SOURCE: Frye, Northrop. “The World as Music and Idea in Wagner's Parsifal.” Carleton Germanic Papers 12 (1984): 37-49.

[In the following essay, Frye surveys the literary and mythological sources of Wagner's opera Parsifal, and associates the work's theme and music with the concepts of Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy.]

On the subject of Wagner I have to speak as a pure outsider. I am interested in Wagner as a creative figure with an immense cultural influence, but I have never been to Bayreuth: I have seen very few Wagner operas, and the whole spectacular side of Wagner, the spears that freeze over the heads of the virtuous, the swans and doves and dragons and other ambulatory fauna, has always been of minor interest to me. In fact I have reservations about the genre itself. I once saw a work of Monteverdi in which the singers performed offstage while the action on the stage—an episode from Tasso—was mimed, and I have never quite lost the feeling that that was the direction in which opera should have developed.

Considering the time and place of my youth, it was inevitable that there should be a long interval between my first music lessons and my first opera (which was Lohengrin). Hence my early musical experiences crystallized around the great keyboard composers, who produced the music I feel I really possess. Then I went through a period, during the Second World War, when I loathed Wagner's music to the point of physical nausea. That meant, of course, that I was accepting the Nazi identification with Wagner, and such paranoid elements in Wagner's character as his anti-Semitism seemed to me at that time very central. So I can understand even Nietzsche's hysteria on the subject of Wagner in general and of Parsifal in particular, although the source of my own hysteria was anti-Nazi and not anti-Christian. I learned from this negative experience not to trust value-judgments too much, even when they come from the pit of the stomach, which is where the sixteenth-century alchemist van Helmont located the soul. Nevertheless it is sometimes an advantage to have come to such a controversial figure as Wagner the hard way, so that the stock prejudices against him have already been made conscious.

One of the most extraordinary features of Wagner's mind, which is familiar but still needs emphasizing, is the way in which all his mythological themes seemed to be present to him at once, aspects of a single colossal vision that he turned to one at a time. If the operas were all alike this would not be remarkable: it is their individuality that makes it so. We remember that Lohengrin was Parsifal's son, that the central and obvious source for the Parsifal story was the Parzival of the medieval poet Wolfram von Eschenbach, who appears in his own right as a character in Tannhäuser, and that Wagner had originally thought of introducing Parsifal as a minor character into the later part of Tristan. So we are not surprised to find that he had been reading Wolfram and pondering an opera on his hero quite early in his career, around 1845. But by the time he was able to give his full time and energy to the subject he was aware that it would probably be his last opera, and in a letter to King Ludwig, after making his regulation plea that this time he must have complete freedom, he adds that, like William Tell, if his arrow fails he has no other to send after it. A touch of genuine pathos here is given by the fact that «Parsifal» was Wagner's private name for King Ludwig, and that Wagner was dead within a few months of Parsifal's first performance.

The story of Parsifal comes from one of the Grail romances. There are so many Grail romances, and they interlock in such curious ways, that one feels at first that there must have been some archetypal poem which contained all the essential Grail themes, of which the poet we happen to be reading has picked up only bits and pieces. But we soon realize that criticism needs another conception when dealing with legends like this, something closer to «total tradition» than to «lost first poem». A great myth like that of the Grail means everything essential that it has ever been made to mean in the history of its development, and the complete story is the one that emerges gradually in the course of time, which in English literature takes us down through Malory to Tennyson, Swinburne, Charles Williams, and many others still to come.

Wagner will always be slightly peripheral to the total Grail story, I think, because in Parsifal, as in Tristan, he obliterates the Arthurian context of the cycle. To adapt a phrase of Vinaver about Malory, he has no Camelot to balance his Corbenic [Malory's name for the Grail castle], and so we have no contrasting base of social operations and no roots in a specific body of legend. The Ring is solidly entrenched in the Siegfried story, but a Grail story without an Arthurian court is as disembodied as an Odyssey without Ithaca. A work of art derives its identity from its context within the art, including the context of its tradition, and anything that has to be called a Bühnenweihfestspiel clearly has problems with identity. I am not speaking of anything that Wagner should have done and did not do: I am trying to indicate the context of what he did. Parsifal belongs to a genre of drama that I have elsewhere called the auto (taking the word from Calderón): a musical and spectacular drama that is neither tragic nor comic, but presents an audience with a central myth in its cultural tradition, like the Biblical plays of the Middle Ages. The latter were associated with the Feast of Corpus Christi, and the symbol of communion so prominent in Parsifal is appropriate to its tradition.

For most of us the Holy Grail is a part of a Christian legend. It was, according to tradition, the cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper, when he identified the wine in it with his own blood. It was later used to catch the actual blood and water that flowed from his side when it was pierced, on the cross, with a lance of a Roman soldier, traditionally named Longinus. Bleeding lance, or spear, and chalice of divine blood thus form together an unauthorized but very haunting pair of Christian symbols. When Wagner read Wolfram, he was, according to his letters to Mathilde Wesendonk, disappointed in him, and seems to have got more, at least at first, from Wolfram's main source Chrétien de Troyes and from the poets who continued Chrétien's unfinished story. One reason, it seems clear, was that Wolfram has no notion of a Christian context for his imagery. Wolfram's Parzival comes to the castle of the Grail, and sees borne in procession there a number of mysterious objects. They include a bleeding lance, but it is not said to be the lance of Longinus; they include a Grail, but the Grail in Wolfram is not a chalice: it is apparently a stone, though a stone with miraculous healing powers, able to raise the phoenix from its ashes. The manuscripts, which clearly reflect confusion in the minds of their scribes, usually call it lapsit exillis. If lapsit is a scribal error for lapis, then it could be lapis exilis, slender stone, whatever that means, or lapis elixir(?) the philosopher's stone of alchemy, or lapis exilii or exsulis, stone of exile, which suggests a meteorite fallen from the sky.

The conception of the Grail as the chalice of the passion of Christ is associated with another cycle of stories connected with Joseph of Arimathea, who is said to have brought the Grail to Glastonbury in England. As we push further into the stories, there seem to be hints of Celtic and pre-Christian sources, where lance and grail were sexual and fertility symbols, emblematical of love and war, as Yeats would say. Sometimes the Grail is not a cup but a flat dish, a platter or salver, which seems to be the original meaning of the word grail. Sometimes a sword replaces the spear or lance, and in the Welsh version of the Percival story, Peredur, there is a procession bearing a bleeding lance and a severed head. As lance and grail became more fixed in the Christian legend, the alternative images, the sword, the dish, the severed head, began to cluster around the passion of John the Baptist, whose birth is traditionally at the summer solstice, at the opposite end of the calendar from the birth of Christ. The John the Baptist parallels, whatever their actual importance, were emphasized by the Grail scholar Karl Simrock, who was one of Wagner's sources. Nineteenth-century poets tended to be more interested in the John the Baptist passion than in that of Christ, because the women connected with it, traditionally named Salome and Herodias, could be so easily assimilated to their cherished theme of the femme fatale. We notice that «Herodias» is one of the names that Klingsor applies to Kundry. Herodias also appears in nineteenth-century fiction as the name of a female counterpart of the Wandering Jew: this is clearly one of the roles associated with Kundry, who says that she laughed at the passion of Christ, and has been looking for the release of death ever since. Other commentators have connected the four main images of the two legends, lance, chalice, sword, dish, with the four suits of the Tarot pack of cards, but Wagner does not follow them, though a number of other writers did so, notably Yeats.

In any case the Christian associations of the imagery seem to go back to fertility images, cauldrons of plenty and the like, which are older than Christianity. We may compare the growth of the story best known to us as that of St. George and the dragon, which also evolved from a pre-Christian into a Christian legend. Here a young knight comes over the sea to a waste land ruled by an aged and impotent king, whose land is laid waste by a dragon. He kills the dragon, rescues and marries the king's daughter (who has just been chosen by lot to be fed to the dragon), and becomes the new king. The overtones of a nature-myth where winter, sterility, age and death give place to their opposites is clear enough. But the same story becomes absorbed into Christian symbolism, where Christ, the new or second Adam, kills the dragon of death and hell, rescues his bride the church, and redeems the old and impotent king who is the first Adam. The close relationship of this myth to that of the Grail story needs no labouring.

An enthusiastic Wagnerian, Jessie Weston, who also translated Wolfram's Parzival into English verse, was an Arthurian scholar whose book, From Ritual to Romance, attempted, on a basis of Frazer and similar writers of his generation, to trace the Grail stories back to a pre-Christian mythology. Her book was a definite and acknowledged influence on Eliot's Waste Land, but The Waste Land, while it uses a good deal of Frazerian and pre-Christian imagery, is again a Christian poem, in which an aged and impotent king seems to be identified both with Wolfram's «Fisher King» and with the first Adam. There are several Wagnerian echoes in Eliot's poem, though the only one linked to Parsifal is a quotation of the last line of Verlaine's sonnet on Parsifal, which refers to the boys' choir singing in the dome («coupole») at the end of Act One, and prophesying the coming of a compassionate fool. Eliot puts this, as we should expect, in a grimly ironic context.

Verlaine treats Parsifal as simply Christian in its imagery, but Wagner also gives us a powerful sense, especially in the Good Friday music of the third act, of an immemorial revival of nature pushing its way through winter to spring. He has not eliminated the pre-Christian fertility and nature-myth basis of the story, nor has he tried to do so. The Christian setting of the opera, therefore, needs to be approached with some caution. Anfortas in Wolfram is wounded in the testicles, which makes him a quite explicit symbol of sterility, and brings him closer to Attis and other dying fertility gods than to Christ. Wagner's Amfortas is wounded in the side like Christ, and by the same spear or lance, though, unlike Christ, he acquires his wound as a result of sin and weakness, and can only be healed by the same spear. Parsifal is the agent of Amfortas' redemption, but he is not a duplicate of Christ, even though Kundry does seem to address him once as though he were. For one thing, as Wagner remarked, Parsifal is a tenor, which in our musical tradition will not do for Christ. He is a figure of a post-Christian legend, much more in the position of, say, the Knight of Holiness identified with St. George in the first book of Spenser's Faerie Queene, a human figure anxious to follow Christ in his dragon-killing quest, but subject to human limitations and frailties on the way. Redemption must come to the redeemer, as the text says. Parsifal, it is emphasized, is primarily a reine Tor, a pure fool, a phrase which makes no sense when applied to Christ. What sense does it make when applied to Parsifal?

We can get two clues to this, one from the greatest fool in literature, the Fool in King Lear, the other from Wolfram. The Fool in King Lear does not lack intelligence: while he is on the stage he is generally the shrewdest person there. But he is a «natural»: he cannot help telling the truth, and is tolerated as an entertainer because, as Freud explained centuries later, the sudden and disconcerting emergence of the truth is the basis of most wit and humor. In Shakespeare, as in every poet of his day, there are two levels of nature, the higher nature that God originally created for man and the lower nature that man entered with his fall, the level of nature that Edmund accepts when he says «Thou, Nature, art my goddess». The Fool is a survival from the higher nature of truth and loyalty, who can exist in a lower world only through the very limited privileges that a licensed fool has. Goneril, we note, does not believe that the Fool is really a fool, because he is a «natural» on a level of nature that she does not know exists. Parsifal is not born with the ability to see things as clearly as the Fool does, but he has the same instinctive sympathy with Amfortas that the Fool has with Lear, a sympathy symbolized by his feeling the same pain that Amfortas feels. Such sympathy is a quality of innocence, and enables Parsifal to destroy the illusions of Klingsor, as innocence and illusion cannot ultimately inhabit the same world.

In Wolfram Parzival comes, by accident, to the castle of the Grail, meets the keeper of the Grail there, called also the Fisher King, who is impotent and suffering, and sees the great procession with the bleeding lance and the holy stone. The latter, it appears, can cure everything except what ails the Fisher King. Parzival, whose father had died in his infancy, has been taught by his mother and by an old knight named Gornemans to behave respectfully when with strangers, and above all not to ask too many questions. So he watches the mysterious procession without comment or inquiry, or expressing the curiosity he feels. The next day he discovers that his silence was not only a grave discourtesy but something like a mortal sin. If he had asked the question the king's agony would have ended, and the waste land transformed into a garden. As he did not, he is reviled and cursed as the greatest disaster that ever came to the land.

At first this sounds like one of those irrational situations that occur in romance simply because they occur, included by Wolfram because it was in his source. The question of why it was in his source, even if we could answer it, would take us too far from Wagner. Almost always, in romance as elsewhere, the hero succeeds by doing what his elders have told him to do, minding his manners, and keeping his mouth shut. A male-centered literature has tended to associate curiosity with the disasters caused by the inherent weakness of females. Yet Parzival's situation is a most eerily suggestive one none the less. Perhaps this is partly because we have all had dreams in which we accepted mysterious and portentous imagery without question, and may have felt on waking that if we had only been sufficiently conscious to ask ourselves about the meaning of what we saw, we might have made a major breakthrough to another dimension of experience altogether. We have mentioned Eliot, and we may remember how as early as Prufrock Eliot is haunted by the theme of “some overwhelming question”, which he associates with the return of Lazarus from the dead.

In Wolfram, Parzival eventually gets back to the Grail castle near the end of the story and asks the healing question, which appears to be something like: «Dear uncle, why do you have this terrible pain in the testicles?» Even Wagner quailed before the prospect of putting this into recitativo, although he had, as we saw, already moved the area of pain to a more respectable address. In Chrétien de Troyes the question is rather «Whom does the Grail serve?», a much more profound question, but a superfluous one for Wagner, for whom the Grail obviously serves the knights of the Grail. Wagner has redistributed the traditional themes of his sources in a most ingenious way. The theme of sexual impotence is transferred to Klingsor, who has castrated himself in order to achieve purity through an act of self-will. Klingsor therefore really is the life-denying spirit that Nietzsche thought he saw in the whole opera. The equivalent of Parzival's failure to ask the crucial question comes when Gurnemanz decides that, prophecy or no prophecy, Parsifal is nothing but a fool.

This happens at the end of the first act, in symmetrical contrast to Parsifal's succession to Amfortas as leader of the Grail knights at the end of the third. It is a rejection by a father figure, more or less: at least Gurnemanz has previously addressed Parsifal as «my son». In the second act Parsifal descends into a world of illusion which Wagner obviously associated, as we should do, with Parsifal's own unconscious. Naturally he meets in that world the ghost of his mother Herzeleide, whom he has, unknown to himself, violated, that is, killed, as he has broken her heart by leaving her. Herzeleide is personated by Kundry, the one female figure of the opera, who represents all the ambivalence of traditional Christianity to female figures. In the Bible the symbolic maleness of God seems to represent the fact that nature, which is usually female in mythology, is morally alien to man and keeps him imprisoned in an endless round of death and rebirth. The flower-maidens Parsifal meets are spirits of nature: they are not evil, but they are creatures of a morally irresponsible and non-human world. The redeeming God has to be male, but man, who is to be redeemed, is in that context symbolically woman, the forgiven harlot who appears in Old Testament prophecy and as the Magdalen figure of the Gospels.

Kundry is neither wholly a siren of nature nor a Magdalen, but is torn between the two, an Ariel who desperately longs to be a Caliban, the servant of a human society, but cannot live in that world either. In Klingsor's world she feels that Parsifal could be her saviour if she could get into sexual contact with him, and Parsifal has to explain to her that she cannot be redeemed by her own desire. In the Grail world she becomes, in the third act, a forgiven and released Magdalen figure. Wagner is said to have been annoyed by those who pointed to the Kundry-Magdalen parallels, but he could hardly have put her through the routine of washing Parsifal's feet and wiping them with her hair without feeling that there was an echo in the room somewhere.

We have been speaking of Christian redemption in Parsifal, but Wagner had also been developing an interest in Buddhism, running parallel to his interest in Christianity though not, as he saw it, inconsistent with it. This had come largely from his reading of Schopenhauer, and before he wrote Parsifal Wagner had meditated dramas on both Jesus and Buddha. In Buddhism the great enemy is illusion, and illusion is caused by the ego-centered nature of our perception. Here again we have two levels of nature, though metaphorically the better one is usually thought of as deeper rather than higher. In this context Parsifal's confrontation with the memory of his mother represents the deepest hold that the habit-energy of his ego still has on him, and the only way to break from it is through compassion, the sudden sense of identity with Amfortas that cuts him loose from Kundry. Buddhism also puts a high valuation on the stillness and the calmness of mind that comes from emptying it of self-conscious thoughts, and the «pure fool» aspect of Parsifal, which sometimes leaves him unable to articulate the simplest sentence, is connected with that.

In the Ring cycle the disturbances set in motion by Alberich's theft of the gold cause a crisis among the gods. The gods, or at least Wotan, find that they have become an establishment, and get caught up in all the casuistry and false decisions of an establishment mentality. At the end of Götterdämmerung the gods have had it, and the new reign of man is prophesied. There were contemporary and later German writers, some of them insane, who were or tried to be polytheists with a genuine belief in the old gods, Classical or Nordic. But Wagner was not one of them, and no other conclusion for the Ring was conceivable except a humanistic one. What kind of man would genuinely deserve to succeed the gods? This, I think, is the question that Parsifal is mainly concerned with. Parsifal assumes that the coming of Christ, symbolized by the Grail, has been essential to the answer, so the question takes the form of what the model of human action is that Christianity provides. The answer is still complex, but its principle is that true human action is anti-heroic, not in the sense of lacking courage, but in regarding patience and endurance as still greater virtues. In the Ring all the heroic quests are essentially ways of feeding the gods, keeping them supplied with the youth and energy essential to their supremacy. The Valkyries, the choosers of those slain in battle, symbolize this conception of the heroic life as a continuous sacrifice by man to nourish the gods. In Parsifal the Grail does the feeding, because the essential sacrifice, of God for man, which is what keeps man alive, has already taken place, and reversed the direction of the cult of heroic warfare.

The theme of the renunciation of a heroic quest, which runs all through Parsifal, had already appeared in the Ring, because the whole titanic struggle strated by Alberich's theft can only end when the stolen gold is put back where it was. The effectiveness of this theme for romance was demonstrated in the next century by the sensational success of Tolkien, who retells the story of a ring that must not be won but lost, the Nibelung story interpenetrated with the spirit of redeeming simplicity in Parsifal, symbolized by his «hobbits». The Parsifal is much more explicitly the drama of a renounced quest, to the point of being something of an anti-drama. This is because the central theme of the spiritual growth of Parsifal himself is so closely connected with the theme of temptation.

When Milton wanted to show the nature of genuine Christian heroism in Paradise Regained, he chose the theme of the temptation of Christ in the wilderness by Satan. That meant an epic of four books in which Satan thinks up one enticing illusion after another, while Christ merely stands in the centre and rejects them. An epic based on the Central episode of Buddha's life, his enlightenment under the Bo tree, rejecting one after another of the illusions of Mara, would not be very different. In this kind of theme the dramatic situation is the reverse of the moral one: our sympathies are dramatically with Satan, with Mara, with Klingsor, because they do the dramatic work. To make heroes of Jesus and Buddha and Parsifal because they refuse to do it makes moral sense, but a dramatic paradox. One feels that while there is a lot going on in Parsifal, what is not going on, to any great extent, is the kind of dramatic action that would be needed (at least up to Wagner's time) to keep a purely verbal play on the stage.

And yet in all major drama a neutralizing balancing power, which the Greeks called nemesis in its tragic aspect, can be seen at work. In Shakespeare's romances, while the surface action moves towards the marriage of young and happy people, the major action is a setting right of something wrong in the past. The theme of The Tempest looks as though it were going to be Prospero's revenge on his enemies by his power of magic. But Prospero renounces both his revenge and his magic, and regains his dukedom, as W. H. Auden makes him say, at the moment when he no longer wants it. The «rarer action», as Prospero calls it, is a neutralizing of the expected revenge action. Wagner remarked that the Grail was the spiritualized version of the Nibelung hoard. But Parsifal does not acquire the Grail by a dragon-killing quest: he merely gets his head clear of the kind of illusion that such dragons represent, and the Grail thereby acquires him.

Going by the text alone, the characters of Parsifal do seem to be a life-denying lot, crippled or half dead, and resembling characters in a play of Beckett more closely than they do those in any earlier work of Wagner's. Amfortas is in mortal agony, longing for death, until almost the last moment of the drama; Titurel speaks from a tomb in the first act and is buried in the third; Kundry, who practically has to be dug out of the ground at the beginning of the third act, also longs for the death she finally gets; Gurnemanz seems old and tired even at the beginning, and proportionately more so at the end. Parsifal himself makes his entrance as a stupid oaf shooting a swan, an oaf's idea of fun, and then proves to be unable even to answer any questions, much less ask them. He finally, as we saw, becomes such an encumbrance to what action there is that Gurnemanz pushes him irritably off the stage. Whatever one thinks of the phrase «music of the future» applied to Wagner, Parsifal at least is the drama of the future, pointing the way to the kind of dramatic struggle with, and within, stagnation that we have later in Strindberg, Chekhov, Beckett, and Sartre.

All through Wagner's work runs the theme of the comitatus, the brotherhood united by some form of distinctive heroism or skill—even the Meistersinger make up such a group. But the knights of the Grail move toward exhaustion in the third act, where much of the dominant music is very like a funeral march. In the course of the action Gurnemanz remarks that in the world of the Grail castle time has given place to space. I don't know what this meant altogether, but certainly the atmosphere is one of suspended time, like the life-in-death of the Ancient Mariner, or the world between incarnations in a Japanese No play. Another parallel would be Ezekiel's vision of a valley of dry bones, transformed into «an exceeding great army» by a power that Christian readers of Ezekiel would identify with the Resurrection, the ultimate transforming power that immediately follows Good Friday.

It seems to me significant, however, that Wagner kept the traditional Good Friday as the setting for his third act, instead of changing it to Easter Sunday. For the main action of the opera is less a resurrection than a harrowing of hell. There are, as always, two levels of hell. The deeper level, the world of the self-castrated Klingsor in which Kundry is unable to die, is the real hell: it will always be there as long as man insists on living in egocentric illusion, but it is still illusion, and is unredeemable. Above it is the limbo of the moribund Grail knights: this world can be redeemed, and its inhabitants set free.

What the verbal action of Parsifal really dramatizes, I think, is not primarily anything Christian or Buddhist or pagan, but Schopenhauer's two worlds of will and idea. The world of will, for Schopenhauer, is a sub-human and sub-moral world, out of which we have come, and which involves far more suffering than happiness for conscious beings. The flower maidens are relatively well-adjusted to such a world, because they have very little consciousness and next to no memory. A conscious being in this world can only do evil, whether willingly like Klingsor or unwillingly like Kundry, but in either case possessed by desire without fulfillment, the spear without the Grail. Amfortas is in a conscious, sensitive, peaceful world of representation or idea, but suffers horribly because he is still caught in the toils of the desiring world as will: he has the Grail without the spear. If Klingsor were to acquire the Grail, the world of conscious moral values would be flooded over by the will and would disappear: if the Grail knights were to regain the spear, they would acquire the creative power which is desire with fulfillment. One reason why Schopenhauer is so central to Parsifal is that, in speaking of music as the primary language of the will, he provided a genuine social and intelligible human context for music. Most philosophers who talk about music, such as Plato, are of no use to a practical composer.

The libretto of Parsifal was very hard on Nietzsche, who had talked of a Superman to surpass present mankind, a new master of morality to replace the old slave-moralities of Buddhism and Christianity, and of a gospel affirming life in place of the life-denying programs of the great religions. I suspect that the elements derived from Schopenhauer infuriated him even more than the Christian ones, as Schopenhauer was probably another Oedipal father whom Nietzsche wanted to kill. But it should be kept in mind, in reading Nietzsche's shrieking abuse of the ideology of Parsifal, that Nietzsche had heard none of the music of the opera except the overture, and he talks very differently about that—in a private letter, it is true. We may concede to Nietzsche that Parsifal is a story of a group of sick and dying puppets, although they are awaiting a colossal transfiguring power that will hurl them into a new life. If we ask what kind of dramatic device could conceivably represent such a power, we have, for Wagner, an immediate and obvious answer: the music.

Parsifal being a very late work, it is not a «number» opera, with detached arias like Senta's ballad in The Flying Dutchman or Wolfram's song to the evening star in Tannhäuser. Some Wagner criticism gives the impression that Wagner wrote a libretto, then composed a number of leitmotifs, each one with an allegorical relationship to some character or image in the story, then mixed these up in a musical pastiche where they appear at appropriate moments. How anything resembling a structure could emerge from such a procedure is an unanswered question. The opposite extreme is represented by Lorenz's four-volume study attempting to demonstrate, not simply that the music has a structure, but that the musical structure in fact is the structure of the opera. This tends to suggest that Wagner's music dramas are simply overgrown symphonies with vocal obbligato. But even the longest symphony has to have some basis in symphonic form, and the structural principles of Wagner's music seem to be quite different from those of symphonic form.

This statement, however, is less true of Parsifal than of any other Wagner opera. Parsifal begins and ends in the same key (A flat major), and the second act also begins and ends in the same key (B minor). We may call this pure accident, but accidents in Wagner are seldom if ever pure. It looks as though tonality has a function for this opera which is unusual for operas in general, even for Wagner's. All through the work, again, there is a contrast of diatonic and chromatic textures. The diatonic ones are associated with the Grail and the ideals and virtues it inspires. The chromatic passages predominate in the world of Klingsor in the second act, and are also associated with the agony of Amfortas and with the more screaming and scampering aspects of Kundry.

The overture presents the three main Grail themes: we may follow tradition, for the most part, and associate them respectively with the Christian virtues of love, hope and faith. We begin with what is called the Love Feast motif, an eerie, plaintive, isolated melody followed by arpeggios on the chord of A flat. We are not, of course, in the world of pre-conscious innocence represented by the open E flat chords at the beginning of Rheingold: the function of these arpeggios is to establish the underlying rhythm of the very syncopated first theme. The second theme is a well-known liturgical cadence called the «Dresden Amen», which would have been familiar to many in Wagner's audience. A third theme, with four descending notes prominent in it, follows and provides a rhythmical contrast to the gentle and wavering opening. A quite sudden modulation of this theme from A flat to D major was associated by Wagner, apparently, with the spreading of the Grail faith throughout the world. The opening theme recurs, wistful and elusive as ever, and the overture ends on a dominant seventh of almost intolerable insistence, lingering even in the first recitativos after the curtain rises.

All three themes are strongly diatonic, and seem to set the pattern for three modes of feeling. The «Love Feast» theme, in spite of its gentle subsidence at its close, is mainly a rising melody with a dotted rhythm in its rise that recurs, in different forms, through various moods of aspiration and yearning, including even the central theme of the Good Friday music. All three acts of Parsifal begin with a summons to wake up, the second and third being both addressed, for different reasons, to the harassed Kundry, and Klingsor has a demonic parody of rising rhythm associated with him as the curtain goes up on the second act.

The Dresden Amen is one of a group of themes that seem to express a mood of waiting, with calmness and patience, for some kind of deliverance from the prison-paradise of the Grail world. The most important of these themes of hope, as we might call them is the hymn that prophesies the coming of the compassionate fool. The more vigorous theme called «Faith» reminds us that the Grail knighthood is still a band of heroes, even though their heroism has outgrown the fighting stage, and it is linked with the marching rhythm of the procession in the first act, which moves with a somewhat plodding stateliness towards the unveiling of the Grail. The march in the third act, where the burial of Titurel is involved, has a slightly different rhythm, closer, as said, to a funeral march, in contrast to the more spirited martial theme that accompanies the entrances of Parsifal. In the chromatic tumult of Klingsor's world in the second act we hear two themes in particular associated with temptation and illusion. One is the waltzing rhythm of the flower maidens' chatter, the other the pastoral six-eight (later nine-eight) rhythm of Kundry's account to Parsifal of his childhood with his mother. Both have curious recalls of the formulas of popular nineteenth-century music: they are equal in attractiveness and technical skill to anything else in the opera, but manage to suggest something a bit bogus, or at least commonplace, at the same time.

The opening of the third act, depicting the exhaustion and low morale of the Grail knights and Parsifal's inability to find them, wanders uncertainly around the key of B flat minor: so uncertainly that one critic has suggested that the real tonic chord is a diminished seventh rather than the chord of B flat minor. Wagner is never atonal, and when he seems to move away from tonality it generally means that chaos is coming again. The third act then alternates between hope and fear, rising to a dissonant climax when the knights insist that the suffering Amfortas, who is at the end of his endurance, uncover the Grail once more, and we wonder if a demonic parody of the sacrifice of Christ is about to be enacted on this Good Friday. However, Parsifal is present this time with his healing spear, and the opera ends with the motif of «Faith» having it all its own way, in a limpidly diatonic conclusion.

Even an amateur with no training in musical analysis, like myself, could follow the evolving, intertwining, metamorphosing play of the various themes throughout the opera for a long time; but we do not have a long time (changed to space, like the Grail world, in the context of an essay), and I wish to make one point only about the music. The verbal framework of Parsifal, we suggested, was derived from Schopenhauer's construct of the world as will and as idea, or representation of the world in a conscious mind. This construct, though it has a popular reputation for pessimism, is nevertheless one within which the redemptive efforts of Christianity and Buddhism become at least intelligible. But the music expands from here into a much larger vision of humanity led by its own inner nature to rise toward some infinite power which is both itself and the opposite of itself, an effort neither quixotic nor hopeless because the infinite power has already descended to meet it. I hear this perhaps most clearly at the moment of Parsifal's prayer before the spear, but its overtones and resonances are on every page of the opera, and make me wonder whether music, which defines nothing and expresses everything, may not be the primary language of the spirit, and not merely, as Schopenhauer said, of the suffering and enduring will.