The second, discordant, stage of love is embodied in Tannhaeuser, composed when Wagner was twenty-nine years of age.  There is probably no modern work of art in which the mediaeval feeling of dualism in the scheme of the universe has been expressed with greater pathos.  We see man tossed between heaven and hell, between the worshipped saint and seductive sensuality, impersonated by a she-devil.  A man of the Middle Ages would have recognised in this work the tragedy of his soul.  Wagner had planned the opera before he had really reached the second period, under the title of Der Venusberg ("The Mountain of Venus"), and in this earlier version the purely sexual occupied a far more prominent place, probably in closer conformity with the old legend.  For here Tannhaeuser returns to Venus unsaved and defying the eternal values, determined to renounce a higher life and give himself up to the pleasure of the senses for all eternity.  This idea was retained in a later version up to the decisive final turn; the purely spiritual love for Elizabeth eventually overcomes the unrestrained instinct.

As the despairing monk of mediaeval times, apparently abandoned by the love of God, turned to Satan and worshipped him, so Tannhaeuser, cast out of the Kingdom of Heaven by the words of the Pope, and renounced by Elizabeth, again gives himself up to sensuality, which is here contrasted with spiritual love, and represented as demoniacal.  Tannhaeuser is not vacillating between the love of two women—­a spiritualised and a sensual love; he is wavering between the purely spiritual love of Elizabeth and promiscuous sexuality represented by Venus, not centring on her as an individual, but diffused, as it were, through her whole kingdom.  The dualism which rends the whole universe is strongly and uncompromisingly emphasised in text and music, and Wagner himself explained to the opera singer, Schnorr von Carolsfeld, that the main characteristic of the principal part was “the intensest expression of delight and remorse without any intermediate stage of feeling, changing abruptly and decisively.”  The closing words of the first scene:  “My salvation lies in Mary!” are the real turning point of the drama.  As abrupt as his desertion of Venus for Mary, is his return to her in the third act.  By the side of Mary is placed the more human, the more earthly but yet idealised form of Elizabeth, a figure closely resembling Beatrice and Margaret.

The music of Tannhaeuser (more especially the overture) expresses the contrast between the two erotic world-elements with striking abruptness.  The harmonious and musically perfect motive of religious yearning (the chorus of the pilgrims) which forms the beginning and the end of the overture, is assailed by the briefer motives of sensuous seduction and ecstasy of the middle; the quivering, tickling passages of the violins play round the sacred music of the chorale like so many seductive elves.  The Venusberg music