Speranza
Our conversation leads us to the mystic Meister Eckhart; R. begins to
read a sermon by him, which fascinates us to the highest degree. Everything
turned inward, the soul silent, so that in it, God may speak the hidden word!
[Cosima's Diary, 26 October 1873]
The absence of all ideality brings
the soul blissful peace, says R., and the way to this peace is through Jesus
Christ.
[Cosima's Diary, 27 October 1873]
Talked with R. about
Buddhism and Christianity. Perception of the world much greater in Buddhism,
which, however, has no monument like the Gospels, in which divinity is conveyed
to our consciousness in a truly historic form. The advantage of Buddhism is that
it derives from Brahmanism, whose dogmas can be put to use where science reveals
gaps, so far-reaching are its symbols. The Christian teaching is, however,
derived from the Jewish religion, and that is its dilemma. Christ's suffering
moves us more than Buddha's fellow-suffering, we suffer with him and become
Buddhas, through contemplation. Christ wishes to suffer, suffers, and redeems
us; Buddha looks on commiserates, and teaches us how to achieve redemption.
[Cosima's Diary, 28 October 1873]
Today is Good Friday again! - O, blessed day! Most deeply
portentous day in the world! Day of redemption! God's suffering! Who can grasp
the enormity of it? And yet, this same ineffable mystery - is it not the most
familiar of mankind's secrets? God, the Creator, - he must remain totally
unintelligible to the world: - God, the loving teacher, is dearly beloved, but
not understood:- but the God who suffers, - His name is inscribed in our hearts
in letters of fire; all the obstinacy of existence is washed away by our immense
pain at seeing God suffering! The teaching which we could not comprehend, it now
affects us: God is within us, - the world has been overcome! Who created it? An
idle question! Who overcame it? God within our hearts, - God whom we comprehend1
in the deepest anguish of fellow-suffering! -
A warm and sunny Good
Friday, with its mood of sacred solemnity, once inspired me with the idea of
writing Parsifal; since then it has lived within me and prospered, like a child
in its mother's womb. With each Good Friday it grows a year older, and I then
celebrate the day of its conception, knowing that its birthday will follow one
day.
[Letter to King Ludwig, 14 April 1865]
n Wagner's poem it is on
Good Friday that Parsifal arrives at the edge of the forest with the Spear and
with a burden of guilt. Here Wagner seems to be following his sources, in which
Perceval or Parzival, who had not been inside a church or made confession in
several years, met some pilgrims who were shocked to see him wearing armour on
the holiest of days, Good Friday. They directed him to an old hermit whom they
had just visited. In Wagner's drama the old hermit is identified with the knight
Gurnemanz. Parsifal's guilt is only increased when Gurnemanz tells him of the
death of Titurel and of the decay of the Grail community.
Und ich, ich
bin's
der all dies Elend schuf!
Ha! Welcher Sünden,
welches Frevels
Schuld
muss dieses Toren Haupt
seit Ewigkeit belasten.
And I, it is
I,
who brought this woe on all!
Ha! What transgression,
such a load of
sin
must this my foolish head
bear from all eternity.
Soon
after, however, Gurnemanz blesses the new Grail king and cries out to
heaven:
Du - Reiner!
Mitleidsvoll Duldender,
heiltatvoll
Wissender!
Wie des Erlös'ten Leiden
du gelitten,
die letzte Last
entnimm nun
seinem Haupt!
O - Pure One!
Pitying
sufferer,
all-wise deliverer!
As the redeeming torments
you once
suffered,
now lift the last load
from his
head!
Good Friday Spell, orchestral version; Bayreuth
Festival Orchestra conducted by Siegfried Wagner; recorded in the Bayreuth
Festspielhaus in December 1926. Ogg format, mono, duration 11
min.
Left: Kundry and Parsifal with the Holy Spear on Good
Friday, Franz Stassen, 1901. Above their scene in the meadow, the artist shows
angels collecting Christ's blood in the Holy Grail.
Obviously this
is a reference to the sufferings of Christ.
Or is it?
On closer examination it
turns out that the Good Friday morning scene is ambiguous from start to end.
What at first appear to be references to Christian doctrine can also be seen as
references to Buddhist doctrine. As Carl Suneson has suggested, Wagner's
spiritual hero Parsifal can be seen as a bodhisattva in the Buddhist Maháyána
tradition, as well as a Christ- figure. These alternatives are not mutually
exclusive, since some Buddhists have accepted Christ as a bodhisattva and thus
integrated Jesus into their own belief-system. In the study of the
bodhisattva-doctrine by Har Dayal we can read the following:
According to
the Sata-sáhasriká Prajñapáramitá, a bodhisattva shows his karuná [usually
translated as compassion or fellow-suffering] chiefly by resolving to suffer the
torments and agonies of the dreadful purgatories during innumerable æons, if
need be, so that he may lead all beings to perfect Enlightenment. He desires
Enlightenment first for all beings and not for himself. He is consumed with
grief on account of the sufferings of others, and does not care for his own
happiness. He desires the good and welfare of the world.
[Har Dayal, The
Bodhisattva Doctrine in Buddhist Sanskrit Literature, 1932]
It is
still Good Friday as the final curtain comes down on Wagner's Bühnenweih-
festspiel and Good Friday still symbolises Christ's sacrificial act on behalf of
humanity; and it is entirely characteristic of Parsifal that he effects the
miracle of the return of the Spear on the holiest of all days, without knowing
it was that day until Gurnemanz told him. There is thus a reciprocal, mutually
interactive connection between Parsifal and the Grail (already observable in Act
1) and between the Spear and the Blood in the Holy Chalice; and as Parsifal
prepares to ascend the steps of the shrine to take the Chalice from the boys who
have already opened the Holy Shrine in preparation for this moment, the point of
the Spear glows red in mutual attraction and empathy with the Blood in the cup.
[Ian Beresford Gleaves, in Wagner News, July
1995]
Michael Tanner, in his
essay The Total Work of Art, regards Parsifal as being a work about religion,
more precisely the psychopathology of religious belief.
He suggests that the
words of Gurnemanz are addressed, not to Christ, but to Parsifal as man redeemed
and transfigured.
There is a certain tidiness about this view of the text, in
which Parsifal not only restores the power of the Grail to intervene in the
human world, but becomes a new Christ, one that does not die.
This
interpretation seems to be adopted in productions in which Amfortas shares the
same fate as Kundry: Wieland Wagner suggested that this was necessary for
reasons of symmetry. It is also consistent with some of the medieval sources, in
which Anfortas is a symbol, or type, of Christ and the unseen Titurel is a
symbol of the hidden Creator. In this symbolic interpretation of the Grail
legend, the Grail bearer (Wolfram's Repanse de Schoye) is a symbol of the Virgin
Mary, who bears the Grail, which represents the body of Christ.
Tanner's
interpretation seems to stretch the text too far, however: Gurnemanz's words are
clearly about Parsifal but addressed to the once-suffering Redeemer.
Wagner's
letter to King Ludwig of 7 September 1865 is evidence that the composer related
Parsifal to Christ, but not that he identified his hero with Christ.
Wagner
repeatedly denied that Parsifal was a Christ figure.
It is true that the
religious symbolism reinforces the relationship between Parsifal and Christ.
In
the last act, the episode of the Magdalen and the dove descending, as at the
baptism of Christ in St. John's Gospel. So it was natural that Parsifal should
be represented as a Christ figure in the first productions outside Bayreuth,
productions which treated Parsifal as a religious work rather than a work about
religion or as a non-religious work employing the symbols of religion.
The
composer's instructions do not imply an identification between Parsifal and
Christ, nor do they indicate that Amfortas should die - as in Wolfram, at the
end of the opera he is restored to health and lives on. To some extent the
symbols have moved into the foreground, obscuring the meanings that Wagner had
intended to convey to the audience. Therefore it would seem to be justified to
reduce or remove some of the religious symbolism, as some recent productions
have done.
nother view of the work is that it is about spirituality rather
than religion. The elements of mystical Christianity and Buddhism give the work
its tension between redemption through the suffering of Christ and redemption
obtained by following the Buddha down the path of enlightenment. Wagner was also
interested in oriental religion and spirituality, for example in the poems of
the Sufi mystic Hafiz. Parsifal's enlightenment seems to come from within, from
God within our hearts, - God whom we comprehend in the deepest anguish of
fellow-suffering speaking the hidden word.
Wagner was still convinced of the pain inherent in being alive,
and of the sovereign value of the identification of one's own sufferings with
those of others. It is only in terms of this ethic of compassion, founded on a
metaphysic of the unity of living things, that Parsifal makes sense. As soon as
one has grasped that, the apparently Christian elements in the work, which can
be embarrassing or seem merely added for colour, function much more actively as
constituents in a profound drama of spiritual awakening and fulfilment. New life
is brought to the Grail community, and it will be able to continue, invigorated,
not through any injection of supernatural energy-boosters, but through the
radiant example of Parsifal, showing the possibility of emerging triumphant from
gruelling ordeals, neither complacent in his achievement nor exhausted by it.
[Michael Tanner, Wagner, pp.198-199]
It might
not be coindidental that Wagner makes a play on begreifen, to take in, and
ergreifen, to grasp, which suggests Luther's translation of the first chapter of
St. John's Gospel:
Und das Licht scheint in der Finsternis, und die
Finsternis hat's nicht ergriffen. [Johannes 1:5]
Saturday, February 23, 2013
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