the woman he loves.  Biterolf calls Tannhaeuser a shameless blasphemer, and challenges him to combat; Tannhaeuser replies bitterly; the surrounding nobles want to silence him; his anger becomes rage, and his rage madness; Wolfram tries to calm every one, but Tannhaeuser is now too far gone, and in “wildest exaltation” he chants the hymn he sang to Venus in the first act.  “Only in the Venusberg can one experience the joys of true love,” he shouts; the ladies rush out in terror, leaving only Elisabeth; the men attack Tannhaeuser.  He would be killed, but Elisabeth suddenly interposes—­all stand aghast at the bare notion of her interceding for so shameless a wretch; but in the end she gets her way.  “Who would not yield who heard the heavenly maid?” they sing; during a momentary stillness the voices of young pilgrims following the elder to Rome are heard; Tannhaeuser is pardoned on condition of joining them and confessing to the pope and gaining his forgiveness; and, being a man of uncontrollable passions, with fits of abject depression as low as his ecstatic flights are high, he humbly acquiesces.  The curtain comes down in the second act as he goes off.

The third act is, I say, quite illogical unless one accepts as a truism, as Wagner accepted it, the patent absurdity that by sacrificing him-or herself one being can save the soul of another being.  But Wagner was not a German of the Romantic epoch for nothing.  He believed the absurdity with a fervour now laughable, and was especially enthusiastic when the sacrificed person was a woman:  woman, to his mind, was the redeemer of man:  that was her metier.  Senta redeems Vanderdecken; in his last work Kundry redeems Parsifal by thoughtfully dying so as to leave that unamiable idiot to lead the higher life of the monastery, as I have described it.  And somehow Elisabeth is to redeem Tannhaeuser—­also, it appears, by dying at an appropriate moment.  In the fit of depression and degradation following his mad outburst the hero goes to Rome, interviews the pope, and confesses all to him.  “If you have dwelt with Venus,” says the Lord’s vicar, “you are for ever cursed; God will not forgive you until my staff of dry wood blossoms.”  At this sentence of eternal doom Tannhaeuser, in the legend as Wagner found it, returned to the Hoerselberg:  in the story, as Wagner shaped it, he gets as near as the Wartburg on his road back to Venus.  By the roadside, as in the second scene of the first act, Elisabeth is praying before the shrine where Tannhaeuser had knelt to thank heaven for his deliverance; Wolfram watches near.  Both await the pilgrims from Rome.  These arrive—­and Tannhaeuser is not amongst them.  “He will return no more,” says Elisabeth despairingly; and she prays to the Virgin to free her from all earth’s griefs.  Then she wends her way up to the castle while Wolfram remains to sing his song of renunciation.  Ominous sounds are heard; Tannhaeuser, tattered and woe-begone, enters, tells his tale to Wolfram, and,