SOURCE: Steinberg, Michael P. “Music Drama and the End of History.” New German Critique 69 (fall 1996): 163-80.

[In the following essay, Steinberg appraises Parsifal as a cultural and ideological text concerned with the crisis of modernity and the redemption of humanity.]

I. THE END OF MUSIC DRAMA

This essay is about Parsifal. It is about Amfortas's wound, the efforts to close it, and the meaning of the claim that it has finally been closed. That closure involves also the closure of music drama, the redemption of Wagnerian form now raised to the level of pure ideology. The essay's three-part argument involves the identification of three claims of cultural resolution and their internal contradictions. These claims I will call the end of music, the end of desire, and the end of history.

On the way to Parsifal and Monsalvat, I want to rest for a moment in that scariest of precinematic hotel lobbies: the Hall of the Gibichungs. I want to identify in Act II of Twilight of the Gods a moment of rupture in the ideology of music drama. The reimposition of that ideology will be the task of Parsifal.

Siegfried has forgotten Brünnhilde and has abducted her to be Gunther's bride. Brünnhilde exposes his treachery, and Siegfried is reduced to a state of utter unmusicality. Loaded down with leitmotivs, he attempts inarticulately to assert his innocence. His music seems to be gesturing to a state of lyricism that it cannot achieve. He struggles to get on top of the leitmotivs, and he can't. In short, he just can't sing. Not knowing that Siegfried is ignorant of his own mendacity, Brünnhilde pushes him away from the spear he is swearing with, replaces his oath with her own, and contradicts him. Her music—“Helle Wehr! Heilige Waffe!” [“Shining weapon! Hallowed blade!”]¹—instantly claims the level of articulation and lyricism that eluded Siegfried. Brünnhilde easily controls the motivic language and achieves subjectivity and lyricism by liberating herself from the burden of leitmotivic submission; she makes music, yelling herself out of the musical, hegemonic structure of The Ring and its musical rhetoric. At this moment, having lost the ring from her hand, Brünnhilde takes control of The Ring, qua music drama, plot, and style. She does this by discovering and projecting the power of Italian opera. Suddenly, she is Norma. She performs this heroic masquerade for the first time during the summer of 1876 in Bayreuth. Translating and transforming her music drama into the heroic subjectivity of the Italian opera heroine, Brünnhilde becomes once again The Ring's voice of disruption. As the Valkyrie, two operas and twenty years before, she had disrupted Wotan's order by enacting his true will. Now, six years into the German Gründerzeit and at the apogee of nationalist swagger, she disrupts again by reinvigorating Burschenschaft (fraternity) that surrounds her with Nietzsche's beloved lifeblood of the south: the transgressive subjectivity of pure voice.

Brünnhilde's life-force of history, her assertion of modernity, of the fleeting, the contingent, and the transient, is the death-wish of music drama. Brünnhilde's will, like Wotan's, is for the end of the gods whose institutionalization in bourgeois law and society—as Wotan laments—kills the will and kills the voice. Wotan and Wagner think this is the fault of bourgeois society; I think it's the fault of music drama. But Wotan's desire for the bourgeois apocalypse is also the desire for the end of music drama. And Wagner will not allow that.

In Act II of Twilight of the Gods, Wagner and the master discourse of music drama cannot control Brünnhilde's escape into voice and Italian opera. She is one of two women in this opera's plot; her foil, Gutrune, proves no challenge either to her or to music drama. Gutrune, as Jean-Jacques Nattiez has persuasively argued, is marked as a decadent by a vocal style lifted from French opera. Nattiez identifies Gutrune's melody in her “comic opera exchange” with Siegfried in Act II, scene 2 as a tune lifted directly from Auber's La Muette de Portici, which Wagner had heard.² The collusion of French opera (Gutrune) and Jewishness (Hagen, son of Alberich) lures music drama (Siegfried) to corruption and doom—a repetition, in Wagner's fantasmatic lineup of cultural criminals, of the alliance of Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn. But in this act II of Twilight of the Gods, the containment of French opera is outmaneuvered by the temporary resurgence of Italian opera in the voice of Brünnhilde.

But Wagner, like Wotan, does not cede victory to the transgressive Brünnhilde. At the end of the Immolation Scene, Wagner takes back the hegemonic form of music drama by taking away Brünnhilde's voice and (in a well known change of mind) placing final comment in the narrative voice of orchestral music. Six years later, he fulfills his own reappropriative campaign with Parsifal, the final return of music drama through its own sublation into the higher sphere of the festival play for the consecration of the stage [Bühnenweihfestspiel], a sacred sonic world where no one can have a voice at all, especially the soprano, who loses hers entirely at the end of Act II.³ The silencing of the voice, in particular the female voice, signifies the return of the repressor: music drama itself.

Parsifal is aesthetically constituted as the desire of music for silence. In its conclusion's projection of cultural grace it achieves a state of sublime silence. But that silence is actually a gesture of sublime silencing. In this way, Parsifal lies. The lie resides in the promise that totality and authenticity will be restored to a reconsecrated world, purged of the dissipating demons of modernity. Parsifal's aestheticism is a strong discourse, not the withdrawal into art but its opposite: the empowerment of aesthetic categories of harmony, form, and authenticity to return to the world the aura that religion had once provided. The end of Parsifal claims to deliver on that claim or at the very least to show how to do so. The governing metaphor of the grail reinforces the enormity of the cultural claim: the cup that held the blood of Christ is resanctified along with the world it represents. The means of the restoration is the cleansing of culture of the element that spilled the blood: the Jews. The Jew or the Jews form the cultural category, group, or person which calls into question, jeopardizes, or even prevents closure, completeness, and, potentially, health in the body cultural. The power of the ideology of aestheticism in the European fin-de-siècle—with resonances in the American one as well—is thus demonstrated by the force of its resulting exclusionary discourses. Parsifal lies because its claim to restore goodness to the world in fact delivers the world to racism and exclusion and thus to the severest evils of the modern age.

Antisemitism is one of these exclusionary and racist ideologies, not the only one. Indeed, Parsifal shows not only that antisemitism is not an autonomous or isolated ideology, but also that it combines into a complicated and overdetermined cluster of cultural hatreds and panics. In this cluster, cultural, racial, and sexual stereotypes converge as projections of others that reside too close to the ideologically projected ideal and pure cultural self. The cultural self, as this projection develops in post-1848 Germany, is based in ideas of solidity, respectability, and masculinity. Against these categories are those of the “outsiders,” in Hans Mayer's formulation, a cluster in which he includes Jews, women, and homosexuals.⁴ A notion of decadent femininity unites these categories. In Parsifal, they are efficiently and potently combined in the character of Kundry, who shocks Parsifal himself and the Bayreuth audience as well when she reveals that she witnessed the Crucifixion, and laughed. For that sin, she wanders through time and space, a wandering Jewess seeking redemption in death. She is not so much, as Nietzsche suggested, that “type vécu,” studied by all the psychiatrists in Europe,⁵ as she is a projection of all the cultural and sexual decadence that Wilhelmine burghers would want to purge if they were to feel at home in their opera houses, in their drawing rooms, and perhaps in their bedrooms as well. The plot of Parsifal concerns the damage done by Kundry, decadence personified, to men, to male culture, to masculinity. Hers is the damage wrought by modernity, troped as female and decadent. The redemption of humanity becomes, in Parsifal, the redemption from modernity and from history. The contradiction in the pattern emerges from the aporetic identification with the object marked for exorcism: with woman, Jew, and homosocial and homoerotic community.

II. THE END OF MUSIC

If the threat of modernity is cast as the reversal of the Goethean feminine, in other words as that element of feminization that draws healthy masculinity to demonic depths, then the rejection of modernity—or more precisely the redemption from it—requires the rejection of that feminization. The aspect of modernity that is feminized and feminizing is the condition of wandering. The antidote to wandering is standing still, just as the resolution of musical flux is silence. It is, in addition, the rejection of history and time in favor of space and stasis.

The dichotomy of Wagner as aesthetic revolutionary and cultural reactionary is complicated. His antimodernist stance is ideological on two levels: the transcendence of time in favor of space and stasis attaches itself to political and cultural ideologies that define and legitimate themselves in the form of the rejection of modernity as the pollution of allegedly constant norms, and, on a more formalistic (i.e., musical and dramatic) level, in the actual imposition of a simplistic and univalent time/space dichotomy, which neglects the possibilities of multiple temporalities that modernists in all artistic media came to explore.⁶ Wagner's self-institutionalization and self-sacralization in the form of the Bayreuth festival and its “temple of art” reached inward to the aesthetic framework of Parsifal and outward into the programmatic political aesthetics of conservative cultural representation.

In the cosmos of the Bühnenweihfestspiel, the three candidates for consecration are the work Parsifal, the house of Bayreuth, and the German nation. These three dimensions of sacralization are accomplished through convergent classifications of sacred space. Bayreuth had already been declared sacred, the new Wartburg where Wagner, once the rebellious Tannhäuser, but now the conservative Hans Sachs, could celebrate his holy art. Parsifal was now written for the house and was to be performed only in that house. Wagner wrote this desideratum into his will, and his widow Cosima enforced it with uncompromising ferocity, until the Metropolitan Opera successfully challenged her in 1903, in an assault on the grail that Cosima attributed to the Jewish origins of its general manager, Heinrich Conreid, né Cohn.⁷

It will be recalled that the plot of Parsifal concerns the reconsecration of the monastery of Monsalvat, in which the holy grail is kept. The place has fallen into disarray because the high priest Amfortas (a Wagernization of the mythical fisherking) has an unhealing wound in his side (decaying and decadent), which of course symbolizes spiritual and cultural decadence. He is the incapacitated Prometheus, too weak to perform adequately his ritual and bureaucratic duties. He was wounded by the same spear that had pierced Christ's side (this is new to Wagner's version of the story). The only curing agent is the “pure fool” of legendary prophecy, who will touch and heal the wound and take over the monastery.

The pure fool appears onstage with instant proof of his stupidity: he shoots a swan in Monsalvat's sacred forest. One will recall that Parsifal's son—in his future but in Wagner's past—is Lohengrin, who uses a swan as a means of transportation. The combined paradigms of Russellian (Anna, not Bertrand) and Benchleyan (Robert, not his son Peter) analysis suggest the following: Parsifal can be understood to be shooting his son's car. Perhaps he is not such a fool after all. Furthermore, the wounded swan necessarily becomes a metonym for Amfortas, revealing the Oedipal nature of the Parsifal/Amfortas relationship: violence, followed by the internalization of paternal authority and morality, followed by replacement of the father by the son.

As in previous operas, the principal characters assume dimensions of Wagner's own psychic projections. Just as Wagner was himself father Wotan and (grand)son Siegfried, here Wagner is both Amfortas the priest of a decaying culture and Parsifal the restorer. He is also Gurnemanz, the monk who narrates the story to us and to Parsifal and who brings Parsifal to Monsalvat in the suspicion that this may be the pure fool everyone is waiting for. Gurnemanz is sage, storyteller, and cultural planner. Parsifal is escorted into the hall of the monastery where he is instructed to witness an actual communion ritual, which Wagner placed on the Bayreuth stage. Parsifal's lack of comprehension of what he sees shows Gurnemanz that he is not ready (we are still in Act I) for his purifying mission, and must himself be purified first (Act II). He will be purified by resistance to the sexual advances of Kundry, the same temptress who had seduced Amfortas. Wagner emphasized the sacred nature of the staged communion ritual by requesting that his festival audience not applaud at the first act curtain; late twentieth-century international Parsifal-buffs never hesitate to show their understanding of his claims by loudly silencing the few applauding philistines among them.

Parsifal's most overdetermined moment, the moment that unites the three levels of consecration and sacralization mentioned above, comes at the point of transition from scene 1 to 2 of Act I, as Gurnemanz guides Parsifal from the forest to the hall of the holy grail. As the “March to the Grail” begins to swell in ponderous repetition from the orchestra, Gurnemanz seems explicitly to refer to the scene change by explaining to Parsifal, “Du siehst mein Sohn/Zum Raum wird hier die Zeit” (“You see, my son, here time becomes space”).⁸ Claude Lévi-Strauss characterizes this moment as “probably the most profound definition that anyone has ever offered for myth.”⁹ The word “here” refers both to a point in space and a point in time; in the German text it appears both spatially and temporally exactly between the words Raum and Zeit, removed by one word from each. The present tense is significant, as this is a moment that stops time, claiming to unite into one moment the scenes that this moment actually separates. The musical line that holds these words is a phrase that echoes the motiv of the march to the grail. This most significant moment is also the most paradoxical: musical modernism (chromaticism and harmonic fluctuation) serves a set of textual and theatrical ideas, which in turn serve an antimodernist ideology. Nietzsche observed this detemporalization of musical style and reacted to it with the phrase “the lack of melody even sanctifies.”¹⁰

Tonal music, of which the score of Parsifal is a late but definite example, may be describable as the aestheticization of time and temporality. Dissonance, both synchronic and diachronic, can be described in such a language as the creation of a perceived need for the horizontal harmonic structure to resolve itself into consonance. A musical form thus gives time an aesthetic shape of tension followed by resolution. Chromaticism, or the stretching and rendering ambiguous of the harmonic language, therefore affects music's relation to time. The intensity of chromaticism in Parsifal (a technique that matured in Tristan and Isolde) points stylistically to the abandonment of conventional temporality at the same time as the text points ideologically to the abolition of time. Nevertheless, stylistic/musical modernism and its implications with regard to conventional temporality cannot be said to share in the same ideological discourse of the antimodernism of the Parsifal text. The contradiction between stylistic modernism and textual antimodernism will be resolved at the end of the opera: as the cult is restored and the new age proclaimed, the music comes to a thoroughly conventional resolution in an extended bath of A-flat major that is reached at the phrase “Redemption to the redeemer,” referring to Parsifal/Amfortas/Wagner/Christ, presumably but not necessarily in that order of significance. This resolution is in marked contrast, for example, to the ambiguous and unresolved musical and dramatic conclusion of Tristan.¹¹ In other words, the pronounced modernism of the music itself dissipates and is absorbed into the antimodernism of the text and the stage. Within the work's musical language, therefore, time becomes space in two separate ways: in a stylistic way that places the work and its composer within the language of musical modernism, and ideologically in the abandonment of that very stylistic modernism in favor of the antimodernist abandonment of history for stasis. Gurnemanz, who at the moment in question in Act I has already written the end of his story, even if it will take two acts longer to unfold than he now thinks, thus links the plot of the story, in which he is both narrator and participant, with the transformation of the stage (Wagner gave directions that the scenery change visibly at this juncture) and with the musical structure, with which he shares his narrative duties. The end (in both senses of the word) of music will come at the point of resolution of its own structural tensions, which, if the principles of music drama are to be taken seriously, will come at the moment of plot resolution.

In plot terms, the transformation of time into space introduces the space in which the grail and the culture of Monsalvat will be redeemed. At this point Gurnemanz doesn't know that three acts will be necessary; he hopes that Parsifal will do the job right away. The transformation of time into space is the resolution of history into stasis. The space in question is sacred space; it is sacred space, whether temple, aesthetic form, or nation, that will carry the momentum of alleged historical resolution.

Insofar as Parsifal is Wagner, Monsalvat is Bayreuth. This connection is expressed with a gesture that unites the three levels of sacred space I am discussing here. The festival theater's unique acoustical properties provided the aesthetic rationalization for the restriction of performances of Parsifal to the Bayreuth. Only Bayreuth could provide the correct path to the holy grail.¹²

III. THE END OF DESIRE

The function of sacred space—of Monsalvat, Bayreuth, and late Wagnerian ideology—is to mark cultural redemption and hence to halt the passage of time in the guise of profane history. In the case of the late Wagner, the political and cultural ideologies of his earlier days form the cultural program of Bayreuth antimodernism. Paradoxically, aesthetic revolution, purification, and antisemitism are tenets of Wagner the revolutionary and modernist. Parsifal contains elements of all three, despite the fact that at first exposure the narcissism on which Bayreuth and Parsifal were built takes the focus away from any ideological position that transcends self-referentiality. The modern decadence that Parsifal the character within the work, Parsifal the text, and the Bayreuth festival itself were to exorcise is defined in an increasingly overdetermined fashion as the problem of the Jews, the urban, Eastern, and capitalistic elements who on these precise counts pollute the health and totality of Germanness. Indeed, the reemergence of antisemitic ideology in the late Wagner led Robert Gutman to call his chapter on the making of Parsifal “Moral Collapse,” and to juxtapose Parsifal with an antisemitic article of the same period called “Heldentum.”¹³ Both works advocate the Aryan purification of a culture decayed by racial pollution. The hero Parsifal, who gains his own purification by resisting the sexual overtures of the Jewess Kundry (who, as we recall, witnessed the Crucifixion and laughed), reverses the pollution of the cult/culture that dates from Amfortas's succumbing to Kundry (one meaning of his wound).

In this particular case, cultural pollution is also seen as gender confusion. If Amfortas's wound opened through his seduction by Kundry, the wound becomes a metonym of male invagination at the hand of the phallic woman. Furthermore, the bleeding wound suggests here a menstruating man, with the attendant qualities of femininity and pollution. The closing of Amfortas's wound represents, finally, a remasculation of authority.

In Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's film of Parsifal, the wound is represented as an autonomous entity, borne on a pillow with elaborate ceremony in the form a royal accoutrement. In discussions of Amfortas's wound, Slavoj Zizek has applauded this representation for its insistence that the wound “does not concern the body as such but the symbolic network into which the body is caught,” “a moral-symbolic decay.”¹⁴ I would insist on the recognition of the bodily housing of the wound, as an insistence that the body and its production of voice are the sites of operatic transgression and thereby a crucial site of the nineteenth century's ongoing production of subjectivity. Amfortas's fate is of course a function of his body, of the sacred body of the king and also of the singer. He has, after all, another fluid exuberance, and that is his voice. Zizek argues that the plot of Parsifal is about the restoration of bureaucracy. But bureaucratic order is a function here of cultural and bodily purity. Through Amfortas, the wound sings. Baritones have good instincts here: every performing Amfortas I have seen has instinctively clutched his abdomen and not his thigh.

Racism, moreover, as the leading modern ideology of cultural purity, is intimately tied to ideologies of the body. George Mosse has distinguished racism from nationalism in terms of the racist fixation on the body, as opposed to the more standard, nationalist reliance on abstract symbols such as flags and monuments. Nineteenth-century German racial ideology, including racial antisemitism, projects an aesthetic ideal of the classical male body as conceived at the beginning of this tradition by Winckelmann on the model of Greek sculpture and praised at its end by Ernst Jünger as “fluid marble.” To this ideal it opposes the racial stereotype of the cultural other, especially the Jew.¹⁵ That the object of desire is the classical male body adds a homoerotic element to racial ideology and its desire for purity of form. Parsifal reveals the convergence of racial ideology and homoerotic desire and anxiety, a convergence that might be said to inform much modern racism.

To what extent can we understand Gurnemanz's explanation “Here time becomes space” as a signal of the impending fusion of form and ideology, a fusion that occurs as time (history and music) becomes space (historical stasis, the repression of difference, and formal resolution)? The work's final prescription of cultural redemption necessarily equates the end of history with the end of music. History and music “end” (“are resolved”) with the end of Parsifal just as they are declared to begin with the opening of The Rhinegold. Parsifal's ideology of posthistoire thus claims to have transcended difference and desire, but the work's fissures show that these things have rather been repressed and distorted. Thus, Kundry's silence, subjugation, and death mark the emplotment of the transcendence of difference and desire, but also reveal the symptoms of their repression.

What are these symptoms of the repression of difference? The first is antisemitism as a mode of suppressing cultural difference. Since the stereotype of the Jew is that of the weak and the feminized, there is a distinct misogynist strand inherent in antisemitism. The purifying community of the grail is an all male community. It achieves its goal, as we have seen, with the simultaneous empowerment of Parsifal and death of Kundry. Now, the homosocial community of the grail is also homoerotic. Since its holy and morally ascetic aura represses any sexuality whatsoever, it clearly represses any hint of homosexuality. In its Wilhelmine context, homoeroticism is culturally defined as the desire that must wish its own end.

The ascetic and the erotic are intertwined in Parsifal. Erotic and homoerotic dimensions of desire accumulate with increasing measures of repression. The music of the grail is sinuous and seductive. This erotic aspect of the music clearly inhabits the drama's predominant homosociality, in which a sacred community of men is restored by way of male youth, purity, and beauty. Parsifal himself first appears onstage as a possible fulfillment of the “pure fool” whom Gurnemanz has just spoken about in his long narrative about Amfortas's misfortune. The musical and dramatic structure of that narrative fluctuates between the noble grand narrative and pockets of incoherence and nonsequiturs, musical and textual. In telling it, the serene Gurnemanz loses his calm. His incoherence is a symptom of repression: the repression of the fact that the “pure fool” is by definition a body—a male body without mind, thus a site of the erotic along with (in the sacred context) the denial of the erotic. The boy Parsifal is introduced as an object of desire, and the fact that he is presented as a mindless body brings the repressed category of erotic desire close to the surface of the music, in the form of a symptom. In his ideological path, Parsifal develops from object of desire (identified as such both by Kundry and Gurnemanz) to subject of desire, wherein homosocial society requires the silencing of the non-male, which means both woman and Jew—in a word, Kundry.

The swan that Parsifal kills in his violation of the sacred forest is indeed his alter ego: the instantiation of Parsifal as object of desire and the victim of Parsifal as subject of desire. Who, Act II asks, will take the place of the impaled swan and thereby repeat the impaling (invagination) of Amfortas: Kundry or Parsifal? The plan of Klingsor and his servant Kundry is to place Parsifal in that very position—to feminize and corrupt him via the weapon of his own desire. But Parsifal, suddenly armed with the consciousness of the grail, turns Kundry into his second deadened swan by taking the voice from her mouth.

The secret to the definition of Parsifal's non-desirous desire is the cultural language of homoeroticism. The homoerotic economy locks Parsifal into the paradox of desiring the end of desire—as synonymous with the end of music and the end of history. But large aporias open here. What is ideologically unproblematic is dramatically highly problematic and contradictory, for in Parsifal as in earlier works Wagner betrays flashes of sympathy and identification with those characters clearly marked as Jewish and hence as others. The same conundrum holds, in a more complicated way, when cultural sameness and its inherent misogyny produces a fantasy of an all male world, replete with homoerotic elements. The homoerotic becomes the compromise formation between the homosocial (the ideological parallel to the culturally pure) and the homosexual, which remains suppressed. In Parsifal, as in many contexts of Wilhelmine culture, the homoerotic becomes a troubled compromise formation between the communitarian and the aesthetic on one side and the transgressive and taboo on the other.

Despite the fact that for Wagner the homoerotic economy functioned to guarantee the repression of desire, the Bayreuth audiences most loyal to Parsifal during its site-exclusive first two decades were divided between the high Wilhelmine cultural sanctifiers and a definite homosexual subculture. In 1895 the notorious Oskar Panizza, Munich writer, critic, psychiatrist, and mental patient, author two years before of the antisemitic parable “The Operated Jew,” wrote an essay entitled “Bayreuth and Homosexuality.” In a shallow but symptomatically fascinating way, Panizza recorded how the community of the grail represented on the Festspielhaus stage was mirrored by all-male groups participating from the audience. He left the logic of this mimetic performance unexamined and indeed unmentioned, but the discussion depends on the assumption that something intrinsic to Parsifal is in play.¹⁶

The homoerotic/homophobic and the antisemitic aspects of Parsifal share this duality of attraction and repulsion. In the case of the work's antisemitism, this duality revisits a career-long ambivalence of Wagner's. It emerges most clearly in the written origins of his antisemitism, the 1850 tract “Judaism in Music.”¹⁷ Specifically, it emerges from the dismissal of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy as a Jewish and hence unoriginal, derivative, and parasitic composer. But the truth concerns how much Wagner learned from Mendelssohn. The anxiety of influence is unusually acute in this relationship, as is the duality of sympathy and repulsion. This duality plays itself out time and again through characters in Wagner's music dramas who are marked both as wanderers—a mark of sympathy—and as wandering Jews. Thus the Flying Dutchman most emphatically carries the burden of Ahasuerus. With The Ring, the advisor Loge is the ephemeral tool of the property owner Wotan: the banker Bleichröder to Wotan's Bismarck. Wotan himself, of course, is reduced in his post-Valkries depression to a life of wandering, and we might propose that the single dramatic function of his long interview—in Act I of Siegfried—of the dwarf Mime, whose stereotypical markings are the most pernicious of all, is categorically to liberate the wanderer from the Jew: the Jew in Mime, and the Jew in himself.

In the case of Parsifal, repulsion gives way to attraction on the Jewish question as it does on the homoerotic one. One of the musical truths of Parsifal is how supremely Mendelssohnian its music is, from its fairy-tale aspects—Elfenmusik—to its orchestration, to the burgherly pomp of its marches. This assertion needs more elaboration than I can give here. However, I want to mention one important example.

The leitmotiv of the holy grail, perhaps the work's central musical figure, is not original to Wagner but is a trope known as the “Dresden Amen.” Prior to Wagner, it was used most famously as a trope of similar significance in Mendelssohn's Reformation symphony. The upward, longing movement of the phrase can easily be heard as a musical longing for resolution, particularly the cultural resolution of Jewish assimilation into Christianity. This is presumably how Wagner would have interpreted Mendelssohn's own musically coded desire. Here as elsewhere, Wagner's reading of Mendelssohn would be a misreading, for Mendelssohn's Lutheranism was fully inhabited. Thus in Mendelssohn's musical subjectivity, the Dresden Amen is a declaration of achieved cultural community and not a confession of longing.

The Dresden Amen in Parsifal, now the motiv of the holy grail, is inscribed as a pine of longing. The trope appears often in Parsifal and its various internal narrations, especially the narrative in Act I of Gurnemanz, in which he tells the story of the grail and of Amfortas's troubles. But it also appears, ephemerally but with uncanny effect, at a most incongruous moment in Act I, from the mouth of Kundry. Moments after her exhausted arrival in the sacred forest and her gift of balsam to the ailing Amfortas, one of Gurnemanz's squires abuses her, asking why she crouches “like a wild animal.” She replies, with dignity, “Are the animals not holy here?”¹⁸ The words themselves are a complicated utterance: they indicate her knowledge of Monsalvat, its topography and ritual; they provide plot information, as Parsifal will enter shortly and kill a swan—a monstrous offense to the sacred forest where the animals are, indeed, holy. The words also indicate her sarcastic acknowledgment of her subhuman status in the eyes of the monks.

The relation of words to music here provides an example of Wagnerian leitmotivic dissonance, for it opens a deep aporia between ideological and emotional content. Kundry's phrase is sung, for example, not to the agitated, indeed animal-like noises that marked her initial entrance, but rather to the musical leitmotiv of the grail, which is the Dresden Amen. Wagner thus allows Kundry's recognition to inhabit a musically sacred figure. Now this may be a way of suggesting that even she is deserving of redemption. Or, more cynically still, it may indicate that she knows to invoke a holy tone when speaking of holy things—indeed that for this kind of craftiness she may be even more dangerous than previously thought. But the moment's emotional constitution argues for a different hearing, as it bears straightforward pathos and honor, and thus betrays a sympathy for the character, which coincides with the overdetermined cultural history of the musical phrase itself: the Dresden Amen, certainly since Mendelssohn, is a site of cultural openness and dialogue. The overwhelming thrust of Parsifal is to appropriate that spirit and devour it in the service of exclusion and ideology, but in this moment of Kundry's melancholic dignity a crack appears in that ideological edifice. For a moment, Wagner tells us “Listen to this woman!” Wagner produces Kundry so that he can silence her, but he also wants to listen to her. He resembles indeed the Wanderer in Act III of Siegfried, by this point in the drama a true neurotic bourgeois insomniac who awakens his former consort Erda in the middle of the night only so that he can tell her to go back to sleep. Erda and Kundry share a kind of wisdom, and the wanderer and Wagner alike betray their own desire to proceed—in the words of the Norns—“Down” “To mother” “Down!”¹⁹ Kundry is both fallen woman and wandering Jew. By allowing her—however momentarily—to speak, or rather to sing, through the motiv of the grail, Wagner enters the aporia in his own ideological apparatus. In a flash of uncanny self-disclosure, he becomes the wandering Jew Mendelssohn so that he can listen to the Wandering Jewess Kundry. Amfortas's wound is Wagner's ear.

IV. THE END OF HISTORY.

Amfortas's wound is the condition of modernity. The closing of the wound—the promise and achievement of Parsifal—is the end of pain and also the end of history: the end of listening. Amfortas's wound is of the body in the same way that the voice is of the body: in fact, we can say that the wound equals modernity equals subjectivity equals the human, bodily voice.

The curse and promise of modernity is the need for subjectivity to reconstitute itself continuously. In this respect, the bureaucratic mentality is the enemy of a mobile subjectivity. The modern ego rebels against the command to be am Amt [at one's post]. The wound of modernity—which antisemitism of course blames on the Jews—is the inability to be am Amt. To be am Amt means to becomes a Beamter [a functionary], to participate in the self-sacrifice of subjectivity. Amfortas's inability to perform his duty is the refusal to be am Amt: a refusal voiced to his father Titurel. The premodern Titurel—whom the modern audiences of Parsifal are in fact not allowed to see—did not have this problem and has no patience for the historical slippage that has shattered his son's ego. Amfortas is the Wilhelmine son: the incapacitated bourgeois heir and regent: Max Weber, Daniel Paul Schreber, Aby Warburg, as well as the ill-fated monarchs Frederick III of Prussia and Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria. This generation suffers from a burden that their fathers didn't have: the command to choose an identity and a way of living correlative to and compatible with the official culture of the German empire. Masculinity and respectability are now no longer civic, but imperial. In Wagnerian terms, there are no more Hans Sachses. Even Hans Sachs, by the time he gets to his final nationalist tirade at the opera's end in Munich in June 1868, is no longer really Hans Sachs, citizen. Having crossed the triumphal divide of the Battle of Sadowa, he has also shifted his frame of reference and self-reference from the civic to the imperial. One wonders, moreover, what the newly triumphant Walther von Stolzing will be like as a fully empowered mastersinger. Frankly, I would have no desire to find out. My guess is that in his utter lack of a redeeming neurosis à la Amfortas, Weber, and Schreber, he will act out without impediment the role of the fin-de-siècle imperial brat. My guess is that he will be a whole lot more like Wilhelm II than like the lost, neurotic, liberal monarchs Friedrich III and Rudolf.

Amfortas's alienation is not only generational. It is also cultural. Like Wagner himself, Amfortas is out of place as a Saxon Protestant trapped in a Catholic baroque play. His refusal to perform the ritual of the grail must be taken seriously not merely as a sign of incompetence but as the refusal of performance and theatricality. In this Bühnenweihfestspiel, it is the stage, the Bühne, to which he objects most. Living with the wound as an aspect of sensation and interiority, he refuses to honor its visual correlative in the vessel of the grail. The evolution of German Protestantism, as Heinz-Dieter Kittsteiner and others have argued, corresponds to the internalization of conscience and the increasing suspicion of representation.²⁰ Interiority resists mimetic display. The wound cannot be represented. Titurel wants to see the grail. In his father's house, Amfortas's duty of care of the grail, which he wants to reject, is identical to its visualization. Amfortas recoils from the demands of the theater, from the spotlight—the Lichtstrahl—that descends onto the ritual object. Thus the passage from father Titurel to son Amfortas is the passage from mid-nineteenth-century grand bourgeois to fin-de-siècle decadent, but it reinscribes as well the prehistory of modernity, which German historiography consistently places in the passage from Catholicism to Protestantism, from ritual magic to human autonomy, from ideologies of seeing to subversive, invisible interiorities—to ears and wounds.

This is the historical passage narrated and celebrated in Max Weber's aporetic masterpiece, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and its definition of modernity as the disenchantment of the world.²¹ Weber began work on this project upon his emergence from the years of psychic dysfunction that followed the death of his father. He thus lived the modern disenchantment through which the fin-de-siècle generation recapitulates the general history of modernity. The tragic irony of modernity—its iron cage, in Weber's formulation—is that disenchantment means both the restoration of the interior, autonomous voice and its second loss through rationalization and bureaucracy.

The generation of Weber and Amfortas suffered a particularly intense betrayal by their fathers. We might call it the Titurel compulsion, wherein the ideology of theatricality is imported from the south to serve the new imperial posture and power of the north. It is the combination of Habsburg pomp with Prussian power. No better geopolitical metaphor for this merger of cultural ideologies than Bayreuth, placed perfectly between Munich and Berlin, between Catholic Bavaria and Protestant Prussia, between the old power of King Ludwig and the new power of the Gründerzeit. It is this new, northern, imperial cluster of power and performance that breaks the backs of its sons.

As in the case of the repeated subjection of Brünnhilde—by Wotan, by Siegfried, by Wagner—music drama ends up a symptom of the bureaucratic side of modernity. Music drama rationalizes and systematizes the transgressive energy of opera and the voice. Leitmotivic writing becomes composition by total administration. But the voice remains the body's charismatic organ. The voice is the instrument of the siren and the prophet, of truth and of hallucination. Max Weber's scholarly classification of pre-rationalized and rationalized forms of political power into the charismatic and the bureaucratic carries as well his own political refusal to choose between charisma and bureaucracy, between voice and administrative order. As he decries the iron cage of law and bureaucracy, he prepares himself—in time and in argument—to reenter the public sphere as a framer of the Weimar constitution. At the traumatic moment of German transition from empire to republic, Weber is again am Amt. His ability, we might speculate, to recloak himself in the mantle of public and political functionality lies precisely in his seizing the moment of national transition. The death of Titurel qua imperial fatherland enables the wounded Wilhelmine son to return to public competence by allowing him to replace the Titurel compulsion with a new ethics and practice of public service—call it the replacement of the trope “vocation as politics” with the principle of “politics as a vocation.” Call it the return of Amfortas; no Parsifal need apply.

For Weber there can be no resolution, no end of history. Weber's refusal to choose between charisma and bureaucracy is thus confirmed by his refusal to legitimate any utopian or transcendent models of historical resolution. “Politics as a vocation” and “science as a vocation”—principles as well as essay titles—form and converge against the pressure of this conviction. Weber died suddenly in 1920. It would do no harm to rehistoricize the long Weimar decade of 1920-33 as the struggle between Weberian principles and Wagnerism.

Notes

1. Richard Wagner, Twilight of the Gods, Act II.

2. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Wagner Androgyne, trans. Stewart Spencer (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993) 86-87.

3. This last point I owe to Suzanne Stewart, “The Theft of the Operatic Voice: Masochistic Seduction in Wagner's Parsifal,” “The Rhetoric of Renunciation: Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Richard Wagner, and Fin-de- siècle Masochism” (M.A. Thesis, Cornell U, 1995) chapter 3.

4. Hans Mayer, Outsiders: a Study in Life and Letters, trans. Denis Sweet (Cambridge: MIT, 1982).

5. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (New York: Vintage, 1966), 62.

6. For a discussion of what I call here “multiple temporalities,” see Dominick LaCapra, “History, Time, and the Novel,” History, Politics, and the Novel (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987) 129-49.

7. Robert Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music (New York: Harvest, 1966) 409. There were several isolated European performances outside of Bayreuth before 1909. See Barry Millington's entry, “Parsifal,” The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, vol. III (London: Macmillan, 1992) 891. As for poor Heinrich Conreid, he got his final comeuppance by the Marx Brothers, who turned him into Mr. Gottlieb in A Night at the Opera.

8. Richard Wagner, Parsifal, Act I, scene 1.

9. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “From Chretien de Troyes to Richard Wagner,” The View From Afar (New York: Basic, 1985) 219.

10. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967) aphorism 6, 168.

11. The phrase “Redemption to the Redeemer” was inscribed on a wreath offered at Wagner's funeral by the Munich Wagner Society. Nietzsche speculated in The Case of Wagner that many observers must have made the silent correction to “Redemption from the Redeemer.” See Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner 182.

12. Having heard Parsifal at Bayreuth once, in August 1976, I concede grudgingly that the sonorities achieved at this point in the work are astounding and very possibly impossible to duplicate anywhere else.

13. Gutman 421-40. Gutman's scenario of Parsifal in the context of antisemitism is convincingly presented; he overstates his case a bit by suggesting a continuity between Wagner's advocacy of the physical destruction of the Jews and the adoption of Wagnerism by the Nazis. In the essay “Judaism in Music” of 1851, Wagner had advocated “violent ejection” or total assimilation of the Jews. In “Heldentum,” he stated the position of no compromise. Yet there remains a distinction between this statement and the explicit advocacy of annihilation; to say nothing of the distinction between advocacy and practice. In a historiographical climate that moves in the direction of denying the “uniqueness” of Nazi policy, it is crucial on all fronts to reemphasize it and not to chart facile continuities or causalities.

14. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989) 78.

15. George Mosse, “Racism and Nationalism,” an inaugural lecture in the A. D. White Professorship-at-Large, at Cornell U., 21 April 1994.

16. Oskar Panizza, “Bayreuth and Homosexuality.” Die Gesellschaft, Jan. 1895.

17. Richard Wagner, Das Judentum in der Musik (Leipzig: J. J. Weber, 1869).

18. Parsifal, Act I, scene 1.

19. Twilight of the Gods, Prelude.

20. See Heinz-Dieter Kittsteiner, Die Entstehung des modernen Gewissens (Frankfurt/Main: Insel, 1991).

21. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Harper Collins Academic, 1991).