Final answer:
Wagner's Tannhäuser introduced the innovative orchestra pit, creating an invisible source of music to enhance the magical experience of the performance and balancing the audio dynamics between the orchestra and actors on stage.
Step-by-step explanation:
One innovative aspect of Wagner's Tannhäuser is the invention of the orchestra pit. Richard Wagner conceived the idea of the orchestra pit to fully separate the performance's magic from its orchestration, aiming to make the music support the action on stage 'magically' without the audience seeing the musicians.
This also served to balance the sound of the actors' voices with the instrumental music by positioning the orchestra lower than the stage and at a distance from the performers, thus diminishing the competition between the two.
Wagner was a progressive composer, like Berlioz and Strauss, who also challenged audiences with their boundary-pushing music. Wagner's innovations stand alongside other significant changes in the artistic world, such as Georg II's establishment of a more naturalistic aesthetic in theatre and Schoenberg's groundbreaking experiments with atonality and the twelve-tone scale, defying the tradition of Western music scales since the Renaissance.