Parsifal
Opera IC Audiophile series
Details
In Brief
In Parsifal, his final music drama, Wagner embeds fear of the temptations of the world and sinful desires into a tale of redemption. The work is indeed a festival play for the stage rather than an opera. Many viewers – perhaps out of their own fears – criticised Wagner, who wrote both the libretto and the music, for what could be called the piece’s virtue and remarkable complexity, which is the personal tone with which he portrayed a religious theme combining notions of sacred and profane love. The “Good Friday Spell” is performed in a concert version at the Opera House at Easter 2027, where, alongside the unique acoustics created by the lowered safety curtain, the story of the Holy Grail comes almost within reach.
Parental guidance
Events
Synopsis
Act I
A forest near Monsalvat, the castle of the Holy Grail. Gurnemanz, a knight, and several young pages are saying their morning prayers. Suddenly Kundry appears: she is a mysterious woman of unknown age who also serves as the Grail's messenger. From far away, she has brought a salve for Amfortas, the king of the Grail knights, who is tormented by a wound which will not heal. It is foretold by prophecy that his suffering “will be brought an end by a pure fool made wise through compassion.”
As the ailing king is taken to bathe, Gurnemanz tells the story of how his suffering came to be: The Holy Grail – that is, the cup from which Christ drank at the last supper and into which his holy blood was shed – and the Spear – which had been used to pierce his body as he suffered on the cross – had been entrusted to Amfortas's father, Titurel, by the Saviour's blessed messengers. In order to guard the holy relics, Titurel built a sanctuary and assembled an order of virtuous knights. Wishing to join the Brotherhood, Klingsor found himself unable to surmount his own sinful thoughts and castrated himself as an act of penance, although this did not prevent him from being rejected by the Order. His ensuing rage endowed him with powers of darkness: out of revenge, he built a castle with a magical garden full of seductive women he could use to lure the knights into his trap. Many knights fell victim to him, so Amfortas, Titurel's successor, resolved to put a stop to Klingsor's evil sorcery. However, he too fell victim to a “beautiful woman”, allowing Klingsor not only to seize the Holy Spear from him, but also to wound him with it. The wound can only be healed by the innocent youth described in the prophecy.
A sudden clamour breaks out: someone has mortally wounded a swan. The culprit is soon found: a young man who is unable to give an explanation for his deed and who feels remorse only when Gurnemanz reproaches him. Nor does he know his own name or anything about his own past, although he does remember his mother. He is interrupted by Kundry, who knows the young man's story: his mother had hidden him in the forest for years in order to prevent him from meeting the same fate as his father, who fell in battle. Gurnemanz takes the lad to the castle, wondering if he might be the one spoken of in the prophecy...
The knights gather in the great hall of the castle. Titurel asks his son to uncover the Grail, but Amfortas is unwilling: while the sight of the cup prolongs Titurel's life, it also increases his son's torments. Titurel gives the order to the pages, and at last the Grail illuminates the hall. The nameless youth observes the sacred ceremony in wonder, but understands none of it. The disappointed Gurnemanz throws the young man out. Again the prophecy is heard: “A pure fool, made wise through compassion...”
Act II
Klingsor knows that the nameless youth has been called to rescue the Grail, and therefore must be destroyed. He summons Kundry to his castle and forces her to seduce the lad. Her protests are no use: Klingsor has her in his spell...
The young man enters the magical garden. Amorous flower maidens besiege him, but he resists them. Then Kundry appears in the guise of a beautiful woman. She addresses him as “Parsifal”, and the lad realises that this is the name his mother called him in his dreams. The seductive Kundry recalls pleasant memories from the young man's childhood, and then kisses him. Parsifal is suddenly overcome by terrible anguish. Understanding that it was Kundry who caused Amfortas's downfall, he realises that it is his mission to safeguard the Grail and its knights. Kundry is astonished at Parsifal's transformation and begs for the man's pity. She laments how she fell under a curse when she laughed at Christ as he suffered on the cross. Parsifal is unmoved, and Kundry curses him, calling Klingsor to her aid. The sorceror appears, aiming the Spear at Parsifal, but in a manner verging on the miraculous, the youth catches it in the air. Klingsor's dominion is done for.
Act III
Titurel is no more. Amfortas, yearning for death, no longer allows the Grail to be uncovered. The Brotherhood is incapacitated. Now grown old, Gurnemanz is living as a hermit in the forest near Monsalvat, where he discovers the remorseful and exhausted Kundry. A strange knight approaches: it is Parsifal with the Holy Spear. His efforts to find his way back to Amfortas and the Grail had long been to no avail, since Kundy's curse had left him wandering uselessly for years. Kundry washes Parsifal's feet, while Gurnemanz blesses him and crowns him king. Parsifal baptises Kundry. They are all amazed by the radiant beauty of nature: the magic of Good Friday. Distant bells call them to the castle for Titurel's funeral.
Knights enter the great hall, bearing Amfortas on a litter. The king is unable to complete the ritual: he begs his knights to kill him in order to bring his torment to an end. Parsifal approaches and touches his side with the Spear. Amfortas's wound heals. Parsifal displays the Grail and blesses the knights as they venerate it. The Grail and the Spear are united.
Concert guide
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
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)