by Martin Geck
However much sympathy one may have for Wagnerian exegetes who approach the plot of Parsifal in a spirit of positive thinking, there remains the question: would Wagner’s Parsifal have existed if Wolfram’s Parzival had not done so? Wagner’s poem is undoubtedly more coherent and concentrated than Wolfram’s rambling and barely logical romance, which runs to almost 25,000 lines. But is the same also true of its message? Wagner’s Parsifal ends with words that are not only mystical but also baffling: “Miracle of supreme salvation: Redemption to the Redeemer.” Wolfram, on the other hand, ends his poem with the lines:
swes lebn sich sô verendet,
daz got niht wirt gepfendet
der sêle durch des lîbes schulde,
und der doch der werlde hulde
behalten kan mit werdekeit,
daz ist ein nütziu arbeit.17
[If any man’s life ends in such a way that God is not robbed of his soul because of the body’s guilt, and if he can retain, with honour, this world’s favour, that is a useful labour.]18
Wolfram’s motto might be summed up as “von tumpheit durch zwîfel zur staete” (from folly through doubt to constancy) and represents an attempt on the poet’s part to combine two distinct virtues as his template for a chivalric education: worldliness and piety. Although the medieval hero ultimately rules over the Grail community, he is allowed to keep beside him his beautiful wife Condwîrâmûrs, whose name—significantly—derives from the Old French meaning “she who leads to love.” There is no such love in Wagner’s Parsifal. Indeed, Wagner turns on their head Wolfram’s ideals, a decision prompted by his own motto, which we have already quoted in other contexts: “Strong is the magic of him who desires, but stronger is that of him who renounces.”19
In the process, Wagner also rewrote Tristan und Isolde, his program note for the prelude having read: “Now there could be no end to love’s desire and yearning, no end to its joy and its misery: the world and all its power, reputation, honor, knighthood, loyalty, and friendship—all had turned to dust like some insubstantial dream; one thing alone lived on: yearning! Yearning, insatiable longing ever reborn, thirsting and repining! The only release was to die, to perish, to fade away, nevermore to awaken!”20 Instead, Wagner’s concern, as expressed in his program note to the prelude to act 1 of Parsifal, was “charity—faith—hope?”21
But what are we to hope for? Parsifal ends, as we have already noted, with the enigmatic words “Miracle of supreme salvation: Redemption to the Redeemer.” We may preempt our discussion of this point by quoting a malicious insight on the part of the disenchanted Nietzsche: “There is nothing about which Wagner has thought more deeply than redemption: his opera is the opera of redemption. Somebody or other always wants to be redeemed in his work: sometimes a little male, sometimes a little female—this is his problem.”22 But this is now a problem for countless writers on Wagner, for whereas the composer’s other operas and music dramas leave us in little doubt about the immediate beneficiary of the intended act of redemption, the ending of Parsifal is nothing if not cryptic. And Wagner himself, normally so eager to dispense advice and helpful hints, did little on this occasion to add to the cause of enlightenment. There is a single sibylline entry in Cosima Wagner’s diary in the course of a conversation on the subject of Parsifal: “‘I know what I know and what is in it; and the new school, Wolz[ogen] and the others, can take their lead from it.’ He then hints at, rather than expresses, the content of this work, ‘salvation to the savior’—and we are silent after he has added, ‘Good that we are alone.’”23
It is entirely possible that—a year before his death—Wagner saw himself as a redeemer released from all further obligations by the success of his final confessional work. That, at least, was the interpretation placed on the work’s final line by the Munich Wagner Society, whose wreath on the occasion of his burial bore the inscription “Erlösung dem Erlöser,” prompting Nietzsche to fire off another barb in Wagner’s general direction: “Many (strangely enough!) made the same small correction: ‘Redemption from the redeemer!’—One heaved a sigh of relief.”24
But this phrase is already a part of the 1877 libretto, where logic dictates that it refers to Amfortas, whose sinful past means that the king of the Grail community is incapable of bestowing the redeeming power of the Grail on his knights. As the new king, Parsifal relieves Amfortas of this burden and releases him from the torments caused by the exercise of his office.
And yet this interpretation is barely calculated to reflect the “content” of the work to which Wagner obliquely referred, encouraging commentators to claim that the redeemed redeemer is “Christ, who is immanent within the Grail.”25 In correspondence with Hans von Wolzogen, Wagner was at this time developing the idea of an “incomparably and sublimely simple and true redeemer who must first be cleansed and redeemed of the distortion that has been caused by Alexandrine, Judaic, and Roman despotism.”26 Brahms’s early biographer Max Kalbeck provided a particularly telling summary of these ideas in a review that he wrote of the first production of Parsifal: “The modern faith hero has come to realize that the nineteenth century can no longer use a Christian, Semitic Savior but has urgent need of a Christian, Germanic Redeemer, and the anti-Semites in our midst may therefore thank Wagner for this blond-haired Christ.”27
A century later, Robert Gutman, one of the elder statesmen of Anglo-Saxon Wagner studies, developed this critique along even more polemical lines, arguing that “in Parsifal, with the help of church bells, snippets of the Mass, and the vocabulary and paraphernalia of the Passion, [Wagner] set forth a religion of racism under the cover of Christian legend. Parsifal is an enactment of the Aryan’s plight, struggle, and hope for redemption.”28
Following in Gutman’s footsteps, the German historian Hartmut Zelinsky has put forward arguments that implicitly accuse Wagner of preparing the way for the Holocaust, arguments that were widely discussed at the time they were first presented.29 Carl Dahlhaus, at that date the doyen of musicologically oriented Wagner scholars, dismissed Zelinsky’s arguments out of hand, claiming that it is insane to regard Parsifal as an “anti-Semitic ritual” and as “coded anti-Semitic propaganda” in the sense of a “demand that Christianity be ‘purged’ of its Jewish elements by means of the root-and-branch destruction of all those aspects.”30 While it is undeniable that members of Wagner’s circle flirted with these ideas, it is impossible to make these charges stick to Wagner, who in 1881 famously refused to sign Bernhard Förster’s notorious petition against the Jews, a refusal that was arguably dictated by more than just tactical considerations. At the very least, it is ludicrous to attempt to see the intended “content” of his final stage work in this light.31 Such a content can be found, if at all, only on a range of different semantic levels.
Of course, Dahlhaus’s own proposed interpretation is no less problematical, for on the one hand he claims that Parsifal, “as the redeemer of the tormented Amfortas himself needs to be redeemed from past guilt,” while at the same time insisting that “Redemption to the Redeemer” is “also a sentence about Christ,” inasmuch as Wagner believed “that Christ, the Redeemer, was seeking redemption in order finally to reveal Himself as He actually was.”32 But what exactly was this “actual” Christ like? He can hardly be equated with the Jesus of Nazareth to whom Wagner had devoted an outline scenario during his revolutionary period,33 even if Jürgen Kühnel is right to argue that in Parsifal, Wagner had sought to free “the historical Jesus” and “perfect human being” from his “status as the son of God, a position that theologians had foisted upon him with the aim of allowing him to safeguard his authority and maintain his grip on power.”34
If Wagner really wanted to establish a private religion in Parsifal, then it remains vague to the point of unintelligibility. And I myself see no need to join the long line of exegetes eager to shed light on the line “Erlösung dem Erlöser” in the spirit of biblical hermeneutics. Whatever the implications of the term Bühnenweihfestspiel, we are ultimately dea
ling with a work of art. That its ending is unclear evidently reflects its creator’s view that redemption can be expressed neither in words nor in actions but only in music. The spear that alone can close the wound it once dealt is ultimately not the spear in Parsifal’s hands but the music flowing from Wagner’s pen. The situation is hardly any different in Tannhäuser, Tristan und Isolde, or the Ring, for there, too, it remains to a greater or lesser extent unclear who is redeeming whom and why. What matters is that the act of redemption is celebrated through the music.
It made sense, therefore, that in his 1977 production of Parsifal in Berlin, Harry Kupfer eschewed a final tableau suggestive of solemn sanctity: after the eponymous hero had restored the spear to the brotherhood of the Grail, the members of that community were not overcome by “utter rapture,” as the stage directions require them to be, but remained lost and bewildered at the sight of their new king carrying spear and Grail out of the hall and signaling the failure of his mission. Kupfer could appeal to Wagner’s music in defense of his production concept, for the music, too, leaves Amfortas unredeemed: the augmented triad that lends Amfortas’s motif its underlying character is not resolved at the words “Sei heil, entsündigt und gesühnt” (Be whole, forgiven and unstained) but is retained as a dissonance, encouraging Egon Voss to write that “Wagner the composer falls, as it were, into the arms of Wagner the librettist.”35 The moral of the story is that if there is to be any act of redemption, it is still in the lap of the gods—or of God.
The same is true of Diotima, a key figure in Robert Musil’s novel The Man without Qualities. She uses the “inflated” word “redemption” until General Stumm “is sick and tired of it,” not least because he has no real idea what she means by it. Musil’s novel is set in Vienna in the years leading up to the outbreak of the First World War and describes a society looking for ideas to guide it in the face of impending crises, ideas that might save the imperial and royal dual monarchy from disintegrating and at the same time help “unredeemed nationalities” to come into their own.36 In a wider sense the novel deals with an existential crisis on the part of an inwardly ravaged civilization abandoned by God but still wanting to retain its divine soul and, like Diotima, seeking refuge in mysticism and all kinds of spirituality.
Musil offers a magisterial account of the way in which politics and philosophy have become intertwined and in doing so he throws an involuntary light on the debate surrounding Parsifal. (It is significant that he does so from the vantage point of 1913, the year in which Bayreuth’s exclusive right to perform the work expired, allowing the Bühnenweihfestspiel to be staged elsewhere in the world.) Wagner, too, felt that the one true God had been lost sight of, and, like Musil’s prewar society, he and his disciples sought “redemption,” confusing art, philosophy, and politics. Although Parsifal cannot be interpreted solely in terms of narrow anti-Semitic ideas, there is no denying that it contains “the imagined picture of an attempt to regenerate the human race” that Wagner painted in his late essay “Religion and Art.”37
This picture also had a nationalistic undertone to it. In his essay “What Is German?” of 1865, for example, Wagner had referred to the Celtic origins of the Parsifal and Tristan legends before noting how these narratives were then “taken up and elaborated by Germans; and whilst the originals have become mere curiosities of no importance except to students of literary history, in their German counterparts we recognize poetic works of imperishable worth.”38 Presumably Wagner regarded his own contribution to the tradition as the ne plus ultra of these reworkings of the old legend. And there is no doubt that he saw himself as part of the predominantly German tradition of “artist-poets” and “poetic priests” who in the past had kept alive the hope that the “human race might yet be regenerated.”39
And yet this point, too, needs to be qualified, for Wagner’s idea of regeneration is based on the concept of compassion, a concept that pervades the whole of the action of Parsifal. In “Religion and Art” he expressly inveighs against the “advancing art of war” with its “torpedoes” and “dynamite cartouches.”40 At the same time, however, the reader is bound to balk at the reasons that Wagner adduces in his essay “Heroism and Christianity” for the part that “blood, the quality of race” can play in “equipping us for the exercise of so holy a heroism”41—regardless of the fact that such statements create a less macabre impression when quoted in context than they do when cited in isolation.
Parsifal cannot be salvaged as a work that embodies a positive religion of art, for, as Peter Wapnewski has noted, “the troubling core of it is the equation of human purity with sexual asceticism. The messianic state is associated with an immunity to carnal temptation, and sexual desire is associated with sin. One proves one’s nobility by resisting sensual urges.” And he goes on to claim that “in its hostility to senses and to women, Parsifal is a profoundly inhuman spectacle, glorifying a barren masculine world whose ideals are a combination of militarism and monasticism.”42 We may add that it also depicts the journey through life of a man who has been robbed of his childhood and who can escape from his feelings of guilt only by seeking refuge in a virtual higher existence.43 In Parsifal’s world, any female creature who wants to be more than a mother is a disruptive influence. Whereas the women in Wagner’s earlier stage works at least had within them the potential to redeem others, the only female characters in Parsifal are the Flowermaidens and Kundry, who is herself in need of redemption. But to shy away from eroticism is also to shy away from society, at which point the artificiality and sterility of the Grail community are revealed in all their grim inhumanity.
The work excited ridicule even among Wagner’s contemporaries, Nietzsche, for example, mocking it as “operetta material par excellence,”44 while one of Brahms’s female friends, Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, reacted to a Bayreuth performance in 1889 with undisguised contempt, complaining that Wagnerians “go to Parsifal just as Catholics visit graves on Good Friday—it has become a church service for them. They are all in an unnaturally heightened, hysterically enraptured state. [. . .] A blood-thirstiness and musty smell of incense, a sultry sensuality with terribly serious gestures, a heaviness, and a bombast otherwise unprecedented in art weighs down on one, its brooding intensity taking one’s breath away.” What she found in Bayreuth was a “bag of spiritual conjuring tricks” and an “unhealthy ecstasy which, fired by the stigmata, is almost an emetic for stomachs accustomed to a diet of Bach.”45 Today her great-grandchildren would presumably complain that in the final tableau the dead Titurel rises up in his coffin to bless the knights of the Grail as if he were some alien or zombie from the realm of science fiction.
However we look at it, Parsifal bears no resemblance whatever to Siegfried as a suitable mate for Brünnhilde as the “woman of the future.” While the characters of the Ring constitute a family, albeit one riven by internecine strife, Parsifal introduces us to a community of human ghosts. And whereas Wotan reveals features that allow us a glimpse of Wagner’s own contradictory personality, there is not a single character in Parsifal with whom we could plausibly identify the composer—assuming we are not to ferret around in the recesses of his unconscious: Wagner is not present in his characters but controls them like a director. And while this may be appropriate behavior for the creator of a Bühnenweihfestspiel, this does not make him any more convincing as an advocate in his own cause, a cause that in any case seems not a little desperate.
What remains? Parsifal offers us a chance to get to know Wagner not only as the self-important founder of a new religion and as a dubious ideologue but also as a committed artist with a specifically romantic understanding of suffering and a longing for redemption. If we judge him by these human standards, then the subject matter of Parsifal reveals astonishing similarities with a text by Franz Schubert—his short story My Dream of 1822:
I was the brother of many brothers & sisters. Our father & mother were good people. I was deeply devoted to them all.—Once my father took us to a feast, whe
re my brothers became very merry. But I was sad. My father came over & bade me enjoy the delicious food, but I was unable to do so, whereupon my father, growing angry, banished me from his sight. I left [. . .] and wandered away to a far-off region. [. . .] I then received news of my mother’s death. I hastened home, & my father, mellowed by grief, did nothing to stop me from entering. [. . .] We followed her body in mourning, & the coffin was lowered into the earth.—From then on I remained at home. Then my father took me back to his favorite garden. He asked me whether I liked it. But I hated the garden [. . .]. My father then struck me, & I fled. [. . .] One day I received news of a God-fearing maiden who had just died. And a circle formed round her grave in which many youths & old men walked as if in everlasting bliss. [. . .] I too longed to walk there. But I was told that only a miracle could allow one to enter that circle. Yet I slowly walked toward the gravestone with lowered gaze, fired by inner devotion & firm belief, & before I was aware of it, I found myself in the circle, which produced a wondrously lovely sound; & I felt as if eternal bliss were compressed into a single moment. I also saw my father, reconciled & loving. He took me in his arms & wept. But not as much as I did.46
The structural affinities between Schubert’s My Dream and Wagner’s Parsifal are plain, and it is no accident that as perceptive a musician as Pierre Boulez has observed that in Parsifal “Wagner realized the romantics’ dream, realized and surpassed it.”47 This may encourage us to examine Parsifal not from the standpoint of its complicated and largely disturbing reception history but as a dream machine on the part of Wagner the artist. Describing a performance of the work in Bayreuth in 1909, Thomas Mann wrote, “Although I went there in a spirit of considerable skepticism and felt that I was undertaking a pilgrimage to Lourdes or visiting an oracle or some other place associated with some mildly indecent fraud, I was in the end profoundly shaken by the experience. Certain passages, especially in act 3—the Good Friday music, the baptism, the anointing and so on, and then the unforgettable final tableau—are significant and completely irresistible.”