Speranza
Our future historians will cull from still unpublished letters and memoirs ...
the idea that the performances at Bayreuth had really much the status of
religious rites and that their effects were not unlike what is technically
called a revival.
--Vernon Lee (1911: 875)
The idea that there is
something religious about Bayreuth is not new, and goes well beyond cliches
about opera houses as the "cathedrals of the bourgeoisie."
The words used to
describe the festival by Wagnerians and anti-Wagnerians alike have often been
consciously religious.
One makes a pilgrimage to the holy site, there are
acolytes who serve the holy work and the orthodoxy, heretics are
excommunicated--the comparisons are all too obvious. Friedrich Nietzsche
referred to this phenomenon in a letter to his friend Malwida von Meysenburg
when he suggested that "all this Wagnerizing" was "an unconscious emulation of
Rome" (Fischer-Dieskau 1974:202). Even in more recent times, after the moral,
ideological, and organizational disasters that the festival was caught up in
during the twentieth century, the skies above the Festspielhaus were scoured for
signs of the white smoke announcing which member of the dysfunctional clan was
to succeed the composer's grandson Wolfgang Wagner.
If this musical Vatican
has a central rite, it is surely Parsifal.
Not an opera or a music drama but a
"Buhnenweihfestspiel" (a "stage-festival-consecration-play" -- or "dramma mistico in tre atti", as the metrical translation goes), Wagner's last work
leaves the cheerful paganism of the Ring far behind. (1) The composer had toyed
with aspects of Christianity as far back as Tannhauser, but in Parsifal he went
much further, almost to the point, many believed, of creating opera as
sacrament. Since the Second World War, controversies about the piece have been
essentially political, but it was its religious content that most engaged
contemporaries.
At the time of the 1882 premiere much ink was spilt about
whether the piece was Catholic or Protestant, or even Christian at all. There
were plenty of Wagnerites who saw it as a profound new kind of religious
experience, but other observers saw the work as heretical at best and
out-and-out pagan at worst.
The plot of Parsifal certainly offered Christian
and secular critics a lot to talk about.
Amfortas, the king of the Grail
Knights, has been stabbed in the side (testicles) by the magic spear that pierced Christ's
side on the Cross.
This morbid penetration is a symbolic punishment for his
weakness in the face of seduction by Kundry, a kind of female Ahaserus, a woman
doomed to wander the earth after mocking Christ's Passion.
The Knights guard the
Holy Grail, but, as with the legend of the Fisher King, their kingdom is as sick
as their king.
Only the "Pure Fool" (as the erroneous etymythology from Arabian reads) can bring redemption.
In the first act
Parsifal stumbles upon the Grail Kingdom, experiences the ritual of the
unveiling of the grail, but does not yet understand its message.
In the next act
he resists Kundry's attempts to seduce him, achieving compassionate wisdom at
the moment they kiss.
Parsifal then takes the spear from Klingsor, the castrated
evil wizard whom Kundry serves, makes the sign of the cross and destroys his
castle.
In the third act, Parsifal returns to the Grail Kingdom on Good Friday
after many years of wandering. Kundry washes his feet and the oldest of the
Grail Knights, Gurnemanz, anoints him the new King of the Grail.
In the final
scene, Amfortas refuses to reveal the grail and begs to be killed, but Parsifal
heals and redeems him with the spear, orders the unveiling of the grail, at
which point Kundry dies, redeemed, and a white dove descends above Parsifal's
head. Thus, although Jesus is never named as such, Christian imagery suffuses
the whole work.
The debate on the work's religious character occurred in the
context of a fierce ideological struggle between church and state in the
aftermath of the so-called Kulturkampf, which Bismarck had launched to establish
the supremacy of the Protestant Prussian order over a united German Reich that
had a very large Catholic population, including French and Polish minorities.
The new state demanded that priests pass state exams, made church weddings legal
only when registered with the state, and excluded the Jesuits from Germany. This
"Culture-War" was arguably the most important political issue in Germany in the
1870s and 1880s, with dozens of Catholic priests imprisoned for refusing to
accept the authority of the state in Church affairs. (2) There was even an
assassination attempt against Bismarck by a Catholic. The death of Pius IX in
1878 calmed the atmosphere to some extent, but relations with the Vatican were
only re-established in 1882. There was a strong ideological dimension to this
struggle, as the progress, masculinity, and rationality associated with
Protestantism were contrasted with the supposed reactionary, effeminate, and
mystical nature of Catholicism and other "irrational" creeds. The medical
profession, and psychiatry in particular, was one element in the new
secular/Protestant Germany that was especially hostile to religious enthusiasm
(Schwarmerei), particularly within the Catholic Church. "Rational" Christianity,
as a bulwark of moral behavior, was all very well, but religious enthusiasm was
scorned by mainstream medicine.
Thus, far from simply making Wagner more
respectable, Parsifal's religious tone also gave it dangerous associations.
It
became a key element in the emerging medical-moral critique of Wagner's operas
as degenerate, which can be seen in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Nordau,
Eduard Hanslick, and many other writers, journalists, and psychiatrists, and
which later provided the psychiatric rhetoric for the Nazi concept of degenerate
music. In this context it is striking that although the debate was ostensibly
about religion and pathology, issues of willpower and masculinity were never far
away. The strange lack of willpower of Parsifal, the "Pure Fool," and the
opera's Schopenhauerian renunciation ethic seemed to compare unfavorably with
the straightforward "healthy" manliness of Siegfried. Combined with the opera's
sensual and mystical ritualistic pomp, and its touch of occult art-religion,
this led again to imputations of effeminacy and references to the developing
medical discourse on homosexuality in discussions of Parsifal.
Anxiety about masculinity is at the heart of the
"diagnosis" of the religious character of Wagner's last work as degenerate, as
the expression of a pathological mystical outlook.
We look at this important and
neglected aspect of Wagner reception, examining the complex relationship between
medicine, religion, and Parsifal.
In considering the religious aspect of the
debate on Parsifal, we are in line with broader trends in
historiography.
Whereas twentieth-century scholars tended to downplay the
influence of religious ideas on events, contemporary historians (who have seen
the supposed decline of religion as a historical force dramatically reversed)
are increasingly taking religion more seriously.
The first section looks at the
debate on the denominational character of the piece, its odd mixture of Catholic
sensuality and ritualism and Protestant elements.
This is followed by an
analysis of the way that Parsifal's Catholic elements gave it associations of
degeneration and effeminacy for contemporaries.
Next, we discuss the position of
Parsifal's religiously-tinged Schopenhauerian Pessimism in the light of
psychiatry and Nietzsche's notion of the will, both of which used medical
language to denounce its renunciation ethic as pathological and effeminate.
Finally, I will look at the way that Wagner's own "art-religion" was received in
esoteric circles, and how that too was related to debates on masculinity and
degeneration.
How Catholic is Parsifal?
Wagner's last work is his most
theatrical ... the art of the theater is already baroque, it is Catholicism, it
is the Church; and an artist like Wagner, used to dealing with symbols and
elevating monstrances, must have ended by feeling like a brother of priests,
like a priest himself.--Thomas Mann ([1933] 1985:94-95)
Wagner himself was
brought up as a Protestant and his letters and prose are full of verbal assaults
on the Catholic Church, especially the Jesuits. For him, as for many
"progressive" Protestants of the nineteenth century, the Catholic Church
represented political reaction and obscurantism. Even in 1878, Wagner said it
was a "scandal" that the Catholic Church still existed, and called it the
"plague of the world" (C. Wagner 1977, vol. 2:224-25). (3) Nevertheless there
are parts of Wagner's work that clearly show Catholic influence, if not as an
ally, then perhaps as a rival. As Wagner makes clear in Mein Leben, he had been
accused of Catholic tendencies long before Parsifal, especially at the time of
the premiere of Tannhauser:
It was just at that time when the
German-Catholic agitation, set in motion by Czersky and Ronge as a highly
Liberal and meritorious movement, was causing a great commotion. It was made out
that by Tannhauser I had provoked a reactionary tendency, and that precisely as
Meyerbeer with his Huguenots had glorified Protestantism, so I with my latest
opera would glorify Catholicism. The rumor that in writing Tannhauser I had been
bribed by the Catholic party was believed for a long time. (Wagner [1870-1880]
1963:378)
This lack of clarity in questions of doctrine is borne out in
Cosima's comments on Wagner's religious beliefs. On January 30, 1880, she
recorded in her diary that Wagner admitted to a Christianity "released from all
denominations" (1977, vol. 2:224-25)4 Such ecumenical aspirations would prove
especially difficult at a time when confessional divisions were extremely
politicized in the Kulturkampf, as Protestantism in discourse established itself
as the patriotic and masculine denomination, in contrast to the effeminate and
ultramontane (i.e., pro-Vatican) tendencies of Catholicism.
Wagner was told
all about Catholic Mass by a Benedictine monk in Munich, who later outlined the
experience in his book Die Errinnerungen des Paters Petrus Hamp. Parsifal's
emphasis on the symbol over the word, and of the grail over any doctrine, has
clear connections to Catholicism, as does its dialectic of shame and grace--the
core of much of the Catholicism espoused by self-declared decadents in
particular. Some Catholics viewed Parsifal very positively, and without
appealing to decadent elements in any way. For example, Abbe Marcel Hebert's Das
religiose Geftihl im Werke Richard Wagners (1895) and Michel Domenech Espanyol's
L'apotheose de la religion catholique: Parsifal de Wagner (1902J both strongly
argued that Parsifal was a Catholic work in the most positive sense.
The
Protestant critic Johannes Hermann Wallfisch agreed that it was a Catholic
piece, but took a much more hostile view, seeing the adoration of the grail as
nothing but Catholic idolatry. He asked, "What do we children of the
Reformation, the Bible in our hands, want with the grail?" (1914:9). (5)
Similarly, an anonymous Social Democrat in the Frankische Tagespost in 1882
accused Wagner of siding with the Jesuits in Parsifal (Grossman-Vendry
1977-83:67), and in the Anglo-Irish writer George Moore's novel Evelyn Innes
Monsignor Martyn denounces Parsifal as "a parody of the Mass" (Moore 1898:298).
Wagner's most famous critic (and former acolyte), Friedrich Nietzsche,
reserved his greatest hostility for Wagner's last work, in which he sensed not
only an ascetic Pessimism, but also "a certain Catholicism of feeling," not a
positive thing for the son of a Protestant pastor (1973:135).6 A poem in Der
Fall Wagner gets straight to the point:
Is that still German?
Did this sensuous screech come from a German heart?
This
tearing-oneself-apart from a German body?
This priest's hands spreading,
German?
The incense sensuality?
German this falling, faltering,
dizzying
This sugar-sweet ding-donging?
This nun's ogling, ave
bell-ringing?
This entirely wrong over-heavening of heaven?
Is
that still German?
Think! You are still at the gate ... What
you
hear is Rome, Rome's faith without words! (7)
Nietzsche did not
necessarily believe that Wagner's "new" Christian faith was sincere. At heart he
suspected Wagner of kowtowing to the weaknesses of the German public.
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