Speranza
In his recent review of Richard Wagner's music drama 'Parsifal' at Covent
Garden, David Mellor follows a typical pattern.
After lavishly praising the
musical qualities of the performance, he is disappointed about the production.
"The production fell well short of the high musical standards", he writes, and
complains of the tendency to 'trivialisation'.
One scene in particular is exemplary of this tendency to debase the
sublime qualities of Wagner's great work.
"For example" he writes, "in
Klingsor's magic garden a stuffed shark dominates the scene for no good reason
beyond a cheap laugh", and in most of the performances I attended the audience
did in fact laugh as the curtain opened on Act 2.
Why should a replica of a
shark dominate the stage at this point? And why should this seem 'trivial' or
amusing to people who see it?
Perhaps the producers just happened to like
sharks, or had one lying around the studio. I prefer to believe that they
noticed a central theme in Wagner's work and decided that a shark was an
appropriate object to symbolise it.
You will hardly be surprised if I say that
the theme is castration and castration anxiety, but it is there in Wagner, not
just Freud.
For those who do not know the story, Klingsor is the bad guy.
He's bad but he once wanted to be good. So he castrates himself.
Another
character, Gurnemanz, tells the story in act 1:
"Unable to kill the sinful,
raging lust within him,
his hand upon himself he turned..."
That act of
self mutilation gave him magical powers, and with it he produced a magic garden
in the desert, full of beautiful women who would lure the good guys away. The
leader of the good guys (the knights who guard the Holy Grail) Amfortas, tried
to stop Klingsor.
But it turned out he was not so good after all. He was seduced
by Kundry, a complex female character who is both Klingsor's chief temptress
and, in another guise, seeking forgiveness, a helper of the Grail knights.
Klingsor stabs Amfortas with his own spear, leaving a gaping wound in his side
that will never heal.
There's more of course, and it's more complicated.
But
castration and the fear of castration looms ominously over the whole of Wagner's
great masterpiece in both explicit and symbolic guise.
So what was Klingsor's
sin that required self castration?
It is shrouded in mystery.
Gurnemanz, who
knows most things, says "I knew not what sin he there committed".
Gurnemanz may
not have known, but Wagner probably did, and he knew the unconscious works by
the law of talion; the punishment usually fits the 'crime'.
Whereas Oedipus only
symbolically castrates himself, Wagner seems to have not wanted to leave any
doubt.
The sin of course was maternal incest, and it is overcoming incestuous
longings that is the task Wagner gives to Parsifal as the redeemer in the story.
Before Parsifal can accomplish the task of saving Amfortas and restoring the
Knights of the Grail to their former glory (potency), he has to confront the
great castrator and overcome him.
If Klingsor's sin is not made explicit in
the drama, the temptation to which Parsifal is subject is crystal clear.
Kundry
tries to seduce him by drawing him into his forgotten past.
Gamuret is
Parsifal's father, dead before he was born.
Herzeleide his over-protective
mother.
"Of love now learn the rapture
that Gamuret once learned,
when Herzeleide's passion
within him fiercely burned!
For love that
gave you
life and being,
must death and folly both remove,
love send
you now
a mother's blessing, greets a son
with love's first
kiss!"
So Parsifal, who grew up in ignorance of this oedipal dynamic (as did
the other great 'idiotic' Wagner hero, Siegfried), is now forced to bring his
incestuous desires in line with both a mother and father.
He is not slow in
learning the consequences.
Kundry leans over him "and presses her lips to his
mouth in a long kiss" as Wagner's stage directions say.
"Suddenly Parsifal
starts up with a gesture of intense fear.
His demeanour expresses some fearful
change; he presses his hands tightly against his heart, as though to subdue a
rending pain".
"Amfortas!
The Wound! The Wound!"
At the moment of
incestous temptation it is the image of castration that bursts through into his
consciousness.
There is a connection between the mother and castration, or
between the experience or knowledge of the mother and the fear of
castration.
But paradoxically it is the repudiation of sexuality which allows
sexuality to come into being.
It is by experiencing the incestuous temptation
and confronting the threat of castration - going through the experience as it
were - that allows entry into the promise of a sexual life with non-incestuous
sexual partners and identification with the father.
Parsifal eventually becomes
a father himself.
At the end of the opera the masculine spear is united once
more with the feminine Grail, male and female symbols joined together in
fruitful union. Echoes of a pagan fertility ritual (the Fisher King and so on)
are evident behind the superficially Christian facade.
Parsifal, the son,
redeems the father by healing the wound with the magical spear, and takes his
place. Amfortas finds peace in death. The last opera Wagner wrote is the first
time the son triumphs in this way. All of his previous work leads to this
moment, a testimony to the difficulty of the task and the dangers it involves.
So it is fitting that a shark should
occupy centre stage in a production of Parsifal. Because in that fearful image
we see the child's terror of the castrating father, rising up as it does from
the depths of the unconscious, holding him in its thrall.
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
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