed battle?"--"Do you

come as friend or foe?" asks the minstrel Walther. So much the

more probable thing does it seem that he comes as foe that there

is a challenging note in the address of all--save Wolfram. The

latter, the gentlest soul among them, has taken account of the

old companion's countenance; his sympathy is quick to interpret

it, by a word he changes the mood toward him of all the others.

"As a foe? How can you ask? Is that the bearing of arrogance? Oh,

welcome back among us, you singer bold, who too long have been

absent from our midst!"--"Welcome if you come peaceably-minded!"

say the others; "Welcome if you approach as a friend! Welcome among

us!"

The Landgrave, after adding his gracious greeting to the greetings

of the others asks where he has been this long time. "Far, far from

here I wandered," Tannhäuser replies, with a vagueness mysteriously

pregnant, "where I found neither peace nor rest. Inquire not! I

have not come to contend with you. Forgive the past and let me

go my way!"

Marvellously softened by this novel gentleness in the formerly so

testy and proud companion, all now with a single mind desire him

to stay, nay, refuse to let him go. He turns from them resolutely:

"Detain me not! It would ill profit me to tarry! Never more for me

repose! Onward and ever onward lies my way, to look backward were

undoing!" He is hastening away, despite their entreaties, when

Wolfram pronounces the name which brings him to an instantaneous

standstill. "Remain beside Elizabeth!"--"Elizabeth!" Tannhäuser

repeats after him, reverently as if the name were consecrated bread

upon his lips; "Oh, power of Heaven, is it you calling that sweet

name to me?" At the spectacle of his emotion, Wolfram turns to

the Landgrave: "Have I your leave, my lord, to be the herald to

him of his good fortune?" The Landgrave consents. "Inform him of

the magic spell he has wrought, and may God lend him virtue to

loose it worthily!" Wolfram imparts to Henry then that when in the

days before his disappearance the minstrels were wont to contend

with him in song, whatever the event of the contest, one prize there

had been won by him alone, his song alone had had power to enthrall

the interest of that most virtuous maid, Elizabeth. And when he had

proudly withdrawn from their midst, her heart had closed to the

singing of the remaining minstrels; her cheek had lost bloom, she

had shunned their song-tourneys. "Return to us, O daring minstrel,"

Wolfram concludes, "let your song resound alongside of ours, that

she may no longer be absent from our festivals, that her star once

more may shed brightness upon us!" The fellow-minstrels join their

voices to Wolfram's, to press the recovered companion to remain

among them. "Let discord and quarrel be laid aside! Let our songs

form one harmony! As brothers regard us henceforward!"

Great gladness has fallen upon the knight, crushed to earth a moment

past by a sense of sin; a swift rebound lifts up the heart that had

asked of this fair and over-fair world just restored to him only

opportunity to expiate and be made clean. Can this be true, this which

seems like the most madly impossible of beautiful dreams? Elizabeth!

the Landgrave's niece, the fair and faultless, the saint!... No

doubt in the old days he had worshipped her, not daring to lift

his eyes above her footprints, had loved as a moth may a star.

That lily had shone in his dreams, cool and pure and unattainable,

by the mysterious attraction of opposites compelling homage and

desire more than might any being less removed in nature from his

hot, pleasure-thirsty, sense-ridden, undisciplined self. An element

in his discontent with the earth had been perhaps his sense of

life-wide separation from her, of unsurpassable barriers between

them, the vanity of aspiration. And now the Landgrave permits her

name to be used to keep him from departing! And with his long-dead

soul come back to intenser life than ever, that lily more than ever

calls forth the worshipping devotion of his reawakened highest

self. In total self-abandonment of joy, he breaks forth: "To her!

To her! Oh, conduct me to her! Ah, I recognise it now, the lovely

world from which I was cut off! The sky it is, looking down upon

me, it is the greensward flaunting rich multitude of flowers. Spring

with its thousand voices of joy has entered into my soul, and my

heart in sweet ungovernable tumult cries out aloud: To her! To

her!"

"Praise be to the power," say Landgrave and minstrels, "which has

dispelled his arrogance!" What the remembrance is in this circle

of Tannhäuser's arrogance appears from the frequency of reference

to it. The remainder of the hunting-retinue has now joined the

Landgrave; the scene is brilliant with swarming figures of hunters,

hounds, and horses. With bright horn-calls the train starts homeward,

on its rejoicing way "to her!"