A Pagan Spoiled: Sex and Character in Wagner's Parsifal

Speranza

 

Anthony Winterbourne, "A Pagan Spoiled: Sex and Character in Wagner's Parsifal."

"This is a philosophical reading of Wagner's last music-drama."

"[Winterbourne's] interpretation is defended through an analysis of the

sexual dynamics

underpinning the action, and through an examination of the religious and psychological symbolism of both the Holy Grail and the lance often associated with the Crucifixion."

"The argument is introduced with an overview of themes and responses in relation to Parsifal and its sources, including its sexual symbolism and the particular relationship between sexuality and sin."

"Nineteenth-century fin-de-siècle preoccupations still resonate, as in the ambiguity of Wagner's view of Kundry."

"[Winterbourne] examines the extent to which Wolfram von Eschenbach's version of the Parsifal legend found its way into Wagner, placing emphasis on the very different dramaturgical roles played by the Grail and the lance respectively."

"The [lance]'s sexual connotations, as well as its eventual healing function, provide evidence that it is the lance, and not the Grail itself, that is the symbolic heart of the work."

"Here also the key concept of sexual indiscretion, manifest through the destinies of Kundry and Klingsor, is developed."

"Kundry's character is seen to express itself in three modes."

"The first is the apparent historical, female guilt that she carries, transmitted via the doctrine of metempsychosis."

"The second is her sexuality, in her role as femme fatale."

"The third is her strangeness as the heathen penitent in relation to the male Christian ascetics by whom she is surrounded."

"[Winterbourne] suggests that the heterogeneity of religious impulses in the work converge in the concept of redemption."

"[T]he drama becomes fully Christian, for it is in the repentance of sins already committed, rather than in sexuality denied as in Parsifal's chastity, that Wagner's Christian resolution of the drama demands the death of Kundry as a heathen redeemed."

[Ref.: Otto Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter].

-- source: http://inside.fdu.edu/fdupress/04070801.html