Arnold Whittall, ‘Tannhäuser’: The Rhetoric of Opposition in Wagner’s Romantic Operas

We prize the unreal in art for its power to shed light on the real: so it is no surprise that, in opera, the unreal and its offshoots – the uncanny, the insane, the magical, the ‘marvellous’, the utopian – are so frequently encountered. Wagner’s only mature work to reduce the unreal to manifestations of purely human artistic enterprise is Die Meistersinger, and even there the role of the irrational and unpredictable – ‘Wahn’ – is far from insignificant. Understandably, therefore, the perceived problematics of the noumenal, metaphysical and downright mystifying in Wagner’s works are frequently explored in the critical literature, and the issues embodied in the real/unreal opposition can be represented in many different ways.