Speranza
The conventional view of Wagner's last years might be as follows.
He
took as the basis for his last major work, the religion that had developed in
the West over the preceding two millenia, and affirmed its truth.
In the
rejection of sexual love in favour of a Buddhistic compassion for all living
things, burdened with existence (or with consciousness perhaps, or reason), his
last hero found salvation for himself and for others.
Put in these terms,
Parsifal is dubious and decadent at best, downright offensive at worst.
Above: The prophecy is revealed to Amfortas as he prays before the
Grail. Painting by Franz Stassen.
And if it is not a Christian work, as opposed to a work which is to a
large extent about Christians (though remember, the Christ is never referred to
by name) and their failings and eventual salvation, what is the significance of
the celebration of the Eucharist in Act I, the prayers that can hardly be
addressed to anyone but the Christian God, the point of Parsifal's baptising
Kundry and telling her to have faith in the Redeemer, and much else besides?
In her Cambridge Handbook,
Lucy Beckett speaks of the work's steadily maintained Christian frame of
reference.
This seems to miss the point that Wagner made right at the start of
his essay, Religion and Art: One might say that where Religion becomes
artificial, it is reserved for Art to save the spirit of religion by recognising
the figurative value of the mythic symbols which the former would have us
believe in their literal sense, and revealing their deep and hidden truth
through an ideal representation.
[Religion and Art, 1880, tr. W. Ashton
Ellis.]
So despite Wagner's description of the work, for the benefit of
King Ludwig, as a Christian parable it would be more accurate to say that he
made use of the symbols of Christianity, together with some elements of Buddhist
philosophy, to convey his own message.
Indeed, as the author has shown in a
separate article, as far as the second act is concerned, it might be more
accurate to speak of a steadily maintained Buddhist frame of reference. We
should also keep in mind that Wagner had an ambivalent relationship with
Christianity; as a disciple of the atheist Schopenhauer, Wagner did not believe
in God, although he told Cosima that he did believe in divinity (by which he
probably meant 'o Θεός ; see Religion and Art).
It is deeply significant
that the second crucial moment in the opera takes place not on Easter Day but on
Good Friday: on the day of the passion of Christ, not of his resurrection.
Gurnemanz corrects Parsifal: it is a time for rejoicing, for the sacrifice of
love that has already set men free. The spring of new life is here, as Parsifal
himself comes to see and to proclaim to Kundry. The interpretation is not that
of orthodox Christian doctrine and devotion, but it does express the
significance that Wagner himself found in Christianity. The emphasis was on "the
deed of free-willed suffering", not on the triumph of love which had overcome
suffering: on "the love that springs from pity, and carries its compassion to
the utmost breaking of self- will" which he claimed to have found in
Schopenhauer's ethics, as he found it in Christianity. Schopenhauer, we know,
points to the renunciation of the will- to-live; but mere renunciation, however
unselfish, does not imply renewal, nor did Schopenhauer look for it.
[James
Mark in Theology, March 1987, reprinted in Wagner, vol.9 no.3, July
1988]
Left: Bayreuth postcard showing Gurnemanz consecrating and
anointing Parsifal on Good Friday (act three).
n his references to Christ,
Wagner was concerned with Christ's act of selfless sacrifice: for him, Christ
was the archetypal sinless sufferer. Since Wagner denied that Parsifal was a
Christ figure, it is argued by Lucy Beckett that Gurnemanz' Du - Reiner! -
Mitleidsvoll Duldender, heiltatvoll Wissender! is not addressed to Parsifal, but
to Christ: this makes a profound difference. On the other hand, this may be
Wagner's deliberate ambiguity.
Thus it was promised to us (Alexander
Kipnis, bass; Fritz Wolff, tenor; Bayreuth Festival Orchestra conducted by
Siegfried Wagner; recorded in the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in 1927. Ogg format,
mono, duration 6 min.)
The figure of the sinless sufferer remains
compelling; he was all that Wagner wanted of Christian tradition. But, if he is
no more than this, what becomes of his relationship to Parsifal? Parsifal
himself has suffered for Amfortas in the moment of temptation by Kundry; he has
overcome the temptation and can now heal Amfortas' wound. If Christ has become
simply the sinless sufferer, is it not possible, whatever the differences
between them, to see a similarity, and thereby to see what happens as somewhat
[sic] that happens not between man and God, to be spelt out in the language of
traditional Christian doctrine, but between man and man -- a possibility that we
may reveal to each other within the limits of the human condition?
[James
Mark]
Lucy Beckett pointed out, Parsifal displaced the Buddhist
drama Die Sieger from Wagner's plan of work.
In part at least, because the ideas
that he had developed in relation to the two stories had converged into one
conceptual web. In Die Sieger, a chaste young man called Ananda receives into
the future Buddha's community a beautiful girl called Prakriti, who has
passionately loved him; but the Buddha persuades him to renounce her. The Buddha
reveals that in an earlier incarnation, Prakriti had rejected, with mocking
laughter, the love of a young man. In the last act of Die Sieger the future
Buddha shows compassion for Prakriti and for the first time admits a woman into
what had been an all-male religious community. One of the last sentences that
Wagner wrote in February 1883 was the following: It is a beautiful feature of
the legend, that shows the Victoriously Perfect at last determined to admit the
woman. Prakriti and her laughter became yet another element in the complex
character of Kundry, who at the end of Parsifal enters, apparently for the first
time, the "Synagogue of the Grail", as Wagner called his Grail
Temple.
Wagner's description of Kundry and her situation is also at odds with
Christian teaching: as a result of her pitiless laughter, Kundry has been cursed
and is unable to repent until the curse is lifted; yet the Christian churches
teach that the door of forgiveness is always open to those who will repent. Nor
does Wagner affirm life: no sooner is Kundry freed from her curse than she
dies.
Wagner can't accept the fullness of Christian doctrine and (in spite
of Nietzsche's polemic [in Der Fall Wagner where he saw Wagner "sinking,
helpless and broken, before the Christian cross"]) the affirmation of life that
it might have made possible.
[James Mark]
For Parsifal is a work of perfidy, of vindictiveness, of a secret
attempt to poison the presuppositions of life -- a bad work. The preaching of
chastity remains an incitement to anti-nature; I despise everyone who does not
experience Parsifal as an attempted assassination of basic ethics.
[Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche contra Wagner, tr. W. Kaufmann.]
Have
you noticed that Wagner's heroines never have children?
They can't.
The
despair with which Wagner tackled the problem of having Siegfried born at all
shows how modern his feelings were at this point.
Siegfried "emancipates
woman" - but without any hope of progeny.
One fact, finally, which leaves us
dumbfounded.
Parsifal is the father of Lohengrin.
How did he do it?
Must one
remember at this point that "chastity works miracles"?
Wagnerus dixit princeps
in castitate auctoritas. (Said by Wagner, the foremost authority on chastity.)
[Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Fall Wagner, tr. W. Kaufmann.]
And, one might note, Wagner's Titurel can hardly have been
chaste, since Amfortas is his son and heir, and Herzeleide was (possibly) his
daughter.
But Wagner's text makes a clear distinction between purity (Reinheit)
and chastity (Keuschheit).
Bot least, with Kundry's cruel, rhetorical question
to the magician Klingsor, Bist du Keusch?
Obviously he is chaste, since he has
castrated himself: but Klingsor is far from pure.
Klingsor is not the only
character in the drama to be confused about this issue: Kundry seeks to regain
her purity by robbing Parsifal of his chastity, and the Grail Knights are
celibate except when the Grail permits them to marry (and even then, it doesn't
always work out). Here too there is a connection with Die Sieger, in which
Prakriti had to accept chastity (in other words, like Alberich she had to reject
sexual love) before she could be united with Ananda in the community of the
Buddha. It is clear that Wagner had considerable difficulty in accepting
Schopenhauer's view that sexual love was just a trick played on us by the Will,
in order to perpetuate the species.
Yet in the long scene between Parsifal and
Kundry towards the end of the second act of the drama, there seems to be a
contest between sexual love ('έρως or amor) and brotherly love or loving-
kindness ('αγάπη or caritas).
As Dieter Borchmeyer points out (in Richard
Wagner: Theory and Theatre), the victory of caritas is shown (at the second
climax of the drama) in Parsifal's brotherly kiss on Kundry's brow, a victory
over the erotic or amorous kiss that Kundry had placed on his lips (at the first
climax of the drama).
Schopenhauer wrote [On the Basis of Morality, §18] that
loving- kindness (like the other principal virtue, justice) flows from
compassion. (See also The World as Will and Representation, part one,
§67.)
Right: Bayreuth postcard showing Parsifal as new Grail King, elevating
the radiant Grail (act three).
Wagner's drama has a
Christian (or at least, religious; and if not religious, spiritual) dimension.
Firstly since, like many of Wagner's earlier operas, it is concerned with
redemption and redemptive sacrifice, and secondly there is a focus on compassion
and self-sacrificing love.
These themes are found in other religions, of course,
and appear in a Christian context only because Wagner (with a predominantly
Christian audience in mind) chose (mainly) Christian symbols, which religion
would have us believe in their literal sense, with which to reveal his deep and
hidden truth. Many commentators have tried to make a coherently Christian
interpretation of Parsifal and given up in despair; it is a collection of vivid
material without coherence, concludes James Mark; the work is made inconsistent,
concludes Lucy Beckett, by a tension between irreconcilable pagan and Christian
elements. It must be concluded that we must look not to Christian theology but
elsewhere for a coherent interpretation of Parsifal as a consistent work.
Saturday, February 23, 2013
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