Parsifal

Introduction

“One of the greatest sounding monuments ever raised to the eternal glory of music,” wrote Claude Debussy about Parsifal. For many, Parsifal is nothing less than a rite: an operatic liturgy associated with the Good Friday tradition, Wagner himself called it a solemn sacred rite, and he wanted to reserve the work exclusively for the Bayreuth cult. (Officially, the opera could only be performed outside Bayreuth after 30 years, although concert versions had appeared earlier, and the Metropolitan even made an exception in 1903.) Reinforcing this ritual character is the tradition, still alive in many places, which in line with the composer’s intent forbids applause after the Act I Communion scene.

The composer skilfully fused the medieval Grail narratives, from Wolfram von Eschenbach to Chrétien de Troyes, and imbued the myth with a distinct transcendent symbolism. The symbolic spear both wounds and heals; compassion and pity take centre stage. The opera’s central figure is the hysterical and demonic Kundry, who, because of her blasphemy, becomes an instrument of evil. “Kundry, the rose of hell […] is practically the paradigm of mythical pathology—in her agonizing duality and torn existence, as the instrumentum diaboli and at the same time a woman yearning for salvation, such a clinically, drastically, and authentically recognized and depicted example of the terrifying and diseased states of spiritual life, so boldly and naturalistically portrayed, that I have long regarded it as the pinnacle of knowledge and art,” writes Thomas Mann. The transcendent ecstasy of compassion-through-suffering manifests as a true musical miracle in the Good Friday scene (“Wie dünkt mich doch die Aue heut so schön!”). Wagner’s interest in Buddhism (traces of which are evident from the 1850s) also left its mark on the work, intertwined with certain features of Schopenhauer’s philosophy.

Through shared suffering begins a process of enlightenment, grounded in the recognition of human flaws. Parsifal’s moment of realization comes with the kiss: instead of sensual pleasure, it awakens in him the pain of the co-sufferer, the understanding of his mission. Alongside the memory of the kiss of his mother who died in pain, it perhaps also incorporates the pity aroused by Kundry’s existence as a mere instrument. Barry Millington, who detects traces of Wagner’s antisemitism in Kundry’s character, voices the question many share: “How can we […] make sense of this witch’s brew, compounded of Christian compassion, Buddhist/Schopenhauerian renunciation, and racial prejudice?” Instead of polemics, it may be worth recalling Sir Georg Solti’s response: “I don’t care about Wagner’s political or philosophical views, nor do I care that he betrayed his friends and even his father-in-law, Franz Liszt. For me, anyone who can create such beauty, whether half-Jew, antisemite, revolutionary, liberal, or monarchist, is above all a musical genius, and will remain so as long as culture exists.”

The music of Parsifal is at times muted, delicate, sensitive in flow; at times suffocatingly erotic, decadently intoxicating; at times liturgical, evocative of religious ceremonies. It was no accident that Nietzsche mockingly dubbed its ideological content “Christianity for Wagnerians”. Of course, Parsifal has also inspired many modern, non-ritual productions: for example, in 2010 Calixto Bieito set it in a post-apocalyptic world in Stuttgart, influenced by Cormac McCarthy’s The Road; the nakedness of the “holy fool,” Andrew Richards, heightened to the extreme the vulnerability of man on earth. In 2016, Uwe Eric Laufenberg reimagined the opera in Mosul, Iraq, in an Islamic setting, where the hero appeared as a commando in combat fatigues, and the flower maidens transformed into women in chadors, then odalisques. Despite such extremes, Laufenberg may have come closest to the view that Wagner sought to replace religion with the universal religion of art. Wagner’s opera had an immense impact on Hungarian poetry as well: Parsifal provided the full “musical” background pattern for Lajos Kassák’s volume Éposz Wagner maszkjában, while Mátyás Varga’s parsifal, parsifal experiments with more modern transformations of the myth.

Zoltán Csehy

Flesh and blood humans on Wagner’s stage

Wagner not only composed music, but also wrote quite a bit, expressing his views on music and opera. These give a precise explanation for understanding his works. There are obviously precedents to what he expressed as being important to him in his writings. We consider the opera genre to stem from Monteverdi, and even he said, and wrote, that the opera is a sung narrative. Gluck also kept written documents about his endeavours to reform the genre and to give back what he considers to be the most important point in its development: the fact that operas tell a story and interpret the text. Wagner was quite familiar with French and Italian operas and, just like Ferenc Erkel in Hungary, he also said that he would like to write in his native language. Who would have thought that the Der fliegende Holländer was written at the same time as Hunyadi László? Though the two pieces seem to be opposites in every sense of the word, if we observe the method for telling their stories and their structures, we see that both trace their roots back to popular early French and Italian operas.

Der fliegende Holländer, Lohengrin, and Tannhäuser, that is, three of Wagner’s early operas, can best be approached through the passion of Italian bel canto operas and the structure of the finales of French grand operas and not by starting out from Wagner’s later works. It is also interesting to note that the manner of musical thinking in the music written by Verdi in his advanced age, the schemes of those operas, and the manner in which he wrote his big scenes and monologues are very similar to Wagner’s later operas, thus also Parsifal, where the brunt of the piece consists of enormous monologues. However, it is exciting to note that the plot tends to take place in an abstract form. The composer wrote the musical language used to compile and offset the main motifs himself, using a certain form of patterns. This approach was used by a number of artists, including Puccini, who was sent by his music publisher Ricordi to Bayreuth to study Wagner’s operas. Puccini’s main motifs are obviously present at a different level than in the case of Wagner, where they encompass almost everything: Wagner builds up his musical world by contrasting these elements and using their relationships to each other.

I always approach a piece by trying to figure out why the composer wrote it in the way he did: I try to understand and decipher his intent as a composer. Contrary to the opinions of many, I do not consider Wagner’s music to be grandiose. Based on his works, I consider him to be someone who was filled with strong emotions and dynamism. Accordingly, I don’t believe we have to stage his works with an academic, distant attitude. All the monologues and narratives have to be imbibed with an energy that results in musical moments that reflect the thoughts of flesh-and-blood humans.

They are not realistic people in the manner that we see, for example, in Le nozze di Figaro. I would rather compare Wagner’s figures to the gods and heroes of Baroque operas, who act, think, and feel like us, moral and mundane humans. Although there is naturally something ethereal about Kundry, Klingsor, and even Amfortas, they still tell of real human emotions. Gurnemanz’s endless narratives where he tells of the situations he has lived through also contain a type of tension. From the aspect of the production, a narrative is exciting if it is staged by the performers dramatically and colourfully, using their own personalities.

Balázs Kocsár, conductor of the 2022 premiere

Sin, love and redemption

We should not forget that there is another way of seeing Parsifal entirely: neither as a drama of extreme characters, nor as a religious parable, but as the story of Everyman. Such was Wolfram’s original intention in Tannhäuser. His story describes a quest – a journey in search of a treasure once glimpsed, and then lost through stupidity and ignorance. This trope survives in Wagner’s version, but the quest is for something inner, for triumph over weakness and temptation, as the hero shifts his attention from Self to Other, an attempt to rectify the world.

On this interpretation, Parsifal enters Monsalvat as an innocent boy, deprived of social knowledge and without attachments apart from that to his mother, of whom he becomes properly conscious only when awoken by a stranger. Something like this is the condition of us all. We enter a world that has been endowed with meaning by others whom we do not know, and who have bound human life in mysterious rules and rituals. We are alone, with only one firm base from which to begin our explorations.

This firm base is the mother. What we know of love we learn from her; but we learn it by osmosis rather than enquiry. The great transition, from receiving love to giving it freely, is something that we must earn. Not everyone achieves this transition, and the striving is fraught with trials, some painful, some delightful, all tainted by the world of spells and domination. […] The world into which we are born must therefore be rectified, and this is revealed in all the paths that we might take in our efforts to live as we should.

It is revealed in sexual love, in which we risk the loss of our autonomy, and subjection to another’s control. It is revealed in religious need, which tempts us to seek refuge in illusory ideas of communion. It is revealed in the adventures that lead us to stray from the path of compassion, and in compassion itself, which tempts us into helpless pity, diverting us from the real task, which is to take the burden of another’s suffering on ourselves.

And somewhere in the background is another narrative entirely, the story of a redeemer, who once made a gift of his suffering, so as to refashion it as love. The story of the redeemer haunts our days, even if we have no knowledge of who he is, why he came, or whence ha has departed. The solution to the mystery comes only when we understand that his story is our story, and that we ourselves are the redeemer. We have been called not to explore the world, but to rescue it. In doing so we emerge from our trials and conflicts in full possession of our social nature. Like the Redeemer, we make a gift of our suffering, through an act of consecration that brings peace to us all. Whether or not there is a God, there is this hallowed path towards a kind of salvation, the part that Wagner described as ’godliness’. That is the path taken by Parsifal, and it is a path that is open to us all.

Roger Scruton
(Wagner’s Parsifal, The Music of Redemption, Penguin Books, 2021)