Speranza
Let's meditate on the meaning of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal, one of our favorite
operas.
Wagner himself
claimed to have been inspired to begin work on Parsifal on Good Friday, 1857,
although this is a suspect claim at best.
Nevertheless, for the musicologist as
well as the theologian, there is much to ponder in Parsifal, starting with
Wagner’s own words.
Near the end of his life, Wagner wrote,
"When
religion becomes artificial, art has a duty to rescue it. Art can show that the
symbols which religions would have us believe literally true are actually
figurative. Art can idealize those symbols, and so reveal the profound truths
they contain."
This is not surprising for a man with as monumental an ego as
Wagner, who truly believed in the ability of art to redeem man (not an
altogether foolish notion) and therefore saw himself in the role of a redeemer
(well, let’s not go that far).
On the other hand, in 1858 Wagner wrote to
Mathilde Wesendonk:
"If this suffering can have a purpose, it is simply to
awaken a sense of fellow-suffering in man, who thereby absorbs the creature's
defective existence and becomes the Redeemer of the world by recognizing the
error of all existence. (This meaning will one day become clearer to you from
the Good Friday morning scene in the third act of [Parsifal])."
"Parsifal" was and
remains one of Wagner's most controversial works, and also one of his most
moving.
It's also, at an average running time of four-and-a-half hours - not
including intermissions - one of the longest operas ever written.
And it's
tempting to read too much into Parsifal.
Tempting, and also
dangerous.
Nietzsche, who started out as a big fan of Wagner, broke with
him over "Parsifal".
He saw it as some kind of pseudo-Christian piece and hated it
for that, saying,
"Here the cunning in his alliance of beauty and sickness goes
so far that, as it were, it casts a shadow over Wagner's earlier art - which now
seems too bright, too healthy. ...How he thus wages war against us! us, the free
spirits! How he indulges every cowardice of the modern soul with the tones of
magic maidens! - Never before has there been such a deadly hatred of the search
for knowledge! - One has to be a cynic in order not to be seduced here; one has
to be able to bite in order not to worship here. Well, then, you old seducer,
the cynic warns you - cave canem."
(On the other hand, he did admit that the
music was sublime.)
Although Wagner's references seem obviously to refer
to Christ, others have said that they could apply to Buddhist doctrine as well.
Derrick Everett notes the connection:
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 fact, if you read
the libretto of the opera you'll notice that Parsifal himself speaks only of the
Redeemer - in the famous Good Friday scene it is only Gurnemanz who mentions the
name of God.
Michael Tanner, in his essay The Total Work of Art, uses this to
suggest that Parsifal is a work about religion, more precisely the
psychopathology of religious belief, rather than a religious work.
Wagner saw
compassion as the defining characteristic, the one which ultimately would redeem
mankind.
As Wagner biographer Michael Tanner points out:
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.
In addition,
Wagner was, of course, a notorious anti-Semite, which makes Christian use of his
words particularly dicey.
Pace Wikipedia,
Some suggesting that Parsifal was
written in support of the ideas of Arthur de Gobineau who advocated Aryanism.
Parsifal is proposed as the "pure-blooded" (ie Aryan) hero who overcomes
Klingsor, who is perceived as a Jewish stereotype, particularly since he opposes
the quasi-Christian Knights of the Grail. Such claims remain heavily debated,
since there is nothing explicit in the libretto to support them, and Cosima
Wagner's diaries, which relate in great detail Wagner's thoughts over the last
14 years of his life (including the period covering the composition and first
performance of Parsifal) never mention once any such intention. Wagner first met
Gobineau very briefly in 1876, but he only read Gobineau's An Essay on the
Inequality of the Human Races in 1880. However, Wagner had completed the
libretto for Parsifal by 1877, and the original drafts of the story date back to
1857. Despite this lack of chronology, Gobineau is frequently cited as a major
inspiration for Parsifal.
If Parsifal so clearly expressed the concept of
Aryan supremacy then it would doubtless have been popular with the Nazi party in
20th Century Germany. In fact, the Nazis placed a de facto ban on performances
of Parsifal because of its "pacifist undertones".
(Interestingly enough, the
conductor at the initial performance of Parsifal was a Jew, Hermann
Levi.)
And Wagner was never particularly accurate in his theology in the
first place.
He sees the Holy Grail as not only the vessel used by Jesus at the
Last Supper, but also the receptacle for the Blood that flowed after He was
pierced by the Spear. (The sacred Spear is also crucial to the plot of
Parsifal.) Read this essay from the 2003 Met Opera broadcast of Parsifal for
more on Wagner's confused theology.
Some point to Wagner's use of Good
Friday (rather than Easter) as the day of redemption as a further
misunderstanding of Christianity. But here I think we may be onto something. As
we have stated many times in these pages, Catholics have what is perhaps a
unique insight into the nature and necessity of suffering. Wagner recognizes,
even if it's only inadvertenty, that without Christ's sacrifice on Good Friday
there can be no Easter Sunday. This is the purpose for which He was born: to
suffer and die for our sins, so that in His Resurrection we might all be reborn
into eternal life.One of our favorite poets, T.S. Eliot, drew on Parsifal in his
poem The Waste Land. We see that influence in the following notes on The Waste
Land:
Eliot’s reliance on Jesse Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920) is
recorded in his own notes (which were prepared for the book publication of the
poem in 1922). The argument of Weston’s book is that the Arthurian legends of
the quest for the Holy Grail are founded on basic fertility myths and rituals,
such as those described by Sir James George Frazer in The Golden Bough, a work
of Victorian scholarship that argued all myths derive from common concerns of
human survival—namely, the fertility and cultivation of the soil, seasonal
changes, and other relevant natural phenomena. According to Weston, “In
Arthurian legend, a Fisher King (the fish being an ancient symbol of life) has
been maimed or killed, and his country has therefore become a dry Waste Land; he
can only be regenerated and his land restored to fertility by a knight
(Parsifal) who perseveres through various ordeals to the Perilous Chapel and
learns the answers to certain ritual questions about the Grail.” And, we should
add, the lance. The Grail (or Holy Cup) and the lance are the crucial symbols of
Arthurian legend for Weston. They are obvious symbols of fertility—Cup=Mother,
and Lance=Father. In the syncretic mythography (the anthropological study of
myth designed to discover common sources for different cultural myths) of
Weston, the Fisher King is the archetype for Christian (Christ’s crucifixion and
resurrection), Greek (the myth of Aphrodite and Adonis), Egyptian (the seasonal
dismemberment and reconstruction of Osiris) vegetation and fertility myths
linked to seasonal cycles and the regeneration of plant, animal, and human
life.
(For more on how Wagner influenced various artists, read the marvelous
Fr. Owen Lee’s essay here.)
So what, ultimately, do we make of
Parsifal?
As we've seen, it is not particularly accurate to call Parsifal
a “Christian” work.
However, although it may be impossible for us to ever know
exactly what Wagner had it mind when he wrote Parsifal, the fact remains that it
has always been associated with Easter. Most classical music radio stations play
selections from it on Good Friday (usually an arrangement featuring the Prelude
and Transformation Scene in Act I and the Good Friday music from Act III). When
the Met stages it, it's done around Eastertime, with the radio broadcast on the
Saturday before Palm Sunday and a performance on Good Friday itself. Whatever
Wagner might have intended, the popular interpretation (such as it is) is that
it is a Christian work.The music, some of Wagner's most stunning and lovely,
emphasizes Alan Wagner's comment that "The contradictions melt away,
transfigured, in the incredible beauty of his music." For those disposed to view
it through a Christian lens, the symbolism and meaning are powerful and moving.
For an opera there are unusually long stretches where there is no singing at
all, just the "beauty of his music."And the message is there: in the Act I
commemoration of the Last Supper, and of Parsifal's sharing in the suffering of
Amfortas, ailing leader of the knights who serve as guardians of the Holy Grail
(Parsifal feels in his heart the pain from the wound in Amfortas' side, a wound
that is the result of past sin, a wound that refuses to heal).
In Act II,
where the temptress Kundry attempts to seduce Parsifal into sin (as she had
Amfortas) - first by an appeal to sensual pleasures with a kiss (the kiss of
betrayal?), then by pity for the life she has led (having been cursed to eternal
life for having mocked Christ on the Cross). In an echo of the Devil's tempting
of Eve in the Garden ("your eyes will be opened and you will be like God,
knowing good and evil."), Kundry tells Parsifal "If you are a redeemer, what
evil stops you, from uniting with me for my salvation?" Parsifal resists
Kundry's temptations and regains the Spear from the evil Klingsor.
And in
Act III, where after a search of many years (reflected in the slow, weary
atmosphere of Wagner's music for the act's Prelude; music that you'd never hear
at the beginning of a 4 1/2 hour opera), Parsifal relocates the knights of the
Holy Grail, baptizes Kundry, and uses the Spear to heal the wound in the side of
Amfortas, thus winning redemption both for Kundry (who finally can experience
death, and therefore rest), and Amfortas (whose wound is healed by the relic of
Christ's sacrifice).
As we said, one must be careful here. Christ is
never mentioned by name - the description above is the Christian interpretation.
But, as Fr. Richard John Neuhaus has said, "The Catholic sensibility, however,
going back to the patristic era and its happy use of 'the spoils of Egypt,' is
inclined to embracing truth wherever it is found." And Parsifal is far from what
one would describe as "the spoils of Egypt." If God is present in everything,
then it's surely not hard to believe that the truth of His sacrifice is present
in Parsifal as well – whether Wagner understood it or not.
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
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