is probably the most perfect expression of pure sensuality which has ever been reached in the world of music; it is the complete translation of sensual craving and sensual rapture into the language of music.  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.  Whenever it is opposed to the transcendental, the natural is conceived as dangerous and diabolical.  At the moment of the abrupt inner change in Tannhaeuser, Venus and her world must vanish like a phantom of the night.  “A consuming, voluptuous excitement kept my blood and nerves tingling while I sketched and composed the music of Tannhaeuser....” says Wagner in one place, and in another he confesses that sensual pleasure, while attracting and seducing him, filled him with repugnance.  He speaks of his longing to “satisfy my craving in a higher, nobler element which, unpolluted by the sensuality so characteristic of modern life and art, appears to me as something pure, something chaste and virginal, unapproachable and intangible.  What else can this longing for love, the noblest feeling I am capable of, be, than the yearning to leave this world of facts behind me and become absorbed in an element of infinite, transcendental love, to which death would be the gate....”

The dualism in the music of Tannhaeuser is consistently maintained.  The two elements war against each other without ever merging into one.  Those parts of the music which characterise Elizabeth are full of noble pathos and a little sentimental.  At the beginning of the second act she is not yet herself; she can still laugh like a light-hearted girl, but when she again succumbs to Tannhaeuser’s unearthly (and to her fatal) charm, and realises how irrevocably he has surrendered himself to Venus, she rises to true greatness and resolutely faces the swords unsheathed to punish the offender.  Before our eyes she is transformed into the saint who realises her mission and is ready to take her burden upon her; more heroic than Beatrice or Margaret, she points to him “who laughingly stabbed her heart,” the road to salvation.  Like her two predecessors Elizabeth prays to Mary for the salvation of her lover—­the prayer for the beloved has ever been woman’s truest and most fervent prayer.