«Sei er gefehmt, sei er gebannt!»

A widespread symbolist reading of Tannhäuser interprets the story as an inner struggle between «the flesh and the spirit», between «Satan and God» (Baudelaire, 1861). This essay reconsiders instead the sociological matrix of the opera and its historical referents, on the basis of the composer’s original paratexts. In the first edition of the libretto (1845), Wagner explained how the Germanic goddess Holda, «sweet and merciful», had been forced into exile as a result of the hegemony of Christianity; forgotten by all, she took the name of Venus, and to survive the stigma became evil, playing the part of the mistress (actually slave) of an artificial paradise. Tannhäuser thus becomes an all-round reflection on the relations of power, on the dialectic between the individual and the community, on the boundary that separates victims from offenders. This analysis of the dramaturgy, in the light of the Zurich writings, brings out the socio-political meaning of redemption, which Wagner declines in different ways: originally, the death of love was conceived as “salus extra ecclesiam”, a solitary escape from the oppression of law; in the new finale, written in 1847, the dying hero finds himself surrounded by the knights and the landgrave, in a mass scene resembling a sacrificial rite to reaffirm the established order. This tension between revolution and restoration is then investigated in Tristan and in Parsifal in order to show the evolution of Wagnerian thought and the ambiguity of its outcomes. If in Isolde the spring gifts of Holda and the utopia of a synthesis between the divisions of the human are revived, in the sacred drama there is no more space for redeeming women: salvation is all male and the mystical chant of the Grail risks appearing as an exorcism, an emblem of an immutable and excluding power. The community of the elect will live forever, strong in its own rituals, while Kundry is unable to hold her gaze and succumbs. On which side is reason? Who “wins” and who “loses” in the scheme of the story? A comparison of the final scene of Parsifal, in its intertextual relationships with the previous dramas, offers the key to a possible exegesis.