Parsifal
[In the following excerpt, McGlathery formulates a detailed explication of Wagner's final opera Parsifal with an emphasis on the work's representation of Parsifal's “triumph over desire.”]
In his last opera, Wagner returns to the realm of magic and miracle. This time—more plainly than in Tannhäuser and Lohengrin—it is the world of Christian myth and legend. Parsifal indeed presents us with a community of knights of the Holy Grail, and is to that extent, at least, a drama of piety. Miracles, moreover, take place before our very eyes, so that as with the supernatural in Wagner's other operas, we must either accept the miracles at face value or attribute to them a symbolic role. Ultimately, the question in the present case is whether we have a glorification and recommendation of the Christian faith, or rather a depiction of piety as answering specific emotional and spiritual needs of the characters. Is Parsifal about the truth of belief or about the need to believe? From our analysis of the preceding operas, it would mark a radical departure, to say the least, if Wagner abandoned a secular depiction of interplay between spirituality and eroticism to write a drama supporting the Christian faith.
Parsifal is of course not a comedy; but it is not a tragedy either. Wagner billed it as a three-act play of consecration and celebration (“Ein Bühnenweihfestspiel in drei Aufzügen”). The constellation of characters, however, remains discernibly that traditional with the commedia dell'arte. As we remember, the chief requirement in this tradition is that we have the figure of the skirt-chasing older man, Pantalone or one of his counterparts. Wagner, as we have seen, rarely gives us this character as traditionally portrayed, as the old fool in love. We have it instead in refined or sublimated forms. In Parsifal, the element of sublimation is provided by the dedication of the older men to a dream or ideal of chastity. The chief spokesman for this ideal of chastity is the old Grail knight Gurnemanz, who best represents the psychic orientation of this pious, all-male community. It is through Gurnemanz that we hear of the striving for achievement of this ideal of celibacy and continence that moved Titurel to found the order of the Grail and to build the Grail castle. It is likewise through Gurnemanz, mainly, that we learn of the failure of Titurel's son Amfortas to resist the power of erotic desire, and of his consequent sufferings as a result of that failure. Thus, we are dealing in Parsifal with the type of the Pantalone in reverse, with the older man fleeing from desire instead of chasing skirts. Moreover, as in The Mastersingers we have three Pantalones: here Gurnemanz, Titurel, and the would-be Grail knight Klingsor; there Sachs, Beckmesser, and Pogner.
Pantalone is of course impossible without the innamorata, the overwhelmingly appealing young woman whom all men, young and old alike, find irresistible. Like the Pantalone figures in Parsifal, though, the innamorata here is the reverse of what she was in the commedia dell'arte. Kundry is anything but a young virgin innocently unaware of the power of her erotic appeal. Quite the contrary, she is the veritable incarnation of an undying urge to seduction. Her role, nevertheless, remains essentially that of the commedia's innamorata in so far as it is the erotic desire awakened by her charms that motivates the action, that stirs up the emotions of the men, young and old, who surround her.
To be sure, Kundry's function is complicated by her role as captive of the sorcerer Klingsor. She appears not entirely free to act of her own will, but is, as it were, a devil's agent. Yet the source of Klingsor's satanic magic, in turn, is precisely the power of desire that Kundry represents, in so far as his inability to rid himself of desire resulted in the self-emasculation from which his magic derives. In Klingsor, therefore, we have a third inverted Pantalone, next to the Grail knights Titurel and Gurnemanz. It is indeed out of despair over failing, because of lustful desire, to qualify for that community of the chaste that Klingsor has sworn to destroy the Grail knights by employing Kundry's charms.
Every innamorata, in the commedia dell'arte, needs a young admirer, an amoroso, in addition to the older men who find her irresistible. In Parsifal, this amoroso is of course the title role, the youth destined to become the new Grail King; but there is also a second amoroso, the present Grail King Amfortas, Parsifal's alter ego. Kundry, the innamorata, being decidedly not the usual sort, it is no surprise that neither Parsifal nor Amfortas is the classic amoroso motivated by the uncomplicated passion for the beloved we have just seen exemplified by the young knight Walther von Stolzing in The Mastersingers. While Parsifal is not on the run from desire like the older men and Amfortas—at least not at the outset—he is not running toward it either. Like Wagner's Siegfried in The Ring, he is a very young lover, indeed—still an adolescent really—and like Siegfried filled at first more with longing for mother than with yearning for a mate. Siegfried's passion proved tragic precisely because, being born of grief over the mother he never knew, it was partly compensation for that love he had lacked. With Parsifal, the question is how, in view of his attachment to his recently deceased mother, he avoids the same fate.
I
In Parsifal, we are immediately introduced to the all-male community of the Grail castle, and to Gurnemanz's place in charge of the noble youths aspiring to become knights of the Grail (the youths are described as being of a tender age; I, p. 11). At the same time, we hear of Amfortas's suffering and the Grail knights' concern to secure relief for him. Moreover, Gurnemanz speaks in a veiled way of how only “the one” could bring Amfortas that relief, raising the thought that there may be some promise of the coming of a healer or savior. Finally, Kundry arrives with a salve for Amfortas she has brought from Arabia. Thus, from the very start we are given to wonder what this community of knights and adolescent youths is all about; what the nature and cause of Amfortas's suffering might be; whether Gurnemanz's passionate reference to “the one” refers to a person and who he—“der Eine” being masculine in gender—might be; and what association a wild and strange creature like this woman Kundry has with this company of knights, especially why she appears so passionately devoted to relieving Amfortas's suffering.
What Gurnemanz's reference to “the one” who could help Amfortas does suggest is a conviction that medicine cannot bring him relief, that relief can come only when he is cured, and implying that the cure must come from the spiritual, as opposed to the physical realm (I, 12)1 Gurnemanz thus is convinced, too, that relief will not come to Amfortas from a woman as healer, the role we then immediately see Kundry occupying. The elder knight's worship of manhood shows itself, too, in his ensuing lament about Amfortas: “O weh! Wie trag ich's im Gemüte, / in seiner Mannheit stolzer Blüte / des siegreichsten Geschlechtes Herrn / als seines Siechtums Knecht zu sehn!” (p. 13). Moreover, the belief that the cure will arrive in the form of a young man produces relief that the knights will therefore not have to be exposed to temptation by women. As Amfortas laments, when he hears that Gawan has gone off in search of medicines without asking his permission as Grail king, “O wehe ihm, dem trotzig Kühnen, / wenn er in Klingsors Schlingen fällt! / So breche keiner mir den Frieden: / ich harre des [=des Einen], der mir beschieden” (p. 13). As we soon learn, the “snares” to which Amfortas refers are none other than the magically seductive charms of the sorcerer's flower maidens.
In view of this seeming misogyny, we must ask how it is that the Grail knights tolerate Kundry in their company, to the extent that she has made herself if not a part of the Grail community at least indispensable to it? As we later learn, it was she, after all, who seduced Amfortas, causing his suffering. She appeared to him though as a ravishing beauty, whereas now, in the Grail community, she is anything but appealing, in the usual way, and is described indeed as ugly or animal-like—a ‘wild woman’ in the sense of one who is unkempt and indeed debases her appearance—not as a seductress. Moreover, while Amfortas knows her as “Kundry,” he did not know his seductress by name, and thus cannot make that connection. Amfortas, and Gurnemanz with him, is appreciative of Kundry's services to the Grail community as messenger and procuress of medicines. Thus, we see that the Grail knights are not haters of women as such, only of women in their seductive capacity. They are not on the run from skirts, but from desire.
Kundry, ever the seductress in spite of herself, appears to know better about her motivations. Certainly, in view of her past—and especially as it secretly concerns Amfortas—she knows herself to be unworthy of the Grail knights' gratitude. She says to Amfortas when he thanks her for her loyalty in bringing him the slave, “(unruhig und heftig am Boden sich bewegend). Nicht Dank!—Haha! Was wird es helfen? / Nicht Dank! Fort, fort! Ins Bad!” (p. 14). In her imagining that the wound Amfortas received because of her is one that will never heal lurks a hint of the seductress's—or stereotypically any woman's—secret pride in the power of her charms. The more exotic and rare the medicines she must bring to him the greater is the proof of how deeply she ‘wounded’ him. What makes her particularly interesting is that she recognizes—again not without pride—that absolutely everything she does or can do is tainted, indeed driven, by the will to seduce.
It is left to the tender young aspirants to knighthood to sense the seductress in Kundry. The reason is of course partly that they are at an age to be preoccupied with sexuality and seduction, such that they might see a seductress in every woman. At the same time, they seem however to be responding specifically to the seductivity of Kundry's animal-like appearance and behavior, that is, to the beast in her:
DRITTER Knappe.
(junger Mann).
He! Du da!
Was liegst du dort wie ein wildes Tier?
KUNDRY.
Sind die Tiere hier nicht heilig?
DRITTER Knappe.
Ja; doch ob heilig du,
das wissen wir grad noch nicht.
VIERTER Knappe.
(ebenfalls junger Mann).
Mit ihrem Zaubersaft, wähn ich,
wird sie den Meister vollends verderben.
(p. 14)
The sexual overtones are unmistakable. The third youth compares her to a wild animal, and the fourth refers to the salve she has brought to Amfortas as “magical fluid” that will completely “ruin” him (verderben also means ‘to corrupt’ in a moral sense, and Saft means ‘sap’ as well as ‘fluid’; cf. such expressions as ‘a juicy lass,’ ein saftiges Mädchen).
The youths' suspicions about Kundry cause Gurnemanz indeed to reflect on the possibility of her involvement in Amfortas's seduction. In response to the old Knight's concession that Kundry, whom he has devotedly seen as an angel of rescue and mercy, may be under some sort of curse and possibly is doing penance for something she did in an earlier life, the third youth raises the question whether she is not responsible for their troubles: “So ist's wohl auch jen' ihre Schuld, / die uns so manche Not gebracht?” (p. 15). The question causes Gurnemanz to consider that the Grail company's misfortunes have coincided with Kundry's extended absence from their presence.
As Gurnemanz now remembers, Kundry has been around from the start. When Titurel was building the Grail castle, he found her in death-like sleep in the underbrush; and Gurnemanz recently found her that way not long after “the calamity,” the wounding of Amfortas and his losing of the spear (p. 16). Here Gurnemanz appears, if only half-consciously, to be telling himself—misogynistically—that where there is trouble cherchez la femme, and thereby to establish a connection between Kundry and Eve, the Biblical archetype of woman as bringer of misfortune through susceptibility to, and capacity for, seduction.
When Gurnemanz proceeds to tell the Grail youths about the wounding of Amfortas, it is clear that, consciously at least, he does not suspect that Kundry and the beauty who seduced Amfortas are one and the same: “Schon nah dem Schloß wird uns der Held entrückt: / ein furchtbar schönes Weib hat ihn entzückt: / in seinen [=des Weibs] Armen liegt er trunken, / der Speer ist ihm entsunken” (p. 16). As his narration in the historical present emphasizes, Gurnemanz was an eyewitness to the seduction; he saw for his celibate bachelor self how powerfully attracted Amfortas was by the woman's “terrible” beauty and how the intoxication of lying in her arms made him forget all about the spear and the Grail castle. Moreover, in Gurnemanz's report the impression is given that the woman, not the sorcerer, wounded Amfortas: “Des Königs Flucht gab kämpfend ich Geleite; / doch eine Wunde brannt' ihm in der Seite: / die Wunde ist's, die nie sich schließen will” (p. 16). In this account, it is almost as though the wound is in the heart instead of the side, that what pains Amfortas is that he is no longer in Kundry's embrace and must return to the company of the Grail. There is, at this point, no direct reference as yet to Klingsor's having wounded Amfortas with the spear, or indeed his having been wounded by the spear, as such, at all. Here again, the wound appears more spiritual than physical: he has let himself be seduced, has lost the spear, and has had to leave the embrace of a ravishingly beautiful woman to boot. In any case, he has been wounded both by desire and by his inability to resist surrendering to it—in Gurnemanz's telling of it here at least.
Male yearning for ‘purity,’ in the sense of resisting desire out of devotion to an ideal of chastity or an oath of celibacy, is the theme, too, of Gurnemanz's ensuing account, at the youths' request, of how the Grail community was founded and, in particular, how Klingsor came to be excluded from it. The founding of the order, in this telling, resulted from divine messengers having bestowed upon Amfortas's father Titurel, for safe-keeping, the vessel in which Christ's blood was collected and the lance that caused the wound from which the blood flowed. Titurel, engaged at the time in a struggle to protect the realm of the faithful against the infidel, evidently viewed the placing of the holy relics in his hands as a sign of divine intention that he should found a community of chaste, celibate knights dedicated to the relics' preservation and to the defense of the faith and to missions of mercy and rescue. Since Gurnemanz, however, does not claim to have been present when the divine messengers visited Titurel, he is not in a position to vouch for the truth of that miracle, only for the belief in its truth. In other words, the point is not that it actually happened that way, but that this is what Titurel and the Grail community believe and how they have acted on that belief.
That desire is the impurity the Grail knights have in mind, in saying that only those who are “pure” can find the way to the Grail castle and join their company, is shown by Gurnemanz's report of how Klingsor failed to gain acceptance. Though the old knight displays reticence at calling a spade a spade regarding sexuality, it becomes clear nonetheless that the particular “sin” that Klingsor was unable to defeat in himself was surrender to desire:
Jenseits im Tale war er eingesiedelt;
darüberhin liegt üpp'ges Heidenland:
unkund blieb mir, was dorten er gesündigt;
doch wollt' er büßen nun, ja heilig werden.
Ohnmächtig, in sich selbst die Sünde zu ertöten,
an sich legt' er die Frevlerhand,
die nun, dem Grale zugewandt,
verachtungsvoll des' Hüter [=Titurel] von sich stieß.
(p. 17)
The implication is that Klingsor emasculated himself out of despair over his inability to remain chaste or celibate, hoping thereby to gain admission to the company of the Grail. Moreover, it is clear that Titurel was not interested in having in that company a man who was no longer a man: the Grail knights must feel desire if they are to struggle with it. The founder's aim is less the exclusion of women than the companionship of men who are bonded by their common, ongoing effort to resist surrender to desire.
Klingsor, for his part, seeks revenge by making the Grail knights experience the same failure to resist desire that he suffered (p. 18). The Grail company's demonization of desire as the devil's work is evident in Gurnemanz's choice of words to describe Klingsor's garden of seduction, of course. Easier to miss is his respect for the power of desire and his vicarious identification with those who find themselves subjected to it. Thus, he speaks of Klingsor's women as being “devilishly beautiful” and as though growing in the garden like lovely flowers. Moreover, he considers that any man whom Klingsor is able to entice to enter the garden is ruined and lost to the Grail castle, implying that in Gurnemanz's mind when men are confronted with beautiful women the tug of desire is irresistible.
The same demonization of desire and fascination with it led to Amfortas's downfall, in Gurnemanz's account. Titurel, the community's founder, apparently was not moved to act against Klingsor. It was left to his son, on assuming leadership of the community, to set out to put an end to the seduction of the Grail knights: “Da Titurel, in hohen Alters Mühen, / dem Sohn[e nun] die Herrschaft hier verliehen: / Amfortas ließ es da nicht ruhen, / der Zauberplag' Einhalt zu tun” (p. 18). Gurnemanz's reference to Amfortas's obsession with defeating this “plague of magic” suggests that the new Grail king harbored an urge to see for himself how seductive Klingsor's beauties were, to experience the magic of desire firsthand. His curiosity about desire must have been all the greater considering that he appears to have been raised by his father at the Grail castle, in all-male company with no exposure to women at all, as far as we learn. Titurel, by contrast, cannot have been innocent of desire considering that he obviously sired Amfortas with some woman or other (we do not learn with whom or under what circumstances). As a result, the son must have been all the more susceptible to passion for women, given the probability that he was separated from his mother at birth or in childhood.
If Amfortas, as seems likely, was sexually innocent when he was seduced by Kundry this helps explain the nature of the vision promising him relief from his suffering. As Gurnemanz tells it,
Vor dem verwaisten Heiligtum
in brünst'gem Beten lag Amfortas,
ein Rettungszeichen bang erflehend:
ein sel'ger Schimmer da entfloß dem Grale, (leise)
ein heilig Traumgesicht
nun deutlich zu ihm spricht
(immer leiser)
durch hell erschauter Worte [Wunder] Zeichen [Male]:
(Sehr leise.)
“Durch Mitleid wissend
der reine Tor;
harre sein,
den ich erkor.”
(p. 18)
In the vision, a sign is given to Amfortas that he will be redeemed by “a pure fool,” meaning surely one who appears foolish in the eyes of the world because of his purity and innocence. In other words, in his “dream vision” (Traumgesicht) Amfortas conceives of himself being saved by an alter ego, by a pure and innocent youth such as he was—or wishes to think he was or wishes he had been—before he surrendered to desire. To be sure, in Gurnemanz's telling the impression is given that he himself was a witness to the vision, through his rapture in relating the experience and the vividness of the description. Yet it is just as likely, indeed more so, that Amfortas was alone at the time he had the vision; and in any case, the prophecy about a redeemer was not spoken but was “seen” (erschaut). Amfortas's vision therefore may be considered to be his dream of atoning for lost innocence through identification with an ideal self, an incarnation of innocence and purity.
No sooner has Gurnemanz finished telling about the vision than—as though miraculously—just such an innocent fool appears in the person of the youth Parsifal, who has been taken into custody by the Grail knights for shooting a swan with his bow. The youth's killing of the swan would at first appear to be a bad omen, in view of Amfortas's having just welcomed as a good sign the swan's circling above the lake where he was bathing to alleviate his suffering. For Amfortas, the male swan evidently symbolized the ideal of purity to which the Grail knights are dedicated, so that Parsifal's fatal wounding of the bird would seem to mark him as the destroyer rather than fulfiller of that ideal. Gurnemanz and the knights are upset with Parsifal not just because he has wantonly shed the blood of a harmless creature, but because he destroyed what the Grail king had perceived as a good omen. (Paradoxically, of course, the shooting of the bird also establishes an identification between the slayer and the victim, in the sense that Parsifal has arrived to replace the swan as symbol of purity and innocence.)
Gurnemanz is angry with Parsifal, too, because, as he imagines it at least, the swan had flown up to look for its mate in order to circle around the lake with her. This reference to conjugal love suggests an association of Parsifal with his victim: that he has reached an age to seek a mate, and indeed that his act of aggression toward the swan is indicative of his developing manhood. He is on the verge of giving up boyish aggressiveness toward birds and animals to enter the role of lover.
Kundry, at any rate, immediately has her eye on Parsifal as ripe for seduction. It is she who gives him the news—truthfully, we must assume—that his mother died while he has been away. Kundry, indeed, appears to be quite clear about the connection between aggression and desire, making war and making love. When she laughs at the thought of his mother's attempt to keep him innocent of military arts. Kundry as arch seductress likely has in mind that a youth can no sooner he kept innocent of war than of sexuality. And when Parsifal leaps at her and tries to strangle her after she has reported his mother's death to him, she sees in his grief an opportunity for seduction, that is, she understands that having lost his mother he will be all the more ready for a mate. At Parsifal's cry that he is about to faint out of grief over his mother: “(gerät in heftiges Zittern). Ich verschmachte!” (p. 22), Kundry's reaction is to ‘mother’ him, as it were, rushing to the forest spring to fetch him a drink of water. When she sprinkles some of the water on him first, she may do so to help keep him from fainting, but perhaps she is also trying to protect him against herself, as when holy water is used to ward off the devil. That she senses in her ministrations that she is half-consciously out to seduce him is shown immediately in her response to Gurnemanz's praise of her action as in keeping with the ideals of the Grail community. He says, “So recht! So nach des Grales Gnade: / das Böse bannt, wer's mit Gutem vergibt” (p. 23). Kundry knows better. Far from driving away evil, her seeming act of goodness and mercy may just as well represent a prelude to seduction. As she tells Gurnemanz in reply, “Nie tu ich Gutes;—nur Ruhe will ich, / … / nur Ruhe! [Ruhe] ach, der Müden [=ihr]! / Schlafen!—Oh, daß mich keiner wecke!” (p. 23). In sleep she seeks escape from the urge to seduce; awake, she is always the seductress. But in expressing the wish that no one might awaken her (ever?), she evidently is reminded that precisely when she was sleeping she was often roused to seduction: “(Scheu auffahrend.) Nein! Nicht schlafen!—Grausen faßt mich! (Sie verfällt in heftiges Zittern; dann läßt sie die Arme matt sinken, [neigt das Haupt tief und schwankt matt weiter].) Machtlose Wehr! Die Zeit ist da. / … / Schlafen—schlafen—ich muß” (p. 23). She knows that the time to seduce is upon her. Something is forcing her to escape into sleep, yet it is a sleep from which she will awaken to seduce.
Amfortas's struggle and suffering parallel Kundry's. Just as she is tormented by an urge to seduce, he is tortured by his yearning to surrender to desire. His shame and guilt at having, as Grail King, to celebrate mass comes not only from the memory of having been seduced by Kundry but even more from the self-admission that he yearns for seduction still:
des heiligsten Blutes Quell
fühl ich sich gießen in mein Herz.
Des eignen sündigen Blutes Gewell'
in wahnsinniger Flucht
muß mir zurück dann fließen,
in die Welt der Sündensucht
mit wilder Scheu sich ergießen;
von neuem sprengt es das Tor,
daraus es nun strömt hervor,
hier durch die Wunde, der seinen [=von Christus] gleich,
geschlagen von desselben Speeres Streich,
der dort dem Erlöser die Wunde stach,
aus der mit blut'gen Tränen
der Göttliche weint' ob der Menschheit Schmach
in Mitleids heiligem Sehnen—
und aus der nun mir, an heiligster Stelle,
dem Pfleger göttlichster Güter,
des Erlösungsbalsams Hüter,
das heiße Sündenblut entquillt,
ewig erneut aus des Sehnens Quelle,
das ach, keine Büßung je mir gestillt!
(pp. 26-27)
The communion wine, as Christ's blood, only forces Amfortas's lustful blood down to the body's lower regions (“in die Welt der Sündensucht”), and does not purify it. This rush of blood to his groin—analogous to what occurs in sexual arousal—causes the wound to bleed again. Whereas the blood from Jesus's wound symbolizes his compassionate love for mankind, that from Amfortas's wound is expressive of his fleshly lust.2 Jesus, the ‘sacred heart,’ bleeds for mankind; Amfortas, the Grail king, bleeds as it were for Kundry, yearning for the very embrace that rendered him vulnerable. His lament is thus a matter, if one will, of sexual boasting, of his undying, unconquerable lust of the flesh—that passion which Kundry's ‘terrible’ beauty awakened in him. We are dealing, in short, with a complaint about love's all-conquering power, with negative celebration of desire's inescapability.
In the context of Amfortas's lament about his hot-blooded passion and fleshly lust, of which he seeks in vain to rid himself, the words of communion sung by the boys' choir at the mass he celebrates can be understood to have special meaning for the Grail company. “Nehmet hin meinen Leib, / nehmet hin mein Blut / um unserer Liebe willen!” (p. 27) may carry the connotation that, in receiving the body and blood of Christ as he commanded, the Grail knights are also wishing away their flesh and blood, in so far as it is the source of sinful lust, and offering it as a sacrifice to their cause of brotherhood through their common devotion to an ideal of purity. Moreover, when the boys sing of “the power of love as compassion” (des Mitleids Liebesmacht, p. 28), we recall the competing power of love as desire. Similarly, when the youths then sing about “the spirit of love as blessed consolation” (sel'ger Tröstung Liebesgeist, p. 28), the reference in the context of the Grail community would seem to be brotherly love as compensation for—and sublimation of—fleshly lust, that other, threatening spirit of love symbolized by Cupid as Liebesgeist. Finally, the difference in the several age groups represented in the all-male Grail company at the mass, and thus their differing developmental stages, appears reflected in the varying emphases they place on “love” and “faith.” While the knights sing of blessedness in both faith and love (the latter albeit somewhat as an afterthought): “Alle Ritter. Selig im Glauben! / Selig in Lieb und Glauben!” (p. 29), the youths, being adolescents, sing of love alone (“Selig in Liebe!”) and the boys, not yet entering sexual maturity, sing only of faith (“Selig im Glauben”).
Parsifal belongs in the category of the youths. His mind is on love, albeit love and grief regarding his dead mother. He is not yet at a stage to appreciate and enter into the brotherhood of Grail knights who, out of flight from desire, sublimate it through devotion to one another and to an ideal of brotherhood and purity. Hence, he takes no notice of Gurnemanz's invitation to join the knights in receiving communion and fails to ask about—or bother himself about—the sufferings of Amfortas he has witnessed. As a result, he is sent away from the Grail castle. He appears preoccupied, presumably by thoughts of his mother. Gurnemanz, however, seems to interpret his preoccupation differently, though not incorrectly. In the old knight's opinion, the youth's head is full of thoughts engendered by the mating urge. Thus, he angrily tells Parsifal that since he is playing the gander he should go off and find himself a goose: “laß du hier künftig die Schwäne in Ruh / und suche dir, Gänser, die Gans!” (p. 30). In upbraiding Parsifal for having his mind on geese, that is, on women, Gurnemanz refers to the youth's guilt in having shot the male swan, and does so in a way to suggest that female swans would be an inappropriate object of his passion, in view of that bird's symbolic association with purity and chastity.3
II
That Parsifal is ripe for mating is shown by his arriving at Klingsor's castle. The “magical” power that lures him there is desire, albeit unconsciously so. To be sure, Klingsor claims it is his doing: “Die Zeit ist da.— / Schon lockt mein Zauberschloß den Toren, / den, kindisch jauchzend, fern ich nahend sah.—” (II, p. 31). The sorcerer of course would like to believe that he is in control of desire's magical power, that he can make it work his will. His need to believe this is all the greater because desire was the power he was unable to overcome in himself, thus destroying his dream of joining the company of the Grail. Therefore, he imagines, too, that he is in command of the curse that keeps Kundry in a deathlike sleep: “Im Todesschlafe hält der Fluch sie fest, / der ich den Krampf zu lösen weiß.—” (p. 31). At the same time, however, he sees in Kundry the eternal seductress, whose urge to seduce, by implication, did not arise with his supposed acquiring of magical powers. Even in his eyes, she represents an elemental force that he, as sorcerer, seeks to direct and control: “Dein Meister ruft dich Namenlose, / Urteufelin, Höllenrose! / Herodias warst du, und was noch?” (p. 31). He knows whereof he speaks, because it was with the likes of Kundry—or with her herself—that he surrendered to desire, and then gained ‘control’ of it only by emasculating himself. The mating urge, not Klingsor, has lured Parsifal from the Grail castle to the sorcerer's castle; and the undying urge to seduction, not Klingsor's summons, calls Kundry from her sleep as Parsifal is arriving there.
True enough, Kundry is a seductress in spite of herself. This is her curse. Yet precisely her struggle against desire makes the urge that much keener. Or, to put it differently, struggling against the urge enables her indirectly to glory in its power. She seeks to atone for seducing Amfortas by serving the Grail knights; but filled with a sense of her irresistible appeal, she takes care to disguise her beauty, appearing to them in debased, beastly form. This disguise is evidently her doing, not Klingsor's, because he apparently wishes she would remain at his castle instead:
Sag, wo treibst du dich wieder umher?
Pfui! Dort bei dem Rittergesipp,
wo wie ein Vieh du dich halten läßt!
Gefällt dir's bei mir nicht besser?
Als ihren Meister du mir gefangen—
haha—den reinen Hüter des Grales—
was jagte dich da wieder fort?
(p. 32)
The answer to Klingsor's question about what compelled her to leave his castle after she had seduced Amfortas is of course that she yearned to atone through service. But the special object of her ministrations has been Amfortas, suggesting that involved here is the seductress's urge to bring comfort to her victim, as a sublime form of celebrating her romantic triumph over him.
Kundry similarly glories indirectly in her seductivity by escaping into slumber. If she is not serving she must put herself to sleep. Otherwise, she might be tempted to practice seduction. Even in deathlike slumber, though, Kundry is ever the seductress. Evidently, it was not actually Klingsor who roused her now, since he speaks of “another” man having done so, another potential victim like Amfortas, namely Parsifal. Or, Klingsor may have summoned her; but it is the chance to seduce Parsifal that has brought her to the sorcerer's castle. She acknowledges that it was her “curse” that roused her:
KUNDRY
. …
Ja! Mein Fluch!—
Oh!—Schande!—Schande!—
KLINGSOR.
Haha!—dort nach den keuschen Rittern?
KUNDRY.
Da—da—dient' ich.
(p. 32)
At the Grail castle, she served; here she has come to seduce.
Klingsor's power over Kundry is rather that of the devil than of a sorcerer. He knows her weakness, her vain pride as seductress, and seeks to control her through the power of suggestion, through temptation. When Kundry protests that she does not want to seduce Parsifal, Klingsor tells her that of course she does, because she has to do it:
KUNDRY.
Ich—will nicht! Oh!—Oh!
KLINGSOR.
Wohl willst du, denn du mußt.
KUNDRY.
Du—kannst mich—nicht—halten.
KLINGSOR.
Aber dich fassen.
(p. 33)
While Klingsor wishes to believe that he is making her seduce Parsifal, he appears to admit that his power over her comes from understanding her (“dich fassen”), that is, understanding the irresistibility of her urge to seduction and its particular nature. He would like to believe that his power over her comes from his self-emasculation, because it has rendered him proof against her charms; and it is true that since he is no longer a man, in that meaning, his perceptions of her are not clouded by desire to possess her physically. It is true, too, that her urge to seduction involves the yearning to find a man she cannot seduce; she will accept as her master only one who is chaste. She derisively asks Klingsor, however, “Haha, bist du keusch?” (p. 33). Chastity is meaningless in those, like Klingsor, who cannot experience desire. She will subordinate herself only to a man who at once feels desire for her and yet conquers that desire.
That it is Kundry's desire, not Klingsor's power, that moves her to attempt to seduce Parsifal, seemingly against her will, is shown by her claiming—however uncertainly—that she does not want to test whether he is proof against her charms (“Ich—will nicht!,” p. 34); by her asking, “Must I?—Must I?,” after Klingsor has reported that Parsifal (“the boy”) is already scaling the fortress; by her cry, “Oh, oh, woe to me!,” on hearing Klingsor say how handsome the boy is (“Ha!—Er ist schön, der Knabe!”); and finally by her ecstatic laughter mingled with convulsive screams of pain after the sorcerer tells how fearlessly and powerfully the youth is defeating his attackers. She simply cannot resist trying to seduce a hero so handsome, courageous, and powerful: “Klingsor. Wie übel den Tölpeln der Eifer gedeiht! / Dem schlug er den Arm, jenem den Schenkel. / Kundry (schreit auf und verschwindet)” (p. 34). Whereas in the Iliad (bk. 3) Helena's account of the power and bravery of the Greek heroes, as seen from the walls of Troy, inspires fear and awe in Priam and the other older Trojan men, here the situation is reversed: an older man's similar description of a young hero arouses desire in an irresistible young beauty. When Klingsor, surprised to find that Kundry has already left to seduce Parsifal, exclaims, “What? Already at work?”: “Wie? Schon am Werk? / Haha! Den Zauber wußt' ich wohl, / der immer dich wieder zum Dienst mir gesellt!” (p. 35), the magical spell of which he speaks is that cast not by him, but by desire.4
Kundry, of course, has already seen Parsifal with her own eyes, at the lake near the Grail castle, and is thus not responding to an imagined image of beauty, but to her own experience of him in the flesh. That his appeal to women is universal, and irresistible, is shown by the reaction of Klingsor's flower maidens to him. The sorcerer does not have to send them forth to try to seduce the youth. The moment they see Parsifal they are overcome with desire, making them immediately forget about their lovers, for whose safety they have just been so concerned. Their lovers had been summoned forth from dallying in bed with them to do battle with the young intruder—like Paris called forth from Helena's bed to do combat with the Greek invaders—and now in a twinkling these young amorous beauties have eyes only for Parsifal.
Parsifal's rejection of the flower maidens' advances is the signal for Kundry to test her powers on him. As both arch seductress and ‘wise woman,’ she knows instinctively and immediately that to seduce Parsifal she will have to appeal to the boy, as well as the man, in him. The flower maidens sensed the same thing as soon as they laid eyes on him. Kundry, though, knows that in his case, the only way is to approach him as a mother to a son. Perhaps she is acting simply on the popular wisdom expressed in the song “I want a girl just like the girl who married dear old Dad”: that every son seeks in a woman something—if not actually everything—of his mother. Yet Kundry also knows that Parsifal, whose father was slain before he was born, had a special relationship with his mother, who indeed to protect him from a fate like his father's and to try to insure that she did not lose him, too, took him into the forest and raised him there by herself. Moreover, having been the one who, at the lake near the Grail castle, broke the news to him of his mother's death, Kundry knows that in his grief his feeling for his mother is at this point just that much more intense.
Parsifal is so much on the run from desire, metaphorically speaking, that he was on the point of literally fleeing from the amorous flower maidens. What stops him is hearing Kundry call to him with the name his mother had used for him once in her sleep: “(Er will fliehen, als er aus einem Blumenhage Kundrys Stimme vernimmt und betroffen stillsteht.) Kundry. Parsifal!—Weile! / … / Parsifal. Parsifal … ? / So nannte träumend mich einst die Mutter.—” (p. 40). Since he evidently had heard his name only that one time before, he must immediately think that it either is his mother calling him, perhaps from the grave, or someone else who has learned about his name from her.
Kundry is able to prevent Parsifal's flight, too, for the related reason that she casts herself in the role of his rescuer from the seduction he wants to escape. She tells him that she is bringing him both ecstasy and salvation: “[(allmählich sichtbar werdend)]. Hier weile! Parsifal!— / Dich grüßet Wonne und Heil zumal.— / Ihr kindischen Buhlen, weichet von ihm; /. …” (p. 40). She leaves unclear just what ecstasy and salvation she means to bring; but since she orders the flower maidens to leave him, the implication is she is saving him from such ‘childish courtesans’ to enjoy some sort of ecstasy that only she can provide, for example, a mature, purer sort of love like that of a mother for a son.
Kundry continues her appeal to Parsifal's flight from desire by associating him with an ideal of purity and chastity not unlike that worshipped by the Grail knights. The flower maidens take their leave of Parsifal by calling him a proud fool, albeit a lovely one, for having spurned their charms. They laugh to one another about his sexual cowardice: “Alle. Leb wohl, du Holder, du Stolzer, du—Tor! (Mit dem letzten sind die Mädchen unter Gelächter im Schloße verschwunden.)” (pp. 40-41). Kundry counters the flower maidens' parting shot by telling him that his name means “pure fool” (reinen Toren), and was given to him, when he was still in his mother's womb, by his father Gahmuret, at the moment of the latter's death (as a Crusader, the father shared this ideal of chastity, evidently, with the Grail knights, or even dreamed of his son becoming a holy saint, a fool in Christ'). There is no reason to doubt the truth of what Kundry tells Parsifal here. Her reason for telling it to him is more important, however. She aims not merely to ingratiate herself with him, but also to identify herself in his mind with that ideal of purity, so that she can seduce him. She falsely implies she has been waiting there just to tell him about his name, its meaning, and how he got it: “Ihn [=diesen Namen] dir zu künden, harrt' ich deiner hier: / was zog dich her, wenn nicht der Kunde Wunsch?” (p. 41), but the leading question she appends betrays her seductive aim. In asking whether anything else than learning about his name has brought him to Klingsor's garden, she is out to direct his mind back to the gander in him yearning for a goose, the yearning that caused Gurnemanz to call him, at that stage in his development, not a ‘pure’ fool but “just only a fool” (doch nur ein Tor, p. 30). Parsifal will have to recognize that he did not come to Klingsor's castle to learn about his name, but out of boyish zeal for adventure, if not—as he will not want to believe—for amorous involvement or to sow wild oats.
With her leading question about why he has come there, Kundry succeeds in her aim of turning Parsifal's mind to sex. At least, he starts to notice her body: “Nie sah ich, nie träumte mir, was jetzt / ich schau und mit Bangen mich erfüllt.— / Entblühtest du auch diesem Blumenhaine?” (p. 41). Apparently, she is more beautiful than anything he has ever seen in his dreams, so beautiful that it fills him with terror. In any case, he connects her beauty with that of the amorous flower maidens from whom he has just escaped, as shown by his asking whether she “blossomed forth from this thicket of flowers, too?” Thus, Kundry has his attention where she wanted it—on her—but still she needs to dissociate herself in his mind from the flower maidens, and does so by returning to the association of herself with his dead mother.
To dissociate herself from Klingsor's castle, Kundry claims—falsely—that she came there only so that Parsifal might find her; and to associate herself with his mother, she claims to have been present when he was still an infant at his mother's breast; indeed she tells it as though she had been there on throughout his childhood and adolescence until he left home, and beyond until his mother's ensuing death of a broken heart. Kundry is intent on painting for him a picture of his mother's joy over him, how he was the apple of her eye, and how his birth soothed her grief over his father's death (p. 41). Thus, Kundry plants an image of herself in his mind as his fairy godmother, to whom he might turn now for comfort in his grief over his mother's death. At the same time, she manages to keep his mind on erotic desire by asking, rhetorically, whether he experienced any anxiety at all when his mother furiously embraced him and kissed him in moments of relief over finding him unharmed when he had strayed from home and stayed away too long: “Hei! Was ihr das Lust und Lachen schuf, / wann sie suchend dann dich ereilt; / wann dann ihr Arm dich wütend umschlang, / ward dir es wohl gar beim Küssen bang?” (p. 42). The answer to such rhetorical questions is no, of course not, which in this case is meant to suggest to Parsifal that he should not feel anxiety if his ‘godmother’ Kundry now does likewise. Or, if Parsifal should react by saying, or only thinking, that he did experience such anxiety, it would have been because he sensed his mother was relating to him as a woman to a lover, not as mother to child, that is in his case, out of incestuous passion. This reaction, too, would suit Kundry's purposes, because by contrast erotic passion between godmother and godson does not have to be viewed, on the face of it at least, as being incestuous.
Kundry closes this phase of her identification of herself with Parsifal's mother, and makes the transition to actual seduction, by appealing to his guilt over having left his mother, thereby causing her to die of a broken heart when he did not return. Kundry wishes to awaken in him a need to expiate his guilt, by showing his mother how much he loved her. Since the mother is dead, he will have to find a substitute object for his passion, namely ‘godmother’ Kundry. Parsifal's reaction, though, is not what Kundry wants. Instead of turning to her, to cry on her shoulder, he is filled only with thoughts of his mother and of what a fool he is that he could have forgotten her. His words are addressed only to his dead mother, ignoring Kundry. To turn to Kundry would mean forgetting his mother, if even only for an instant. Forgetting his mother is now identified in his mind with being a “fool,” the characterization that was made of him when Gurnemanz associated being a fool with chasing geese like a gander, that is, chasing after women, as Kundry is trying to get him to do now. Doing that is associated in Parsifal's mind with being a giddy fool (“taumelnder Tor”). Since Parsifal, in his grief, did not seek comfort from Kundry on his own, she explicitly invites him to do so: “das Wehe, das dich reut, / die Not nun büße / im Trost, den Liebe dir beut!” (p. 42); but he plunges ever deeper into his own private remorse over his folly.
Unable to draw him to herself otherwise, Kundry, who has been “in a reclining position” (in liegender Stellung) the whole time, resorts to physical seduction, bending over his head and putting her arms around his neck. Yet since the only way to his heart is through his mother, she tries to arouse him by inviting him to learn from her the ecstasies his father Gahmuret felt when he sired him:
Bekenntnis
wird Schuld in Reue enden,
Erkenntnis
in Sinn die Torheit wenden.
Die Liebe lerne kennen,
die Gahmuret umschloß,
als Herzeleids Entbrennen
ihn sengend überfloß!
Die Leib und Leben
einst dir gegeben,
der Tod und Torheit weichen muß,
sie beut
dir heut—
als Muttersegens letzten Gruß
der Liebe ersten Kuß.
(Sie hat ihr Haupt völlig über das seinige geneigt und heftet nun ihre Lippen zu einem langen Kuβ auf seinen Mund.)
(p. 43)
Richly possessed of instincts for seduction, Kundry takes care to lead into her erotic talk with reference to seemingly spiritual matters, dropping such words as confession, guilt, remorse, knowledge, meaning, and folly. She speaks, indeed, about how confession will transform guilt into remorse, and knowledge will change folly into understanding. But by “confession” she probably means his admitting his passion for her, Kundry, and by “knowledge,” losing his sexual innocence with her, as Adam and Eve lost theirs after eating from the Tree of Knowledge (Baum der Erkenntnis in German). After this prelude—one might call it spiritual foreplay—she gets right to the point by painting for him an image of sexual intercourse and, moreover, female sexual climax and the pleasure his father experienced in that moment when his mother's “flaming up of passion searingly flowed over him.”
Kundry's situation as seductress is clearly desperate. The last thing an amorous woman wants to do is to remind her lover of his mother when she is trying to get him to lie with her. Certainly the very last thing would be to try to arouse a man by talking about how his father enjoyed intercourse with his mother. Conjuring up for your lover an image of himself as a ‘mother fucker’ is not likely to achieve the desired result, regardless of how deep-seated the urge to violate that taboo may be in the sexual subconscious. Kundry, though, knows that if she is to have any chance at all with Parsifal it will be precisely through those unconscious subterranean urges, which in his case have been especially nurtured by having grown to manhood as the substitute object of his mother's devotion to his dead father.
By identifying love of woman with Parsifal's devotion to his mother, Kundry has raised up the prohibition of incest as a barrier to his surrender to erotic passion. Recognizing this, when she speaks of “her who once gave you body and life, to whom death and folly must yield,” she is not talking any longer about his mother but speaking of erotic love personified, that is, of herself. She then describes the kiss she is about to give as being offered to him by love, calling it both “the last greeting of a mother's blessing” and “love's first kiss.” In other words, she now appeals to an image of passing from boyhood to manhood, specifically of a mother's blessing of a son as he takes a bride, and thus in that sense a mother's taking leave of the son as no longer being able to serve as the object of his complete or primary devotion. Most important, Kundry identifies herself as both the mother who is saying farewell and the bride to whom his mother is giving him.
The kiss Kundry plants on Parsifal's lips does not wholly fail to fire his passion. It succeeds well enough that, though he does not respond to the kiss, he does not reject it right away either. The burning sensation it then produces in his heart is indeed what brings him to the revelation about Amfortas's wound:
Amfortas!—
Die Wunde!—Die Wunde!—
Sie brennt in meinem Herzen.—
.....Nein! Nein! Nicht die Wunde ist es.
Fließe ihr Blut in Strömen dahin!
Hier! Hier im Herzen der Brand!
Das Sehnen, das furchtbare Sehnen,
das alle Sinne mir faßt und zwingt!
Oh!—Qual der Liebe!—
Wie alles schauert, bebt und zuckt
in sündigem Verlangen!
(pp. 43-44)
Kundry does seem finally to have made him forget his mother. He has lost his sexual innocence and become preoccupied with the fire of erotic passion. Immediately, though, he is seized with intense feeling of the sinfulness of the desire that has threatened him as a result of Kundry's long passionate kiss. The question is why he reacts this way.
Parsifal's response to the kiss is partly of course the sort associated with loss of sexual innocence as symbolically represented in the biblical story of the Fall. His reaction, though, is certainly not owing to any specific, specially intense pious Christian upbringing by his mother. At least, we have heard nothing about such religious training in his case. His relationship with his mother having been, at the same time, especially devoted, particularly on her part, and Kundry's having identified herself with his mother in trying to seduce him suggest that his sense of the sinfulness of his passion involves a feeling that desire for any woman is incestuous.5 The desire he feels is painfully intense; but because he unconsciously associates it with his devotion to his mother, he cannot surrender to it.
While Kundry has succeeded in getting Parsifal's mind off his mother—on the conscious level at least—she has not managed to focus his thoughts on her again, at least not consciously so. Instead, his attention has been transferred from his dead mother to Amfortas and his suffering. Parsifal, to the seductress's “horror and amazement,” becomes wholly transported by a vision of Amfortas with the Holy Grail, or rather, to a visionary reenactment of the scene he witnessed at the Grail castle (p. 44). He imagines that while the Grail had the power to fill all other souls present with the ecstasy of salvation, his heart alone continued to suffer the torment of desire. The vision continues:
Des Heilands Klage [Qualen] da vernehm ich,
die Klage, ach! die Klage
um das entweihte Heiligtum:
“Erlöse, rette mich
aus schuldbefleckten Händen!”
So rief die Gottesklage
furchtbar laut mir in die Seele.
Und ich—der Tor, der Feige,
zu wilden Knabentaten floh ich hin!
(Er stürzt verzweiflungsvoll auf die Knie.)
Erlöser! Heiland! Herr der Huld[en]!
Wie büß ich Sünder meine Schuld?
(p. 44)
In his vision, he remembers hearing—or only now imagines having heard?—the Redeemer's lament begging to be saved from “hands sullied by guilt,” meaning of course those of Amfortas as Grail King. Parsifal felt—or at least now feels—that the lament was directed to him, and reproaches himself for having been a fool and coward in fleeing this challenge by pursuing “wild boyish deeds,” by which he must mean those pursuits that brought him to Klingsor's castle and that Gurnemanz characterized as those of a gander seeking to mate. Parsifal understands now what he witnessed at the Grail castle because he now has an emotional need to do so. Confronted by the desire Kundry has made him feel, he puts an interpretation on what he experienced—or reactively invents in his mind a visionary experience—that enables him to defeat or sublimate that desire by seeing such a victory as his divinely appointed mission. He responds to the tug of desire, in short, like a predestined knight of the Grail.6
Kundry reacts to Parsifal's transported soliloquy with “passionate admiration” (leidenschaftliche Bewunderung), but this does not prevent her from continuing to try to seduce him. Partly, this is because her pride as seductress, and simply as an appealing woman, is at stake. But she also wants, only unconsciously perhaps, to test his resistance to seduction still further, in order to admire his dedication to purity that much more. Ultimately, though, it is her own revulsion at the irresistible urge to seduction within her—the ‘low self-esteem’ of the slut, in today's social scientific parlance—that makes her want to test whether he is truly worthy of the passionate admiration she involuntarily feels for him, that is, whether she can trust his imperviousness to seductive guile.7 Can she be sure that she has at last found a man she cannot seduce?
Parsifal, for his part, is not unmoved by her ensuing seductive caresses. On the contrary, if he is able to see in them those she must have used on Amfortas it is only because they must even now have awakened passionate desire in him himself. He exclaims,
Mit aller Schmerzen Qual im Bunde,
das Heil der Seele
entküßte ihm der Mund! -
Ha!—Dieser Kuß! -
Verderberin! Weiche von mir!
Ewig—ewig—von mir!
(Er hat sich allmählich erhoben und stöβt Kundry von sich.)
(p. 45)
When he tells her to stay away from him forever, it is because he recognizes the seductive temptation her caresses and her kiss still potentially hold for him, that same susceptibility that proved Amfortas's undoing.
Kundry's passionate reaction to Parsifal's pushing her away is not simply the anger of a woman spurned. Ever the seductress, she instinctively tries another tack with him, appealing now to his pity. If he feels so strongly that he has been called to redeem the Grail knights, he should heed her suffering and save her by sleeping with her. In casting him in the role of Christ, she is of course trying to seduce him by appealing to the image he conjured up for himself in his visionary transport.
At the same time, Kundry is also assigning Parsifal a role she wishes him to play via-à-vis herself, that of Christ with Maria Magdalen. Thus, she claims to have been living at the time of Christ herself to have seen him with her own eyes, and to have laughed at him (pp. 45-46). She appears to beg Parsifal not to surrender to desire for her, as Christ did not for Mary Magdalen, and as Kundry claims, implicitly, he did not when she saw him herself. She does not explain, or indicate, why she laughed when she saw Christ, though most likely because his mind was on things more sublime than love of women, that is, because of an otherworldliness in his look or manner, like that to which the Grail knights aspire, whereas as seductress she believes that all men are susceptible to erotic desire. Her laugh, unconsciously perhaps, would likely have been meant to attract Christ's attention to herself, to demonstrate the truth of that belief, that no man is proof against the charms of a seductress like her. As she tells it to Parsifal, when Christ looked at her in response to her laugh his eyes did not fill with desire. She has longed desperately ever since to encounter a man who might react to her in that way.
Kundry clearly is inviting Parsifal to do as she claims Christ did then, to gaze at her and yet not surrender to her charms. But this is the invitation of a seductress still bent, consciously at least, on seduction. Thus she paints a picture of what happened every time she thought she had encountered a man who would react to her the way Christ did: when she imagines that she meets a man's gaze looking at her that way, much as she tries not to, she cannot help but laugh the way she did when she saw Christ, with the result that, in response to the erotic stimulus of her laugh—the sexual abandon the laugh betokens—the man sinks into her arms, surrendering to desire.8 In effect, she is daring Parsifal to look at her in a Christ-like way, while predicting that he will surrender to her charms, but claiming to him that what she really wants is for him to react the way she claims Christ did. But in pretending to him that this is what she wants, she is suggesting that resisting her is not what he wants in the depths of his being; if he wants to persist in thwarting her he now will have to surrender to desire for her, which is what she actually is after, of course.
The encounter that Kundry depicts for Parsifal as having happened time and again between her and Christ-like men differs from her portrayal of her claimed encounter with Christ in a crucial respect. With Christ it was her laugh that caused him to gaze at her, while with the others her laugh came in response to feeling their gaze already on her. She is saying to Parsifal that those men like him whose eyes have been drawn to her without her having had to laugh to get their attention are sure to fall into her arms when she then answers that gaze by laughing in her compulsively seductive way.
Once again, Parsifal does not take the bait. This is not to say, though, that he does not accept the role of savior that Kundry has just painted for him in taking this new seductive tack. On the contrary, he embraces the role both enthusiastically and genuinely, not least because it answers his need for sublimation of desire arising from his association of love of women with his mother's intense devotion. Accordingly, his response to Kundry's invitation to save her by sleeping with her is that this would, on the contrary, spell eternal damnation for both of them. Kundry clearly has succeeded all too well in appealing, as it were, to his messianic complex. The reason he cannot sleep with her is no longer the burning pain of sinful desire but his mission, which he now sees, at her suggestion, as including her redemption: “Auch dir bin ich zum Heil gesandt, / bleibst du dem Sehnen abgewandt” (p. 46). He says though, in effect, that he can assume this role vis-à-vis her only if she renounces “yearning,” by which he means of course erotic desire, or at least the compulsive urge to seduce men. In his flight from desire, he now identifies strongly with the Grail knights, whom he describes as yearning languishingly for another source of salvation than the well-springs of desire: “Ein anderer [Quell] ist's—ein anderer, ach! / nach dem ich jammernd schmachtend sah / die Brüder dort in grausen Nöten / den Leib sich quälen und ertöten” (p. 46). The knights represent themselves to his mind as engaged in a desperate struggle to mortify the flesh in hopes of finding a substitute source of delight and ecstasy for fleshly lust. Parsifal, though, seems to harbor doubt as to what this true source of salvation might be:
Doch wer erkennt ihn klar und hell,
des einz'gen Heiles wahrer Quell?
O Elend, aller Rettung Flucht!
O Weltenwahns Umnachten:
in höchsten Heiles heißer Sucht
nach der Verdammnis Quell zu schmachten!
(p. 46)
Or rather, he is filled with a sense of misery at the thought that in the passionate search for a most sublime salvation one may at the same time, like Amfortas, yearn after the source of damnation—by which he means the present danger, erotic desire. That is to say, he confesses here, through identification with Amfortas, his own yearning to surrender to desire.
Kundry reacts with “wild inspiration” to this indirect confession on Parsifal's part, which has suggested to her a new avenue of attack. Seeing that her kiss did not fail to awaken his desire after all, she places a spiritual interpretation on the kiss's effect, offering him the possibility of surrendering to desire while thinking that in doing so he is pursuing some lofty aim:
So war es mein Kuß
der welthellsichtig dich machte?
Mein volles Liebesumfangen
läßt dich dann Gottheit erlangen!
Die Welt erlöse, dies ist dein Amt:
schuf dich zum Gott die Stunde,
für sie laß mich ewig dann verdammt,
nie heile mir die Wunde.
(pp. 46-47)
Appealing to his messianic vision of himself, she tells him that he is called to save the world. For that he will need to achieve divinity, which her “complete embrace of love” (volles Liebesumfangen) will bestow on him, considering that her mere kiss has endowed him with prophetic vision (“welthellsichtig dich machte”). And to counter his objection, just made, that he was sent to save her, too, she offers to sacrifice her salvation so that he may fulfill his role as savior of the world. Thus, though she may seem to have the role of the devil with Jesus, appealing to his vanity—to the superbia of wishing to become like God—she is bent instead specifically on erotic seduction, hinting suggestively that sleeping with her will make him feel like a god, make him feel in that sense ‘simply divine.’
In speaking of her damnation that she would thereby render eternal, Kundry associates herself with Amfortas, through referring to damnation as her “wound,” thus slyly identifying herself with the suffering Grail King as the object of Parsifal's compassion. She shows herself ever the seductress when she appeals to his compassion, as she offers to “sacrifice” herself for him, by declaring “may my wound never heal.” Amfortas's wound does not heal because he cannot rid himself of erotic desire. For Kundry, being condemned never to have the “wound” of her desire heal—a healing that, for a seductress like her, would be something like having her hymen grow back—would be no damnation at all, on the contrary.
Kundry recognizes all too well that Amfortas and the company of the Grail knights are her competition. When she is now reduced again to trying to persuade Parsifal that he can bring her salvation by sleeping with her, he responds by promising her both love and salvation if she will show him the way to Amfortas. Her reaction is to erupt in rage (“in Wut ausbrechend”): “Nie sollst du ihn finden! / Den Verfallnen, laß ihn verderben, / den Unseligen, / Schmachlüsternen, / den ich verachte—lachte—lachte!” (p. 47). This response is that of the woman spurned, as though Amfortas were her rival for Parsifal's passion. Her aim is to destroy the rival's image in his eyes. As seductress she should know, however, except for her jealous rage, that she is giving the young man the wrong message, that surrender to her will not render him a god, even only in her eyes, but make him instead only the object of her scorn, as Amfortas has thereby become.
Recognizing that Amfortas is the object of Parsifal's yearning, Kundry is reduced to offering the bargain that she will show him the way there if he will first spend an hour of love with her; and she attempts again to embrace him. She of course knows quite well, as does Parsifal, that having surrendered to her, he could not then go and present himself to Amfortas as his savior, since he would have succumbed to the self-same temptation that Amfortas did. When she now lays a curse on Parsifal, after he has pushed her away to escape her embrace, her object remains that of the jealous woman spurned. The curse is made to prevent him from finding and visiting her rival in love, as it were, who is in this case a man, Amfortas:
den Weg, den du suchst,
des Pfade sollst du nicht finden:
denn Pfad' und Wege,
die dich mir entführen,
so verwünsch ich sie dir:
Irre! Irre!
Mir so vertraut—
dich weih ich ihm zum Geleit!
(p. 48)
It is important to note that she curses only the paths that lead away from her, not those leading to her. As we shall see, his pathway in quest of salvation does eventually bring him back to her; and in that sense, the power of her curse proves not ineffective.
The meaning of the actual curse is uncertain, because the power she invokes is not named, being addressed only as “you” (dich). But since she identifies this force as one most intimately known to her, we can assume that she is invoking the power of desire. The curse, then, has no magical force other than the magic of her erotic appeal. It is actually not a curse, but simply the wish that he will not be able to rid himself of the desire for her that she wants to believe she has awakened in him. Just as he cannot appear before Amfortas if he has succumbed to the same desire for Kundry to which the Grail King surrendered, he also cannot do so if he has not yet overcome the desire he feels for her.
Magic certainly is involved, though, in Klingsor's ensuing attempt to wound or slay Parsifal with Amfortas's spear; but this magic functions as an outward manifestation of an inward emotional state. The hurled spear hovers harmlessly over the young hero's head, whereupon he seizes it and invokes its magic to destroy Klingsor's palace. With this act, Parsifal has finally and completely renounced the desire that brought him there, the search of the gander for a goose, the urge to mate. The spear that wounded Amfortas fails to wound Parsifal because the Grail King had surrendered to desire while the youth has not. Renouncing and resisting surrender to desire and conquering it are two different things, however. Nor has he completely overcome a certain attraction to Kundry. Therefore, in taking his leave he turns and pauses to tell her she knows where she can find him again (“Du weißt, wo du mich finden kannst,” p. 48). He is inviting reunion with her, albeit not so that he can surrender to her, but to offer her salvation from erotic desire and the urge to seduction.
III
How will this love story end? That the tale is at least as much one of love as of salvation is suggested by Kundry's arousal with the arrival of springtime at the Grail castle. Gurnemanz discovers her when he hears her moaning in her sleep, and tries to awaken her: “Ha! Sie—wieder da? / Das winterlich rauhe Gedörn' / hielt sie verdeckt: wie lang schon? / Auf!—Kundry!—Auf! / Der Winter floh, und Lenz ist da!” (III, p. 49). Her arousal is not simply owing to spring's arrival, though. She evidently has been lying under the thorny hedge for some years, certainly ever since Parsifal's rejection of her advances; she is to this extent portrayed in the role of Sleeping Beauty, who in the Grimms' version (KHM 50) lies waiting for her Prince Charming hidden behind a great hedge of thorns. Considering that Gurnemanz, since we last saw him, has aged greatly (zum hohen Greise gealtert), we have the impression that spring has come and gone more than once in the meantime. The passage of time, to be sure, is not the reason for his aging, but rather—as we soon learn—it is Amfortas's refusal to celebrate the mass any longer. Yet Kundry's stirring in her sleep appears to involve not just a sense of spring's arrival but a ‘psychic’ awareness of Parsifal's approaching return. She has, after all, done as he invited her to do and gone where she can find him again.
Kundry has not come to the vicinity of the Grail castle with seduction in mind, but instead with the dream of worshipping the man who was able to resist every seductive charm she could employ. As seductress, she could not love the men who surrendered to her, only despise them for their weakness in succumbing to desire. Indeed, as seductress she did not feel desire, only the will to conquer, while yet yearning to be defeated. She served Klingsor because he, having emasculated himself, was at least proof against her charms—as prostitutes might serve a pimp who feels no desire for women. But Klingsor was rejected by the Grail knights for membership in their order and shunned by them because his triumph over desire came only after he was no longer physically able to feel its tug. For the same reason, he could not serve Kundry as the object of her devotion. Having laid on Parsifal the curse that he be led astray by the power of desire, so that he could not find the way back to Amfortas, she knows—or at least, believes—that if Parsifal does succeed in returning to the Grail Castle it will mean he has completely conquered desire and thus become the true and worthy object of her passionate devotion. What is depicted then in Kundry is a woman's yearning to devote and subjugate herself to a man worthy of her love; and for a seductress of her type, this can only be a man who has been subjected to the full power of her charms and not succumbed. At the same time, the ‘spell’ she placed on Parsifal has not proven ineffective, for as we remember, she cursed only the paths that would lead him away from her, not those leading to her, which latter, in the end, he has indeed followed after all.
Now Kundry seems intent on proving herself worthy of Parsifal's chaste devotion. The wildness she displayed when she served the Grail knights earlier has gone out of her (“aus Haltung und Miene ist die Wildheit verschwunden,” p. 50). Now she can dedicate herself wholly to serving (“Dienen … Dienen!” she admonishes herself), like the haughty virgins of folktale once the wedding night has put an end to their scorn of men (see for example the Grimms' no. 52 “King Thrushbeard”). In Kundry's case, it was precisely because Parsifal would not sleep with her that she now behaves like a devoted bride, indeed, like a nun as bride of Christ. She is rehearsing the role she now embraces as Mary Magdalen to Parsifal's Jesus.
Already, Kundry has become in the eyes of the old knight Gurnemanz the object of spiritual devotion, as a sublimation of erotic passion. He has harbored tender, paternal feelings toward her all along, as witnessed by his recognition of her voice when she was moaning (“Mich dünkt, ich kenne diesen Klageruf,” p. 49); his joy at discovering her; his desire to summon her back to life and springtime (“Erwache, erwache dem Lenz!” p. 49); and his physical efforts to raise her body temperature, to thaw her out, as it were (“Gurnemanz reibt der erstarrt vor ihm ausgestreckten Kundry stark die Hände und Schläfe [haucht sie an] und bemüht sich in alledem, die Erstarrung von ihr weichen zu machen.”) He rejoices at the change that has come over her, which seems to make her that much more an object of his devotion, now even adoration. He rejoices in his contribution to her apparent spiritual salvation, in his sublimated role as her angel of rescue.
The ‘coincidence’ or ‘magic’ of Kundry's awakening on this Good Friday is matched by Parsifal's arrival, in his wanderings, at Gurnemanz's hut that same morning.9 He has appeared there quite by accident. He does not know that he has now found the way back to the Grail castle. The impression is made, of course, that his arrival at that place at that time is by divine appointment. It is as though God has led him there.
Because Parsifal does not know that he has arrived at his goal, we are able to witness the behavior that characterized him on his wanderings. We know that his yearning is to heal Amfortas's wound, and that the means is the spear taken from Amfortas when the latter was seduced by Kundry—the spear the Grail knights believe is the one that pierced Christ's side on the cross. Thus, we see Parsifal now worshipping the spear, kneeling in silent prayer before it, and piously lifting his gaze “in ardent prayer” (in brünstigem Gebet) to the spear's point, which must be thrust into the wound if it is to be healed.
Parsifal's piety is an expression of his guilt at having failed to understand Amfortas's suffering—and thus to fulfill his mission of salvation—until he had experienced the same temptation by Kundry to which Amfortas succumbed and then incurred her curse when he rejected her advances. At the Grail castle before, he was still innocent of sexual desire, though in his passage to manhood the mating urge was stirring within him. His remorse now (“Und ich—ich bin's / der all dies Elend schuf!” p. 54) is therefore irrational in that he could not have been expected to feel what Amfortas had felt without yet having confronted loss of sexual innocence, as did not happen to Amfortas either until his fateful encounter with Kundry. What Parsifal's remorse expresses, in effect, is a wish never to have known desire at all, to have been capable of feeling compassion for Amfortas without having had to be placed himself in the position of being exposed to attempted seduction. The objectification of Parsifal's wish is his pain at hearing how, during the time of his wanderings, Amfortas meanwhile came to long for death and has refused any longer to celebrate the mass, with the result that the loss of this spiritual sustenance has sapped the Grail knights' strength and thus contributed to the death of Amfortas's father Titurel. (This effect on the Grail company is the same as that experienced by the gods in Wagner's The Rhinegold, but there the gods were deprived of Freia's apples, symbolizing desire, whereas here the knights are unable to partake of the host, which here symbolizes the opposite, the renunciation of desire.)
Parsifal now is consumed with yearning to fulfill what he believes is his appointed role as savior. Accordingly, by way of purification, he directs Kundry to wash his feet, and Gurnemanz to sprinkle water on his head; and after Kundry, on her own accord, anoints his feet, he tells Gurnemanz to anoint his head, so that he may assume the office of Grail King that same day: “(nimmt Kundry sanft das Fläschchen ab und reicht es Gurnemanz). Du salbtest mir die Füße, / das Haupt nun salbe Titurels Genoß, daß heute noch als König er mich grüße” (p. 56). His first act then, after Gurnemanz has hailed him as Grail King, is to ask Kundry to accept baptism from him: “Mein erstes Amt verricht ich so: / die Taufe nimm / und glaub an den Erlöser!” (p. 56). She reacts by bowing her head to the ground, appearing to weep passionately (“sie scheint heftig zu weinen”), whereupon he turns away from her, seemingly only to remark to Gurnemanz on the beauty of the meadow that day:
Wie dünkt mich doch die Aue heut so schön!—
Wohl traf ich Wunderblumen an,
die bis zum Haupte süchtig mich umrankten;
doch sah ich nie so mild und zart
die Halme, Blüten und Blumen,
noch duftet' all so kindisch hold
und sprach so lieblich traut zu mir.
(pp. 56-57)
He no doubt is thinking of the meadows he traversed during his just completed wanderings, but likely also unconsciously of Klingsor's flower maidens, when he talks about the miraculous flowers that wound themselves “passionately” (süchtig) around his body up to his head. And he may be secretly exulting in his “salvation” of Kundry, her transformation to a weeping penitent, when he talks about the quite different flowers on this meadow today, which give off such “childish” fragrance and speak to him in such a lovely, cozy way. The memory of his adventure at Klingsor's castle lingers on, and his passion for Kundry remains, even though sublimated as that of savior for his penitent, of Christ for Mary Magdalen.
That the erotic attraction between Parsifal and Kundry is still a factor is indicated by their reaction to the sermonette that Gurnemanz proceeds to deliver to them. He appears to be addressing Parsifal, to encourage him with a message of salvation:
Nun freut sich alle Kreatur
auf des Erlösers holder Spur,
will ihr Gebet ihm weihen.
Ihn selbst am Kreuze kann sie nicht erschauen:
da blickt sie zum erlösten Menschen auf;
der fühlt sich frei von Sündenlast und Grauen,
durch Gottes Liebesopfer rein und heil.
Das merkt nun Halm und Blume auf den Auen,
daß heut des Menschen Fuß sie nicht zertritt,
Das dankt dann alle Kreatur,
was all da blüht und bald erstirbt,
da die entsündigte Natur
heut ihren Unschuldstag erwirbt.
(p. 57)
He is telling Parsifal that nature is not sad on Good Friday, but rejoices because, although creation cannot envision Jesus himself on the cross, it experiences the effect his mission as redeemer has had on mankind. Not Parsifal, however, but Kundry, reacts first to Gurnemanz's pious words. She evidently identifies herself with these creatures of nature that “blossom and soon die” and identifies Parsifal with the “redeemed human being” to whom nature looks up because it cannot envision the crucified Redeemer. Moreover, Gurnemanz also unintentionally provides Kundry with an image of herself as “nature absolved of sin” which “today gains its day of innocence,” that is, an image of herself as restored to virginal purity.
Kundry reacts to this role that Gurnemanz unwittingly offers her by lifting her head and looking up at Parsifal “with moist eyes, quietly and seriously entreating him” (feuchten Auges, ernst und ruhig bittend). His reaction to her gesture shows that he, too, has made the identification of her with nature's grass and flowers. More than that, he also remembers her as having appeared to him from among the flower maidens at Klingsor's castle, judging from his words to her now about how he “saw them wither, those that once laughed for me”: “Ich sah sie welken, die einst mir lachten: / ob heut sie nach Erlösung schmachten?— / Auch deine Träne ward zum Segenstaue: / du weinest—sieh! es lacht die Aue. / (Er küβt sie sanft auf die Stirne.)” (p. 57). To be sure, he seems to be speaking merely of the flowers on the meadow that Gurnemanz has just described as having been moistened and revived by “a sinner's tears of remorse” (Des Sünders Reuetränen) and to be identifying Kundry with that sinner, saying that her tears, too, have caused the meadow to rejoice or “laugh” as he puts it. Yet when he asks whether nature's creatures that once laughed for him are languishingly yearning for salvation, the association of Kundry with the now withered flowers appears unmistakable. In any case, his gentle kissing of her forehead shows that he indeed envisions her in that role. Thus, Gurnemanz's little Good Friday sermon to Parsifal has the effect of bringing Parsifal and Kundry together in a sublimated love; and Gurnemanz thereby unwittingly casts himself in the role of older bachelor as matchmaker, a role that is itself a sublimation of desire.
Parsifal's entry into the role of earthly Redeemer is completed with his becoming Grail King, which he achieves by bringing redemption to Amfortas and, as a result, succeeding him in that office. The occasion for the redemption of Amfortas is the Good Friday mass at the Grail castle that is also a funeral mass for Amfortas's father Titurel. The latter's death in old age resulted, in the eyes of the Grail knights, from Amfortas's refusal any longer to celebrate the mass. That refusal in turn resulted from Amfortas's spiritual suffering over having to perform that sacred rite when he feels himself spiritually unclean as a result of his seduction by Kundry. Reversing the biblical admonition, the sin of the son has been visited upon the father; for Titurel had dedicated himself to an ideal of chastity and remained faithful to it, albeit only after having sired Amfortas. This contrast between father and son is underscored by the stage direction for the procession: “(… Von der einen Seite ziehen die Titurels Leiche tragenden Ritter, von der anderen Seite die Amfortas im Siechbett geleitenden, vor diesem der verhüllte Schrein mit dem Grale.)” (p. 58). The coffin of the dead father and the sickbed of the suffering son are carried in from opposite sides, with the Grail proceeding the son as a sign of his failure. Parsifal's role in succeeding Amfortas as Grail King is thus to replace him as the son for whom Titurel, in founding the Grail castle out of devotion to chastity, had wished.
As we noted at the outset, Amfortas is the case of a son raised evidently without a mother, having been brought up indeed in all-male company that has withdrawn voluntarily from contact with women, while Parsifal, who succeeds at chastity where Amfortas failed, is the opposite case of a son raised solely by a mother. We can imagine that Amfortas was rendered especially susceptible to Kundry because of his yearning for the mother he apparently had never known (like Tristan's yearning for his mother, who died giving him birth), and by the same token, that Parsifal, as we have seen, rejected Kundry's advances because his especially devoted relationship with his mother made desire seem incestuous.
Amfortas's guilt is that of a son who feels he has failed his father, especially that he has failed to live up to an ideal set by the father (p. 59). He suffers from the tormenting spectre of his father's spiritual purity, which was demonstrated by the—reputed—visit to him by God's angels. As we have noted, though, because Titurel sired Amfortas, the father's dedication to chastity was necessarily preceded by involvement with a woman. As we remember, too, it is curious that no mention is made at all of Amfortas's mother, much less of the circumstances of his conception. The impression is thus justified that Titurel's withdrawal from the company of women was not unrelated to the circumstances of his siring of Amfortas, whether out of grief because the mother possibly died giving birth to the son or out of revulsion at having surrendered to desire. Amfortas's guilty comparison of himself, as victim of seduction, with his father, as proof against desire, is in any case unfair and irrational. Titurel had known desire and surrendered to it before renouncing it; Amfortas, as a youth, was called upon to renounce desire before he had experienced it.
Amfortas's very special suffering in celebrating the mass, as we remember, was not just over the memory of his surrender to desire, but the stimulation of that desire anew brought on by the reliving of his seduction. When he now prays to his dead father, the “poison” of which he speaks is his own blood that, as we remember, he feels rushing to the wound in his loins when he celebrates mass: “Die schreckliche Wunde, das Gift, ersterbe, / das es zernagt, erstarre das Herz! / Mein Vater! Dich—ruf ich, / rufe du es ihm zu: / Erlöser, gib meinem Sohne Ruh!” (p. 60). It is that rekindling of the sinful desire awakened in him by Kundry that makes him yearn to be relieved of the duties of Grail King. For Amfortas, death seems the only salvation, the only escape from the reawakening of desire and the intensified feelings of guilt and sinfulness attending it.
Parsifal is able to redeem Amfortas because he did not succumb to Kundry and instead has sublimated desire through seeking the role of Grail King that Amfortas, by contrast, had had thrust upon him. Parsifal becomes Grail King only after he has had the chance to show himself proof against desire, while Amfortas inherited the role before he was exposed to seduction. Just as Amfortas's wound is the symbol of his defeat by desire, Parsifal's recovery of the spear that wounded Amfortas testifies to his victory over desire, the more so since the spear is believed by the Grail knights to be a holy relic (the very spear that a Roman soldier thrust into Jesus's side as he hung dead on the cross, John 19:34). Parsifal's redemption of Amfortas by thrusting the spear's point into his wound represents an act of purification, because the spear was the same one that was considered holy for having caused blood and water to flow from Christ's side, and Parsifal in turn has achieved Christ-like purity by overcoming desire. When Parsifal declares, “Nur eine Waffe taught:— / die Wunde schließt / der Speer nur, der sie schlug” (p. 60), he knows that the spear can heal Amfortas's wound only because his own rejection of Kundry's advances enabled him to recover the sacred weapon. And Amfortas's piously ecstatic reaction results from his recognition that recovery of the spear betokens redemption of his guilt. That is to say, for both Parsifal and Amfortas here, believing is seeing, not the other way around.
The spiritual ecstasy that seizes the company of the Grail knights finds objectification in Parsifal's apotheosis as Grail King. At his command that the Grail be uncovered, it begins to glow, light from heaven descends, and a white dove flies down to hover above Parsifal's head. In his own ecstatic vision, he sees blood flowing from the tip of the spear as though it is yearning to be joined with the “kindred” blood in the Grail: “Der [=der Speer] deine Wunde durfte schließen, / ihm seh' ich heil'ges Blut entfließen, / in Sehnsucht nach verwandtem Quelle, / der dort fließt in des Grales Welle!” (p. 61). The blood that Parsifal actually sees is perhaps only from Amfortas's wound; but in his mind certainly that blood has been purified, made “holy,” by blood that is miraculously flowing from the spear.10 Since he has recovered and “redeemed” the spear, he may associate the purity of that blood with his chaste renunciation of desire.
Similarly, Parsifal is filled with a sense, too, that Amfortas's suffering is blessed for having made his own entry into the role of redeemer possible: ‘Gesegnet sei dein Leiden, / das Mitleids höchste Kraft / und reinsten Wissens Macht / dem zagen Toren gab” (pp. 60-61). Having witnessed Amfortas's suffering, albeit without understanding it, Parsifal was enabled to associate it with his own feelings in his ensuing crisis of passion with Kundry. When he refers to himself as having been a “hesitant fool” to whom Amfortas's suffering gave the power of “compassion” and “the purest knowledge,” he is thinking of his failure to understand or inquire about Amfortas's suffering on his earlier visit to the Grail castle. Yet in rejecting Kundry's advances he proved himself to be another sort of “fool,” namely a sexual coward (in German, the adjective zag was often applied in this sense to men as lovers in Wagner's day).
The miraculous confirmation of Parsifal's sanctity—provided by the hovering dove, the rays of light descending from heaven, and the glowing of the Grail—produces a reaction in Kundry, too, yet one that remains ambiguous. Gazing up at Parsifal, she sinks down lifelessly: “(… Kundry sinkt, mit dem Blicke zu ihm auf, langsam vor Parsifal entseelt zu Boden. …)” (p. 61). Like the others, she seems to be overcome with feelings of ecstatic worship, only more intensely, so much so that she perishes. Or perhaps, seeing Parsifal confirmed as divine redeemer, she succumbs to a yearning for death, as a final and complete escape from the torments of desire, or the urge to seduce, and possibly with the dream of being reunited with him in heaven. Or does she expire because she now sees him as wholly and completely proof against desire, so that she no longer has any hope, however suppressed or unconscious, of seducing him even in her sublimated role as his Mary Magdalen? Or, amounting to the same thing, if she is ever and wholly the seductress, has her existence simply lost all meaning and purpose once she believes the ultimate object of her passion to seduce is utterly and completely beyond the reach of her charms? What appears clear, in any case, is that Parsifal's apotheosis and Kundry's death mark his final and complete triumph over desire.11
Wagner's source was obviously the epic poem Parzival by the medieval German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach. Like Wolfram's hero, Parsifal is a naive youth whose charming innocence is largely attributable to his having been raised by his mother away from courtly and chivalric life. He also shares with Parzival of the epic the failure to ask about the nature and cause of Amfortas's suffering; an ensuing, related pious guilt; and ultimate fulfillment of his destiny to become Grail King. Wagner's momentous change was in Parsifal's relation to women and feelings about desire. In the case of Wolfram's Parzival, this was wholly unproblematical. His tender relationship with his mother rendered him, if anything, eager for the company of women and plainly desirous of intercourse with them. Very early in his adventures, indeed, he falls in love at first sight with Condwiramurs—whose very name points to his healthy desire for a companion in love; he marries her, and much of his subsequent yearning is to be reunited with her.12 So boisterous and robust is Parzival that a pious hermit has to teach him to feel guilt about having failed to show compassion for Amfortas; and this guilt has nothing to do with having surrendered to desire. In the epic, Amfortas's wound does seem to be in the genitals; but his suffering would appear to be not out of guilt over having surrendered to desire but grief over having been emasculated (by contrast, Wagner's Klingsor emasculated himself in his desperate yearning to become a Grail knight). Wolfram's Grail knights are not depicted as on the run from desire. On the contrary, women form a part of the Grail company; and Parzival does not have to put away his beloved Condwiramurs to become Grail King. Instead of combating desire, Parzival and the Grail company in the epic poem struggle rather with religious doubt.
Notes
-
Richard Wagner, Parsifal: Ein Bühnenweihfestspiel in drei Aufzügen, ed. Wilhelm Zentner, Reclams Universal-Bibliothek, 5640 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1974). All references are to this edition.
-
Hanslick complained, “The ailing Amfortas remains a purely suffering figure, and there is so much talk about his searing pains, bleeding wounds, baths, and medicaments that our sympathy is clinical-pathological rather than tragic”; “Parsifal (Letters from Bayreuth, 1882),” in Vienna's Golden Years, 221. Wagner, however, upon conceiving the drama had worried that Amfortas might upstage Parsifal; Briefe, 394, 397, letter to Mathilde Wesendonck of 29-30 May 1859. Regarding Amfortas's wound in relation to his partaking of communion, Wagner explained the wound's reopening as renewed lust for life; ibid., 394. Wapnewski errs when, assigning phallic symbolism to the spear, he sees Klingsor's robbing Amfortas of it as resulting in a loss of manhood on the latter's part; “Parzival und Parsifal,” 52. On the contrary, Amfortas continues to be tormented by sexual desire.
-
Cosima recorded, in her diary, hearing from Hans von Wolzogen that many people, on learning of the action in Parsifal, were horrified by Gurnemanz's calling Parsifal a “gander”; Cosima Wagner, 2:42, entry of 3 February 1878. In his prose sketch the previous year (1877), Wagner had Gurnemanz tell Parsifal he is a fool and “stupider than a gander” and tell him to “go join the wild beasts”: “‘Du bist doch eben nur ein Tor und dummer als ein Gänser … Dort hinaus, geh deines Weges zum wilden Vieh!’”; “Zweiter Entwurf [zu Parsifal] (1877),” in Dichtungen und Schriften, 4:364. In the final version, Wagner has Gurnemanz specifically refer to the mating urge in telling Parsifal he is a gander who should go look for a goose.
-
Hanslick labeled Klingsor and Kundry “bloodless abstractions” and complained about “many sorts of contradictions and riddles” in what they tell; The Collected Musical Criticism, 308; cf. the translation in Vienna's Golden Years, 221.
-
Rank, in an early psychoanalytic critique, similarly saw Parsifal's repeated rejection of Kundry's advances as motivated by “the fixation of his desire upon his mother” and as a “warding off of repressed love of his mother”; Das Inzest-Motiv, 647. Thomas Mann, too, found the seduction scene to involve “the erotic mother-complex”; Wagner und unsere Zeit, 70. Dettmering, referring as Mann did to the parallel of Siegfried's association of Brünnhilde with his mother in The Ring (Siegfried, Act III, Sc. 3), likewise maintained that “One may speak expressly of incest … because Kundry indeed represents for Parsifal his tenderly loved mother” (208).
-
Hanslick complained, “In vain we ask how it happens that Wagner's Parsifal, who has never been enlightened as to his guilt and is himself conscious of none, should suddenly be overcome with remorse and contrition during the love scene of the second act and be transformed from a pure fool to a pure saint. … Kundry, transformed into a beautiful enchantress, gives him ‘the first kiss of love,’ and he jumps up, crying ‘Amfortas, the wound, the wound!’ and falls, nonplused, to his knees. [Let him who can understand that do so]”; Vienna's Golden Years, 218. Wapnewski correctly observed that since “Amfortas's sin is sexually conditioned, Parsifal must therefore be exposed to the same temptation” if he is to be rendered capable of compassion; Der traurige Gott, 232. Wapnewski, though, sees the point as being Parsifal's progress from an “unknowing animal state [and] therefore one of not being consciously capable of compassion … to that of a ‘clear-sightedness about the world’ that recognizes sufferings and therefore knows compassion, and, practicing such compassion, is empowered to perform the act of redemption.”
-
As Gregor-Dellin rightly remarked, “In her the craving for sexual pleasure struggles with the wish to be blessed with salvation through being spurned. With her it is worse than with other sinners who want to be saved from the curse [of the Fall] but not from pleasure” (12).
-
Cosima recorded that Wagner spoke of Kundry's laughter as being that of desire (“ihr Lachen des Begehrens”); Cosima Wagner, 2:68, entry of 23 March 1878.
-
Lorenz considered the “good Friday spell” (Karfreitagszauber) to be chiefly a matter of nature mysticism as opposed to redemption in the Christian sense of “absolution of mankind from sin” (343).
-
In Parsifal's eyes here, Amfortas is not only redeemed, but become like Christ. Wapnewski, though, rightly termed Amfortas “a perverted Christ,” observing, “He does not suffer as a guiltless man for the guilt of others; on the contrary he, the ‘only sinner among men free of sin,’ suffers for his own guilt in the midst of guiltless men”; “Parzifal und Parsifal,” 51. Though Wapnewski does not make the point, Amfortas's suffering is not only for his own guilt instead of the guilt of others, but for a limited and quite specific type, namely sexual guilt, for having surrendered to desire and for continuing to want to surrender to it.
-
The Grail company's celebration of Parsifal's triumph with the exclamation “Redemption for the Redeemer!” (Erlösung dem Erlöser!) has attracted recent critical comment. Wapnewski maintained that “redemption … is the one and only theme of Parsifal” and that not only Amfortas, Kundry, and Klingsor were in need of redemption, but Parsifal too; “Parzifal und Parsifal,” 51. Huber (59), though, saw the meaning to be that God needed to be redeemed by mankind through being liberated from the Christian concept of redemption. More convincingly, Borchmeyer (293) interpreted “Redemption for the Redeemer” to refer to the need to rescue the savior—as present in the Grail—from Amfortas's guilt-stained hands. Küng, meanwhile, suggested the exclamation was simply “a summing up of Parsifal's path to redemption,” in analogy to Christ, who too was “a Redeemer who first had to be redeemed from death by God” (331). Gregor-Dellin's explanation (23-24) was that by “Redeemer” Parsifal is meant, and that he is to be spared the heavy burden of becoming Grail King, or that the reference is to Amfortas and his being released from suffering—Redeemer being understood in either case as referring to the office of Grail King.
-
Groos observed, rightly, that “Wagner intensifies Wolfram's superimposition of genre elements from the saint's life onto the basic structure of knightly romance, creating instead a saint's life with knightly elements” and noted that “Wagner's transposition reduces the romance episodes to three static situations characteristic of the saint's life (anticipation, temptation, completion) …” (32).
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.
‘Alles was ist, endet’: Living with the Knowledge of Death in Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen
Conclusion: What Does the Ring Mean?
