Difficult as it is to believe, Parsifal, Wagner’s work of peace and conciliation, has been and remains the subject of even more bitter contention than any of his other works. For many people it casts a spell so potent that they are unable to take it as anything more than an objet, to be contemplated with awe and devoted incomprehension. For others it is the climax of a life of brilliant charlatanism, the emission of ‘tragic grunts’ (Nietzsche), still more offensive than anything which precedes them, because the subject-matter is one that many members of our culture care about as their supreme value. In his essay ‘Art and Religion’, written in 1880 when he was composing the music, Wagner begins: ‘One could say that when religion becomes artificial, it remains for art to salvage the true essence of religion by perceiving its mythical symbols – which religion would have us believe to be the literal truth – only according to their figurative value, in order to make us see their profound, hidden truth through idealised representation.’ Which does not mean that Wagner is advocating that we make a religion of art, but rather that when we see that the role which only a religion in the genuine sense can play is no longer to be fulfilled by anything, it is to art that we should turn for all that our now reduced expectations can be provided with.
That statement of Wagner’s is more helpful in approaching Parsifal than his designation of the work as ‘Ein Bühnenweih-festspiel’ (A stage-consecrating festival drama). That way of categorising it is dangerous, and was really no more than an indication that it was to be distinguished from other contemporary theatrical productions than as a positive specification of its nature. Since Wagner first thought of composing a drama on this subject in 1845, when he was thirty-two, and returned to it intermittently over the years, it is helpful to begin by tracing some connections between it and his other mature works. He drew up a prose sketch of it in 1865, shortly after the first performance of Tristan, and that sketch is in most respects close to the drama as it finally emerged. But he was too preoccupied with finishing first Die Meistersinger, and then with writing the music for Act III of Siegfried and of Götterdämmerung, not to mention building the Bayreuth Festspielhaus and training the performers for the first production of the Ring, to give it much thought for the next eleven years. He had always claimed that his last work for the stage would be Parsifal, and the fact that its subject remained in his mind for more than half his life, returning to the forefront of his consciousness in relation to his other key projects, and at crucial junctures of his creative development, is worth bearing in mind. Thus he at one point thought of introducing Parsifal himself into the Third Act of Tristan, juxtaposing a figure dying of love with one who has renounced love. Wisely he gave that idea up, but the subject continued to crop up during the writing of Tristan, and he came to feel that there was a strong connection between the character of Tristan and that of Amfortas, the head of the Knights of the Grail, who lost the sacred spear which pierced Christ’s side to the black magician Klingsor as he lay helplessly in the arms of the seductress Kundry. Writing to Mathilde Wesendonck in May 1859, Wagner says what a frightful subject it would be: ‘It suddenly became clear to me. Amfortas is my Third-Act Tristan inconceivably intensified.’ One might have thought that any intensification of his Third-Act Tristan was inconceivable. Wagner goes on to explain the source of Amfortas’s suffering, so vividly that he concludes this part of the letter with: ‘And you expect me to carry through something like this? And set it to music, into the bargain? – No, thank you very much! I leave it to anyone who has a mind for such things; I shall do all I can to keep my distance from it.’ But one of the reasons why he couldn’t is made clear by his account of Amfortas’s pains: they are not the pains of love itself, but of the consequences of having yielded to love, giving up everything else which he cared about in its interests, with disastrous results for the community which depends on him.
As he was composing the work – a process which is recorded from day to day in Cosima’s diary – Wagner obsessively made connections between the characters in Parsifal and those in his other works. But even if we lacked that detailed testimony, many of these crucial correspondences would be clear. All his creative life long, Wagner was preoccupied, as we have often seen, with people who had no past – innocents, ignoramuses – and with people who had all too much of a past, who were burdened with having done something so dreadful (which might simply be having been born) that only by a prodigious act on their part, or on someone else’s on their behalf, could they be released from the torments of an insupportable existence which could not be ended until they were absolved. In the first class the most obvious members are Siegfried and Walther. In the second and larger class are the Dutchman, Tannhäuser, Tristan and Wotan. Each class has its culmination in Parsifal. The eponymous hero is, at his first entrance, the limiting case of naiveté and ignorance, combined with amnesia about what past he has had. Amfortas takes the second class to its furthest bounds.
Wagner’s hopes for his suffering heroes reside either in their entering into some relationship with the innocent, potentially heroic figures who will remove their burden of guilt, or in their redemption through the love of a self-sacrificing woman. But one way or another in all his works until Parsifal, things become more complicated than might have been hoped, or the nature of the redemption which is accomplished remains obscure. Even so, they do explore possibilities of living with a vigour and pertinacity which has few equals in art. But in doing that, the initial terms, the broad contrasts, take on a complexity which so candidly mirrors that of life that there is a danger that no progress will be made. Or the redemptive process involves so superhuman an endeavour on the part of one character, aided by puzzling metaphysical or quasi-religious machinery, that one is left uneasy about the feasibility of such feats.
It is Wagner’s achievement in Parsifal to render the resolution both psychologically convincing and to set it in a context where the basic elements are the most extreme he ever imagined. There are two particularly striking connections with his earlier works, besides the relationship to Tristan already touched on. One is Die Meistersinger, in which Walther brings new creative vigour to a community which is not in anything like so desperate a condition as that of the Grail. The second is the Ring, where the heroic burden is shared between two figures, one of whom, Siegfried, all too convincingly buckles under the strain. The other, Brünnhilde, transcends the human condition, as we have seen, by delusion, and we wonder how she relates to us with our meaner, less nourishing delusions. She is, in all ways, a mythic figure; while Walther, even when aided by Sachs, rather worryingly combines the glamorous and the commonplace.
It is typical of Wagner’s heroic male figures that they are and feel isolated, but until Parsifal they all think that the road to salvation, or at any rate completion, lies through one or another kind of union with a woman, and they all find one, even if she isn’t quite what they expected. Lohengrin is the obvious exception, but we saw that his drama is somehow both superficial and confusing. Far from suffering an identity-crisis, he seems to suffer from the opposite complaint, and his self-sufficiency remains bewilderingly ambiguous. What he needs from Elsa is so much at odds with what she needs from him that the result can only be unenlightening disaster, with the music as a kind of sauce diverting us from the issues to which it should be adding piquancy.
Parsifal, unlike his son Lohengrin – but I’m sure that the relationship is a red herring – is not only not prepared (as his son is) to say what his name is, but doesn’t know it. Gurnemanz, the moving, pervasive ‘chorus’ of the outer acts, asks him a series of ever more elementary questions on his arrival, gently but with growing exasperation, and all Parsifal can reply is, ‘I had many names, but now I have forgotten all of them,’ which is Wagnerian synecdoche for having had many experiences which meant nothing to him. Not that he has no personality – his motif, which interrupts the music with marked effect as he is brought in by the knights and squires, outraged at his killing of a swan, shows that he is of the genus Siegfried at his most untutored, entirely a child of Nature. His engaging first words are ‘Im Fluge treff’ ich, was fliegt!’ (I shoot at anything that flies!). Yet he can soon be made to feel guilt, even though he had no idea that he was doing anything wrong in shooting the swan.
It is this capacity for feeling pain, specifically at wrongdoing, whether his own or someone else’s, which enables Parsifal to be the saving figure he eventually becomes. He has to answer to the prophecy which had gradually been expounded in the earlier part of Act I: ‘Durch Mitleid wissend, der reine Tor’ (Knowing through pity, the pure fool). Each term of the prophecy is of equal weight. ‘Fool’ doesn’t mean idiot, as Debussy maliciously said; he found the self-castrated magician Klingsor the only sympathetic figure in the drama, and was pleased to express his agreement with Klingsor’s view of its hero. Both magician and musician underrate Parsifal: his folly is a condition of utter unawareness. ‘Pure’ qualifies this unawareness in the sense that becoming aware will not be for him, as it almost invariably is, a process of corruption. What is it about him which guarantees that, as he acquires knowledge, he won’t be corrupted? His capacity for feeling with, so that ‘pity’ carries none of the connotations of condescension against which Nietzsche railed so effectively. So each element in the terse characterisation is not only equal, but interdependent. If Parsifal feels compassion, it will be by understanding pain, his own and/or someone else’s. At the crucial moment, as we shall see, he won’t make the distinction.
In Act I Parsifal doesn’t get as far as that, but the ground is essentially prepared, and in two stages. First he is made to feel thoroughly ashamed of himself for having shot the swan, and for his instinctive violence towards Kundry when she tells him that his mother is dead. This is, as it were, a tenderising process, so that when in the Hall of the Grail he witnesses Amfortas’s pain and anguish he convulsively clutches his heart. He has no idea what the pain means – indeed, it is primarily physical, and therefore means nothing. He is so bewildered by it that he can only shake his head and remain silent when Gurnemanz sharply asks him, ‘Don’t you know what you saw?’ and pushes him angrily out of the side door. It is a revealing and slightly comic moment, this irascible behaviour on the part of one who has just received the Grail’s blessing: a profoundly human touch on Wagner’s part, to show the annoyance that unshared spiritual elevation often leads to, especially when hopes are high. The last word in the act goes to a voice from above, repeating the first part of the promise ‘Made wise through pity, the pure fool’, and further voices take it up and set the seal on it, ‘Selig in Glauben’ (Blessed in faith), a faith that Parsifal will perform the mission which he has begun so unpromisingly.
Wagner’s powers as a dramatist of the most radically innovative kind are at their height in Parsifal, just as much in Act I, which sets up the terms of the action, as in the remaining acts. The Prelude, which excited Nietzsche to unexampled eloquence when he finally heard it in 1887, after years of a priori abuse, is a piece of scrupulous exposition which simultaneously contrives to offer the faintest hope of peace at the end of what is evidently going to be a long, excruciating journey. Its first section depicts what the drama will be centred around, the Grail which needs to be completed by the Spear – as figured by the long opening monody, a theme which can clearly be broken into parts, but somehow has to retain the integrity it tenuously possesses when we first hear it. No sooner have we heard this melody than we are shown how it can express devotion, agony, disintegration and fulfilment. Myth and psychology, that endlessly opposing but finally interdependent pair, are here manifest as one. The Prelude’s middle section, alternating between softly breathing strings and sonorous brass, shows the state which the community needs to be in to be effective in its task. And the third section subjects the first to inquisition and torture, ending in, as Nietzsche put it, ‘a look of love such as one finds expressed in Dante, nowhere else’.
The opening scene, in the lands of the Grail, succinctly lays before us the major elements: Gurnemanz and the young knights and squires at prayer, the arrival first of the wild and mysterious messenger Kundry, bringing balsam from Arabia, and then of the man who needs it so desperately, Amfortas, the wounded King. In some of his most exquisitely sensitive orchestration, Wagner depicts Nature here as the primary healer, the background against which the drama will be played out, but also a participant in it. As Amfortas is carried down to the lake for the washing of his wound, Gurnemanz explains to the young knights how the Grail got into such trouble, and what it was like before catastrophe overtook it: for the time being, happiness and wholeness can only be evoked as memory. And, as we saw, as soon as the promise of regained wholeness is voiced, it is only for it to be brutally interrupted by the arrival on the scene of a young barbarian.
After Parsifal has turned out to know nothing about anything, the orchestra quietly changes gear for what is known as the Transformation Music, during which he and Gurnemanz move to the Hall of the Grail, to music which, beginning as a march, the least expressive of musical forms, moves into counterpoint which seems to tear apart the very fabric of which it is composed, and climaxes in huge slabs of brass dissonance, an ultimate challenge to any kind of resolution, and flagellated by strings. This passage occupies a unique place in Wagner’s oeuvre, and indeed in the history of music: pain which can only be conveyed in these terms takes art to the verge of the tolerable. And nothing that follows it, in the celebration of the sacrament, can do anything to assuage it, indeed can only sustain its intensity, as Amfortas makes all too vivid in his horrible cries for the ‘Allerbarmer’ (All-merciful One) to have mercy on him. Needless to say, the All-merciful One fails to oblige. If there is to be resolution, absolution, it will not come from on high.
Act II takes us into a different world – the land of the anti-Grail, Klingsor’s domain. Here a suffering of a more revolting kind is at work, the suffering of someone who has given up hope and therefore wants to tear down the world. Whatever Amfortas’s relation to Tristan, Klingsor is Alberich, but holding, it seems, the whip hand. Certainly in his scene with Kundry he manifests the power of malevolence and misery combined, fertilising one another so that Kundry, who can seduce anyone she has a mind to, can only be in bondage to a man who has renounced everything, even basic sensual pleasure, let alone love. Many other scenes in Wagner are agonising; this one is hateful. It makes the arrival of Parsifal all the more welcome: his entrance is similarly obtrusive to that in the First Act, but his motif is here expanded and doesn’t end in disgrace. On the contrary, he is triumphant over Klingsor’s knights, and this time the reproaches he receives swiftly give way to the seductive, lilting chorus of Flower-Maidens, Wagner’s tribute to his adored Johann Strauss. That Parsifal is not even faintly tempted by them shows that he has yet to be awakened sexually, and it is for that purpose that Kundry, transformed into a bewitchingly lovely woman, is lying in wait.
The processes by which she attempts Parsifal’s seduction are amazing in their resource and variety. The first stage is to re-animate Parsifal’s sense of guilt, to make him loathe himself for his casual indifference to the mother he had left, thereby causing her death. Kundry’s careful but voluptuous account of how he did that makes him vulnerable to an extreme degree, but this time, Kundry unwillingly hopes, to lust rather than pain. So when, in a moment of Freudian genius, she imparts his mother’s dying greeting to him as love’s first kiss – the turning point of the whole action, as is indicated by the extraordinarily disturbing music which accompanies that ambiguous kiss, vividly conveying both tumescence and a sense of revulsion – Kundry hopes that Parsifal, like many before him, will lie helpless in her arms.
Instead, what Parsifal feels is something, again physical, which he immediately identifies with the pain of Amfortas which he had witnessed uncomprehendingly in the Hall of the Grail. But it takes him a little longer to realise that it is not what he had first taken it for, a purely physical wound. It is the ‘Qual der Liebe’ (torment of love) – that experience which links him not only to Amfortas but also to Tannhäuser and Tristan. In Tristan’s last anguish he cries, ‘Im Sterben mich zu sehnen, vor Sehnsucht nicht zu sterben!’ (To be yearning in dying, but not to die of yearning!) – though it is impossible to convey in English the equivocation of Tristan’s words, which make his fate so akin to Amfortas’s, and thus by transference to Parsifal’s. The whole of Tristan und Isolde turns on this equivocation, by which both the lovers, but he more than she, see the essence of their being in yearning, so that they crave death as the cessation of their torment, but at the same time can’t will that their love should cease, since it is the only thing which they value. Parsifal, lacking the metaphysical capacities of Tristan and Isolde, as well as the constitution that necessitates their use, is not one to equivocate. He is simply horrified at the effect that Kundry’s kiss has on him, and robustly calls his longing sinful – not something that Tristan or Isolde would ever do, because they completely bypass moral and theological categories.
Parsifal’s rejection of the fever of love is so comprehensive and convincing – and set to some of Wagner’s subtlest music – that Kundry realises that she had better try a different tack. She tells Parsifal of the most appalling moment in her life, or lives (Parsifal flirts with notions of reincarnation, at any rate in Kundry’s case) when she saw Christ – referred to only as ‘Him’ – as he passed by on the way to his crucifixion, and laughed. He looked at her, and ever since she has been driven from world to world, uncontrollably laughing, the momentary expression of mirth changed into an eternity of hell. If Parsifal pities Amfortas so much, what about her? She makes the astounding suggestion that he should spend one hour in her arms, which would redeem her – his purity is for her, in this demented state, a negotiable item.
Parsifal sees through that, and urges repentance on her. Kundry’s brilliant riposte is to say that if he has learned so much merely by being kissed, how much more would he learn if they took things a good deal further. By now she is in thrall, unable to gain any perspective, to what Wagner has come to see at this stage as the ‘utterly and completely destructive’ power of love. Her view of Parsifal, in fact, amounts to a parody of love as redemption, though significantly it had always been the woman who had redeemed the man. When Parsifal says that only if she shows him the way to Amfortas will she be saved, she curses him vainly and calls on Klingsor’s help. But Klingsor’s prophecy at the start of the act – ‘Only one who spurns you sets you free’ – turns out, though it isn’t immediately realised, to be true, and the act ends with Klingsor’s magic garden destroyed and Parsifal setting out for the realm of the Grail.
I have recapitulated the action of Act II in a little detail because it is initially hard to follow, and Wagner leaves it strewn with ambiguities. Kundry, for instance, as the act proceeds, becomes increasingly confused about the relationship (or identity) between Christ and Parsifal. Actually there isn’t one, but many listeners, impressed or nauseated, have followed in her wake. And though the psychology of the act is stunning in its depth and unflinching insight, its myth combines elements of both magic and religion in a way which leads one to uncertainty about the intrusion of the transcendent and mere conjuring tricks. To destroy Parsifal Klingsor hurls the Spear at him, but it hovers harmlessly above his head. Parsifal grasps it, makes the sign of the cross with it, and Klingsor’s domain is obliterated. Wagner’s penchant for bringing quite separate myths together and making them interact here exceeds itself, the whole point being – or this is the fundamental idea – that Parsifal can save others through saving himself. But Wagner had temporarily got into a jam in which a non-Christian and a Christian tale collide rather than colluding.
This act, so oddly different from those either side of it, and necessarily so, gives place to the most sustained serenity in Wagner’s art. We endure the overwrought intensities of Act II in order to appreciate how hard-won, and convincing, the balm of Act III is. It only remains for Parsifal to accomplish his mission, having regained the Spear and thus acquired all the qualifications for redeeming Amfortas that were so painstakingly set out in Act I. But it turns out to be a big ‘only’. Many years elapse between Acts II and III, as Parsifal, we gather, wanders lost, and the community of the Grail disintegrates without the daily sight of the holy vessel itself. Even so, it is clear from early on in Act III that everything will be put to rights, and it is Wagner’s crowning achievement to produce a happy ending without forfeiting suspense, or leading us to wonder, as we so often do with happy endings, whether things really would have turned out so well. It is the reward of patience in this sublimely slow but sure music and drama that we have no such doubts. And the peace in which the work ends is one which mercifully is not that which passes understanding, but one which we have been able to grasp at every point as it comes into our view.
There can be few works which cut so deep and yet leave us feeling so intelligibly elevated. What, then, is the angry disputation which surrounds Parsifal about? Why does it become, if anything, ever more a centre of controversy as the years pass? Why – to be wholly explicit about it – are people not grateful for what Wagner has given them?
In the first place, Wagner’s biography, which is repeated, with tiny modifications blown up into major revelations, as a kind of litany to render him as powerless as Klingsor, has him portrayed as increasingly monstrous towards the end of his life. At the time he was composing Parsifal, it is true that he was writing prose works which combine brilliance, crankiness and offensiveness to an extreme degree. He had become obsessed with the impurity of the German race, thanks to the infiltration of the Jews and the pollution of the blood through meat-eating, so, encouraged by Cosima, and overwhelmingly impressed by Gobineau’s ludicrous theories of racial degeneration, he produced diatribes which make shocking reading. Commentators who hold gratifyingly simple views of the relationship between art and life cannot believe that opinions held so stridently can have failed to get into his works, especially Parsifal, which mentions blood quite often, though not the necessity for its being ‘pure’ – in fact it is bleeding rather than blood that the work is concerned with, a fairly clear distinction, one might have thought.
But many writers, of whom Robert Gutman in the United States and Hartmut Zelinsky in Munich are the most vociferous, see Parsifal as a myth of racial regeneration, with the Knights of the Grail as an endangered Aryan species and Kundry and Klingsor as corrupting Jews. Klingsor, after all, castrated himself, which comes to much the same as being circumcised, which means he must be a Jew. And evidently there is a link ‘between the monastic homosexuality of Parsifal, centred around the leadership of an intuitively inspired youth, and the not dissimilar fellowship of Ernst Röhm’s troopers. Not the Ring but Parsifal was the Wagner work whose mythology was powerful enough to leave an indelible mark on Germany’ (Gutman).
Such views can’t possibly be made to fit the drama in a coherent way – they can’t begin to. For one thing, Wagner had worked out the course of the drama in all essentials in 1865, before he embraced some of his later theories in an extreme form, or others at all. For another, the blood which is referred to in the drama is the Saviour’s, and whatever may happen to it, racial pollution is not among the conceivable risks. If one studied and listened to the work itself with the greatest care, without knowing of Wagner’s attitudes as expressed in his contemporaneous writings, it could never occur to one that it had any connection with anti-Semitic views. It may seem strange that someone could fervently advocate a set of convictions simultaneously with producing his most deeply-felt work of art, and that the second should have nothing to do with the first, but just that is what we find.
The second and much more plausible way in which Parsifal is regularly misinterpreted consists in seeing it as a religious, specifically a Christian, work. Why otherwise, both those who welcome and those who deplore what they take to be that fact ask, should Wagner have called it a stage-consecrating festival play? And if it is not a Christian work, as opposed to a work which is to a large extent about Christians (though remember that 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 which 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?
Yet who would have their Christian faith enhanced by Parsifal, or how could it effect a conversion? – two basic criteria for something’s being a Christian work, surely. Of course the answer could be that Wagner’s intention was to produce a Christian drama, in the most straightforward way, but that he failed and therefore the work is broken-backed. But here we have to return to our actual experience of it, which is, one or two brief passages apart, marvellously unified and coherent, and to remain true to that. The work is primarily about Parsifal’s progress to enlightenment through compassion, and his subsequent ability to put the Hall of the Grail in order. That he manages to accomplish this without supernatural aid is clear; or if it isn’t, recall that quotation from ‘Art and Religion’, about deploying beliefs as symbols. As long as Amfortas goes on crying to the All-Merciful, we have seen that he gets only a dusty answer. There is, correlatively, no point in Parsifal’s development at which one could say that without the intervention of divine grace he would have remained powerless to accomplish his mission. Each stage is charted in psychological terms. Wagner’s music, in this work at its most consistently subtle, economical and moving, enables us to feel with Parsifal and to live through his process of enlightenment. That is of the essence.
Even so, it might still be argued, what is it all in aid of if not the salvation of the Knighthood in general and Amfortas in particular? And how is that effected? Those are leading questions, for it does seem that the thrust of the work is that God helps those who help themselves, and quite notably doesn’t help those who don’t. But His presence is required to make sense of the process. How, otherwise, does Parsifal’s compassion effect anything? Do such deeds as touching Amfortas’s wound with the Spear heal, in a world which contains no supernatural agents or forces? Yes, if one takes these acts as symbols, though it is important to recall that Wagner is not only operating with a mixture of Christian and pagan symbols, but also that he was committed to Schopenhauer’s philosophy of the primacy of the Will, more at this stage of his life than ever before. He was thus also 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.
I have said far too little about the music of Parsifal, admired enormously even by those who feel that it needs to be firmly separated from the repulsive drama. It certainly has a quality, in the outer acts, which has usually been compared to illumination from within, and also its vocabulary of pain seems to know no limits. What makes it so extraordinary is that it possesses these features simultaneously, and that leads me to a last tentative reflection on it. In the Prelude, the Transformation Music in Act I, Parsifal’s central outburst in Act II, and throughout Act III, exaltation and desolation, pain and consolation, merge into one another in a way that reminds me of what Rilke wrote to a friend in 1923, apropos of his Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus: ‘Whoever does not, sometime or other, give his full consent, his full and joyous consent, to the dreadfulness of life, can never take possession of the unutterable abundance and power of our existence; can only walk on its edge, and one day, when the judgement is given, will have been neither alive nor dead. To show the identity of dreadfulness and bliss, these two faces on the same divine head, indeed this one single face, which just presents itself this way or that, according to our distance from it or the state of mind in which we perceive it.’ If you think that that is outrageous mumbo-jumbo, you will almost certainly think the same about Parsifal. If you find it profound, it could well provide the most valuable brief commentary on Wagner’s last work, and on a central theme which runs through them all.