Musically, Wagner’s Tannhäuser is an excellent example of mid-nineteenth century German Romantic opera. Romantic opera in Germany began with composers like Ludwig Spohr (1784-1859; Faust, 1816), Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826; Der Freischütz, 1821), Heinrich Marschner (1795-1861; Der Vampyr, 1828)) and Albert Lortzing (1801-1851; Zar und Zimmermann¸ 1837). Many of the accomplishments of these composers pointed towards the Wagnerian “revolution”, of a sung-through and through-composed music drama, and within the works of these composers there are influences to be found on Wagner’s early operas Die Feen (1834), Das Liebesverbot (1836) and Rienzi (1842, although this latter work relates more to French grand opera than to the German tradition). In Der fliegende Holländer (1843), Tannhäuser (1845) and Lohengrin (1845) we find Wagner on sure stylistic footing, summing up the German opera tradition and taking it further than those early 19th century composers could ever have expected.
Speaking specifically of Tannhäuser, we can find elements of both old and new styles directly related to the conflict between the sacred and the profane that is at the heart of the libretto. The world of Venus and the world of the Wartburg are the two warring entities vying for the soul of the hero. Wagner highlights this conflict by using musical means. The Venusburg is saturated in E-major and its related keys, whereas the human world of the Wartburg Castle is rooted in E-flat major. Wagner also cleverly uses older operatic forms within the context of the Song Contest in Act II (arias) to underline the nature of the tradition-bound Wartburg court as opposed to the more free-flowing, non-stop dynamism that we experience in the Venusberg scene (especially in the Paris version).
The leitmotif plays no true role in Tannhäuser. There are themes that recur, of course (particularly the hero’s hymn to Venus in Act I which returns as his scandalous contribution to the Song Contest), but they don’t develop in the way that the motives in Tristan or the Ring do, where the themes become the very fabric of the musical texture of a whole work. But there is music that points in the direction of Wagner’s mature style, most notably in Tannhäuser’s Rome Narrative in Act III, a devastating piece of music drama which communicates the text through vocal and orchestral means in a way that was unthinkable by earlier composers. The Narrative is deeply expressive, with every nuance of the text projected by the music.