‘Sin was with us in my rooms; the Flesh was with us always; the Arch-demon arose from Hell whenever I evoked him and certainly my Venus and I came near, night after night, afternoon after noon, hell’s mouth. There, after much mad dancing of my senses, I sought and found the Cloven Hill. Alas and alas for the sweet and eternal hell wherein to spend my Eternity in the arms of Venus!’[1]

My essay ‘The Music of the Venusberg: Richard Wagner and the poetry of Arthur Symons’ has been published in a new collection, Salome’s Bookshelf: Artists and Writers of the 1890s, edited by Simon Reynolds. The collection, named after a bibliographic detail in one of Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations for the 1894 English edition of Oscar Wilde’s play Salome (see the cover photo), contains essays that examine the striking experiments in inter-art aesthetics of late nineteenth-century Decadence.

My own chapter explores the fascination of the poet, Arthur Symons (1865-1945), with Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser (1845/61) and shows how he figured himself as a version of the eponymous Arthurian knight, who is enslaved by Venus in her subterranean palace of pleasures, the Venusberg. Symons effectively role-played Tannhäuser in his own love life but he also obsessively replayed and transformed Wagner’s version of the legend in London Nights (1895/97) and his other poetry collections.

My chapter analyses several of Symons’s poems for their musical eroticism, as well as sections from the poet’s later memoir of his descent into madness, Confessions: A Study in Pathology (1930). The chapter also discusses the sensual poetry of a lesser-known Decadent poet, Theodore Wratislaw (1871-1933), whose collections Caprices (1893) and the suggestively-titled Orchids (1896), contain a number of Wagner-inspired lyrics, including the Baudelairean sonnet ‘Tannhäuser’, which begins with the line, ‘Orgy of ill and triumph of the sense’.

Salome’s Bookshelf’s other chapters include work by the late Henry Maas (whose memory the book is dedicated to) on the poet Ernest Dowson, Rachel Sloan on Fernand Khnopff and Georges Rodenbach, Tom Hubbard on John Davidson, Samuel Shaw on Charles Conder, Paul van Capelleveen on Charles Ricketts, Alice Condé on Walt Ruding’s An Evil Motherhood, and Simon Reynolds on Sibyl Vane, Mary Anderson, and Max Beerbohm.Salome’s Bookshelf is available from the publisher Greenwich Exchange: Salome’s Bookshelf: Artists and Writers of the 1890s

[1] The Memoirs of Arthur Symons: Life and Art in the 1890s, ed. Karl Beckson (London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977), p158.

Categories: Art criticism, music, poetry

Tags: 1890s, Art, ArthurSymons, AubreyBeardsley, Decadence, literature, OscarWilde, poetry, Richard Wagner, Salome, SalomesBookshelf, SalomesBookshelf:Artistsandwritersofthe1890s, Tannhauser, TheodoreWratsilaw, Wagner, writing