the sad and tragical termination, and, while some of the best musical authorities of the day applauded, others criticised the work unsparingly.  Schumann alone seems to have realised the force of the author’s new style, for he wrote, ’On the whole, Wagner may become of great importance and significance to the stage,’—­a doubtful prediction which was only triumphantly verified many years afterward.  Like many of the mediaeval legends, the story of Tannhaeuser is connected with the ancient Teutonic religion, which declared that Holda, the Northern Venus, had set up her enchanted abode in the hollow mountain known as the Hoerselberg, where she entertained her devotees with all the pleasures of love.  When the missionaries came preaching Christianity, they diligently taught the people that all these heathen divinities were demons, and although Holda and her court were not forgotten, she became a type of sensual love.  Tannhaeuser, a minstrel of note, who has won many prizes for his songs, hearing of the wondrous underground palace and of its manifold charm, voluntarily enters the mountain, and abandons himself to the fair goddess’s wiles.  Here he spends a whole year in her company, surrounded by her train of loves and nymphs, yielding to all her enchantments, which at first intoxicate his poetic and beauty loving soul.

But at last the sensual pleasures in which he has been steeped begin to pall upon his jaded senses.  He longs to tear himself away from the enchantress, and to return to the mingled pleasure and pain of earth.

The first scene of the opera represents the charmed grotto where Venus gently seeks to beguile the discontented knight, while nymphs, loves, bacchantes, and lovers whirl about in the graceful mazes of the dance, or pose in charming attitudes.  Seeing Tannhaeuser’s abstraction and evident sadness, Venus artfully questions him, and when he confesses his homesickness, and his intense longing to revisit the earth, she again tries to dazzle him, and cast a glamour over all his senses, so as to make him utterly oblivious of all but her.

Temporarily intoxicated by her charms, Tannhaeuser, when called upon to tune his lyre, bursts forth into a song extolling her beauty and fascination; but even before the lay is ended the longing to depart again seizes him, and he passionately entreats her to release him from her thrall:—­

   ’’Tis freedom I must win or die,—­
    For freedom I can all defy;
    To strife or glory forth I go,
    Come life or death, come joy or woe,
    No more in bondage will I sigh! 
    O queen, beloved goddess, let me fly!’

Thus adjured, and seeing her power is temporarily ended, Venus haughtily dismisses her slave, warning him that he returns to earth in vain, as he has forfeited all chance of salvation by lingering with her, and bidding him return without fear when the intolerance of man has made him weary of life upon earth.