SOURCE: Ziolkowski, Theodore. “Wagner's Parsifal between Mystery and Mummery; or, Race, Class, and Gender in Bayreuth.” In The Return of Thematic Criticism, edited by Werner Sollors, pp. 261-86. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.

[In the following essay, Ziolkowski provides background to Wagner's opera Parsifal and makes a thematic analysis of its libretto, while noting the “racist, sexist, and elitist” assumptions of the text.]

In the century since its premiere Wagner's Parsifal (1882) has been venerated by its admirers as a semireligious mystery and vilified by its detractors as ideological mummery. The trend toward sacralization was initiated by the Master himself, who was not content to designate his final opus with the term he coined to characterize the Ring—Bühnenfestspiel (stage festival). To single out Parsifal he created the neologism Bühnenweihfestspiel—in which the interpolated syllable was meant to suggest the sacral nature of what he called “the mystically meaningful lovefeast of my Grail knights.”¹ To preserve its consecrational purity Wagner specified in 1880 that Parsifal should never be profaned by being performed merely “for the amusement of the public” outside the hallowed precincts of Bayreuth. “How can an action in which the most sublime mysteries of the Christian faith are openly staged be produced side by side with an opera repertoire in theaters like ours and before a public like ours?”² The restriction lasted until Christmas Eve of 1903, when the Metropolitan Opera Society of New York, finding a loophole in the international copyright, staged the first performance of the opera outside Bayreuth. While Cosima and the German Wagnerites fumed at what they deplored as a new “theft of the Grail” and this “sin against the Holy Ghost of German Art,”³ the opera became the sensation of the American season.⁴ The New York Times published a flurry of articles, including attacks on the “blasphemy” of the work by various clergymen, a piece on the proper attire for the opening, a synopsis of the plot, and even a catalogue of the principal musical motifs. Finally on Christmas Day the front page proclaimed the performance “A Triumph.”

The expiration of the copyright in 1913 produced a “Parsifal Protective Movement” (Parsifalschutz-Bewegung) that petitioned the German parliament for a special “Lex Parsifal” to protect in perpetuity the privileged status of this work. But despite the support of Richard Strauss and others the action failed. Within the first month of 1914 Parsifal was performed to sold-out audiences in forty opera houses around the world. The broader exposure simply enhanced the work's standing. Perhaps not everyone shares the reverence of Otto Weininger, who proclaimed in Sex and Character (1903) that Wagner was “the greatest man since Christ” and that Parsifal was “the most profound poetic work of world literature.”⁵ Yet what Thomas Mann, in his essay on “The Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner,” called this “theatrical Lourdes”⁶ evidently enjoys a special position among the Master's creations. Igor Stravinsky recollected in his autobiography the Bayreuth Parsifal in the last year of protected performances. “I have reservations when a theatrical performance is placed on the same level as the holy, symbolic action of the sacred service. And isn't the whole Bayreuth staging really an unconscious imitation of the churchly ritual?”⁷ As recently as 1966 Wieland Wagner, while protesting that “Parsifal is a theater-work and not a church service,” conceded that “for the public Parsifal remains a Christian mystery”⁸—a Bayreuth attitude tacitly confirmed by the long-standing tradition at opera houses around the world of performing Parsifal at Eastertide and by the Bayreuth practice of withholding applause following performances.

At the same time, the work has provoked its critics since the beginning. Even those who were enchanted by the music were not always happy with the message of the libretto. For Nietzsche the score exemplified the seductive power of music.⁹ As for the text, he lamented in his jeremiad Contra Wagner, “Parsifal is a malicious, vindictive, poisonous work against the assumptions of life, a bad work.”¹⁰ Elsewhere he noted more caustically that “After the crime of Parsifal Wagner should have died in prison, not in Venice.”¹¹ Claude Debussy, whose Pelléas et Mélisande betrays an unmistakable harmonic indebtedness to Parsifal, believed that “nothing in Wagner's music achieves a beauty more serene than the prelude of the third act of Parsifal and the entire Good Friday episode.”¹² At the same time, Debussy found the libretto laughable. “Take, for example, Amfortas, that melancholy chevalier of the Grail who complains like a dressmaker and whines like a baby.” As for Kundry, Debussy confesses that he has little passion for “this sentimental streetwalker.”

Since World War II critics have sensed more disturbing undertones in Wagner's text. Theodor W. Adorno claimed that the “glorified blood-community” of the Grail society provides a model for subsequent fascist groups (Führerorden).¹³ Wagner's American biographer went so far as to call the Grail Knights “Storm Troopers” and adduced the composer's notorious “regeneration” essays to argue that the libretto amounts to a gospel of National Socialism proclaiming a religion of Aryan racism.¹⁴ In a series of sensational studies a recent German critic sought to document Parsifal as an anti-Semitic ritual proclaiming a proto-Nazi “ideology of blood”¹⁵—an interpretation evident in Harry Kupfer's 1977 Copenhagen production, in which the Grail Castle is decorated with huge statues of militaristic angels in the style of the Nazi sculptor Arno Breker. Indeed, if the text is judged by the criteria of race, class, and gender that have recently emerged as tools of cultural analysis, Parsifal comes off badly—as a racist, sexist, and socially repressive document. The only women in the play are silly “flower girls” and a wanton seductress. Kundry's appearance—her wild black hair, her reddish brown skin, and her blazing black eyes, not to mention her snakeskin girdle with its evocation of Eve and the Devil—betrays what Wagner regarded as degenerate racial characteristics that set her apart from the Aryan knights of the Grail. And the Brotherhood itself—that exclusively white male bastion that seeks to impose its self-righteous attitudes imperialistically on others—is able to dispense with peasants, servants, and other evidences of the lower classes thanks to the power of the Grail, which functions as a kind of divine catering service (not unlike the patrons who provided for the composer's own needs).

It is not my purpose here to contribute either reverentially or ideologically to the debate that has exercised the critics. I want to focus instead on Wagner's libretto in an effort to establish its place in the literary tradition and its integrity as a literary text. Despite the objections of musicologists who maintain that in Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk the text cannot be viewed independently of the music, we must insist on our methodological right to do so:¹⁶ after all, Wagner published the libretto to Parsifal in 1877, five years before completing the score, and distributed it to Nietzsche and other friends for their reaction. It is only by locating Wagner's libretto in its thematic context and by analyzing its motifs comparatively that we can reach a reasonably objective critical appreciation of its stature as a literary text as well as its status as a sociopolitical document.

I

From the standpoint of literary thematics Wagner's Parsifal constitutes simply one link in a chain of Grail works extending from primitive folklore to sophisticated modern parodies. Post-Wagnerian Germans, ignoring its sources, have co-opted the legend as “typically national” and claimed Parzival (to give him the usual German form of the name) as the epitome of the “German soul.”¹⁷ Thanks to Wagner, for two decades before and after the turn of the century the figure of the Grail-seeker was widely appropriated to symbolize the urge for spiritual renewal of the newly constituted German nation.¹⁸ The metaphysical reaction against nineteenth-century rationalism and positivism produced influential journals called Parsifal and Der Gral as well as cultural or semireligious associations with such names as the League of the Grail (Gralbund)—not to mention a series of Grail-oriented writings: poetic cycles, epics, adventure novels, and dramatic sequences. It is symptomatic of this generational infatuation that C. G. Jung became obsessed with the story of the Grail around the age of fifteen and would have included a discussion of that myth in his own writing had his wife not already decided to devote her lifetime to a study of “the Grail legend from a psychological point of view.”¹⁹

Yet Parzival's quest for the Grail is by no means simply, or even primarily, a German theme. (W. H. Auden has even argued persuasively that the quest for the Grail is “the mirror image” of the modern detective story.)²⁰ The story is generally conceded to be a late syncretism of two separate narratives, one stemming from ancient cultic ritual and the other from Indo-European folklore. In her influential book From Ritual to Romance (1920) Jessie L. Weston presented evidence that the legend of the Grail had its origins in a nature ritual associated with such vegetation deities as the Sumerian Tammuz, the Phrygian Attis, and the Greek Adonis. The purpose of the ritual was to celebrate the annual regeneration of the deity, whose death marks the onset of winter. In order to revive the deity each spring the celebrants employed various symbolic objects with specifically sexual associations—notably a lance and a chalice—as well as the ancient life-image of the fish. In medieval Europe this ritual was translated into Christian terms. The deity became “a King suffering from infirmity caused by wounds, sickness, or old age,” and his affliction had a disastrous effect upon his kingdom, “either depriving it of vegetation, or exposing it to the ravages of war.”²¹ The neophyte being initiated into the nature cult was Christianized into the Quester Knight—originally named Gawain, not Parzival—who revives the dead king by asking ritual questions and thereby restores the land to fruitfulness. The traditional cultic objects gradually took on new significance: the phallic lance was identified as the spear used by Longinus at the crucifixion to pierce the side of Christ; the womblike chalice was transformed into the Holy Grail—the vessel used by Jesus and his disciples at the Last Supper and subsequently by Joseph of Arimathea to collect the blood of Jesus at the cross; and the fish has been an image for Christ since earliest Christian times.

The wholly unrelated story of Parzival is a variant of the Indo-European folktale formula of expulsion and return, known to classical antiquity from the stories of Perseus and Romulus and Remus. In the Welsh variant upon which Parzival is based, the hero is the son of a widow whose husband was slain in battle. The mother, anxious to preserve her son from a similar fate, flees to the woods, where she brings him up in ignorance of knightly accomplishments. But the boy, encountering a party of wandering knights, is so captivated that he deserts his mother and sets out to become a knight. Arriving at King Arthur's court, he undertakes a series of adventures, is admitted to the Round Table, and wins back his father's heritage.

At some point, but probably no earlier than Chrétien de Troyes's late-twelfth-century Conte del Graal, the two stories were fused together. Parzival-Perceval displaced Gawain as the hero of the Grail adventures while the Grail legend, in turn, was expanded to include the Arthurian material—that is to say, the quester's exploits in the years before and after his first visit to the Grail Castle—as well as a separate series of episodes recounting the knightly deeds of Gawain.

If we take as our basis Wagner's direct source—Wolfram von Eschenbach's Middle High German adaptation of Chrétien's unfinished romance (ca. 1200-1210)—we note that the sixteen books relate two parallel stories: those of Parzival and Gawan. The first two books are devoted to the life of Parzival's father Gahmuret, his marriage to Lady Herzeloyde, and his heroic death. We then hear about Parzival's secluded youth up to his encounter with the knights and his departure from his mother. Along the way he meets his cousin Sigune, who reveals to him his name and parentage. Arriving at Arthur's court, he is instructed by Gurnemanz in courtly demeanor—and specifically warned that it is boorish to ask indiscreet questions. At this point he sets out on his first period of knight-errantry, during which he liberates a besieged city and woos its queen, Kondwiramurs, whom he marries and with whom he begets two sons, Kardeiz and Loherangrin (sic). Leaving his wife to go in search of his mother, Parzival is directed by a fisherman to a mysterious castle where he sees the suffering Fisher King, Anfortas, and the bloody lance as well as a procession with the Grail. Mindful of his instruction in courtly etiquette he refrains from asking the compassionate question. When he awakens the next morning the castle is deserted, and Sigune points out to him how he has failed. Parzival returns to Arthur's court, where Cundrie, the hideous messenger of the Grail, curses him for his failure. Plagued by guilt, Parzival spends almost five years in search of the Grail temple in the hope of redeeming himself. Finally he encounters Trevrizent, a pious hermit to whom he confesses his sins; he is absolved by the hermit, who initiates him into the mystery of the Grail and Anfortas's affliction. After further adventures Parzival is summoned to the Grail for his second visit: having posed the question that heals Anfortas, Parzival becomes the new king of the Grail.

While this entire action is taking place, Gawain is pursuing adventures of his own, which include a visit to Castle Miracle (Schastel marveile), where he survives combats with various monsters and magical contrivances and succeeds in liberating the four hundred women and four queens who have been imprisoned there by the magician Klinschor. In the course of this enterprise he wins the hand of the beautiful Orgeluse, in whose service Anfortas earlier received his wound but whose beauty failed to seduce Parzival away from the lovely Kondwiramurs.

This rich collection of materials—the so-called matière de Bretagne—was enormously popular during the late Middle Ages, which produced various versions in several languages.²² However, every writer felt free to adapt and modify the familiar plots to fit his own needs or national preferences: for example, by replacing Parzival as the liberator of the Grail with Lancelot or Galahad or by adding new adventures to fill in the spaces between the key episodes. The entire story, with many new adventures, was related in an immense Old French prose cycle composed around 1230 and bringing together five different plot lines: the stories of the Holy Grail, Merlin, Lancelot, the Quest for the Holy Grail, and the Death of Arthur. The fourteenth-century English Sir Perceval has no Gawan and no Grail; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in contrast, has gotten rid of Parzival as well as the Grail; while in Thomas Malory's Morte D'Arthur (1485) it is Galahad who heals the maimed king by anointing his legs with blood from the sacred spear. Other variations were popular in Low German and Welsh.

During the Renaissance the Grail stories were forgotten along with most other medieval lore, but the nineteenth century in its enthusiastic rediscovery of the Middle Ages appropriated the old legends as purely literary materials. Decades before Wagner, German Romantic writers contemplated various dramatic adaptations.²³ Poets in other countries were also captivated by this great international material: James Russell Lowell composed his Grail poem The Vision of Sir Launfal (1848); in William Morris's The Defence of Guenevere (1858) Galahad learns from Percival that illness and death are the lot of the Grail-Quester; and in Tennyson's The Idylls of the King (1885) the Grail is redeemed by Galahad rather than Percival or Lancelot, who prove to be too worldly and impure for the challenge.

The twentieth century eagerly exploited a legend that was so widespread and easily recognizable, breaking it down analytically into its constituent parts, retelling it from a modern point of view, or exploiting it for parodistic purposes. T. S. Eliot remarked in his notes to The Waste Land (1922) that “not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston's book on the Grail legend.”²⁴ Eliot was concerned less with the familiar pattern of the quest romances than with the sexual rituals and vegetation myths that underlie them. Other recent versions have updated the old story with a modern sensibility. In keeping with the fantasy fad of the 1970s Richard Monaco, in Parsival, or a Knight's Tale (1977), portrayed a “Parsifool,” who, wandering through the earthy realities of medieval life, fails to recognize the Holy Grail yet eventually acquires a kind of self-knowledge. Peter Vansittart in his fanciful Parsifal (1988) revisualized the legend in settings ranging from Celtic prehistory and the Burgundian waning of the Middle Ages to Mitteleuropa in the Reformation and Nazi Germany.

Two other works adapt the theme parodistically as the pattern for a contemporary action. In his novel The Natural (1952) Bernard Malamud exploits the familiar theme to expose the legendary dimension of baseball. His hero is a true “guileless fool”—a country boy, with the prophetic name Roy, who is discovered in a remote pasture by a baseball scout. With his homemade bat, Wonderboy, and his dream of a Graillike golden baseball, this Parzival of the diamond arrives in New York, where his batting prowess helps to revive a fading team called the Knights. The manager of the Knights is named Pop Fisher, and before the arrival of the quester his worries have produced a psychosomatic affliction—a case of athlete's foot on his hands—which is healed by the spectacular performance of the bat Wonderboy.

David Lodge was motivated by similar parodistic aims in his “academic romance” Small World (1984). The hero is a young poet named Persse McGarrigle, who pursues his ideal woman to scholarly conferences around the world, and the literary scholars who people the novel make sure that we never overlook the parallels. One character points out that “Scholars these days are like the errant knights of old, wandering the ways of the world in search of adventure and glory.”²⁵ When Persse gets discouraged in his pursuit, a pupil of Jessie Weston named Miss Maiden urges him not to give up. “Like the Grail Knights?” he asks. Miss Maiden replies that the knights were “boobies”: “All they had to do was to ask a question at the right moment, and they generally muffed it” (324). The motif of the healing question ties Persse's quest to the dilemma of Arthur Kingfisher, “doyen of the international community of literary theorists,” who is initially in despair “at no longer being able to achieve an erection or an original thought” (105). At the meeting of the Modern Language Association in which the novel culminates, Persse asks a question that stymies the leading critical theorists of the day. As a result, Kingfisher regains his potency as well as the “Siege Perilous,” the UNESCO Chair of Literary Criticism that has constituted the goal for most of the characters. The parodistic tendency attained its inevitable conclusion in a comic-book version of Parsifal (1978) and then experienced its cinematic transformation in The Fisher King (1991), whose hero, Parry, moves through a world of derelicts in a weirdly medievalized Manhattan in search of the redeeming Grail.

Obviously the legend of Parzival and the Holy Grail has never constituted a single, constant, authorized version but comprises a mass of movable parts which each author has felt free to modify as seemed appropriate. Even the Grail itself is mutable: for Wolfram von Eschenbach it was a mysterious stone with magical properties, while for other writers it was associated with the chalice used at the Last Supper—but also with the pennant of the World Series and an academic chair. The first step toward the demythification of Wagner's Parsifal is to recognize that historically the opera is located in a continuum of works ranging from primal myth to modern parody. If we now consider the work autonomously as a literary text, we can ascertain that it occupies a position that is also structurally closer to mummery than to mystery.

II

We know which of the available sources were familiar to Wagner and how he went about his composition because the process is documented over the course of almost forty years in letters, conversations, and writings.²⁶ In July 1845 the thirty-three-year-old Kapellmeister from Dresden spent several weeks at the spa at Marienbad, where his reading material featured the works of Wolfram von Eschenbach in two different modernizations—by San Marte (1836) and Karl Simrock (1842)—which had recently made the medieval epic accessible to readers inspired by resurgent nationalism to rediscover the Germanic past. Wagner was already familiar with the figure of Wolfram, who plays a major role in Tannhäuser. He also had an edition of the anonymous Middle High German epic Lohengrin, which was introduced by a long essay on medieval culture by the Romantic scholar Joseph Görres (1813). Wagner was enchanted by the world of medieval romance, but it was the story of Lohengrin that initially seized his imagination and on which he set to work. For twelve years he gave no further thought to Parzival—though in 1854 he toyed with the notion of having Parzival visit the ailing Tristan. Then in the spring of 1857 Wagner recalled his Marienbad reading and conceived the entire plot of his Parzival, which he rapidly sketched out in three acts. Although that first draft, if it actually existed, is now lost, we know that Wagner thought about Parzival intensively during the next three years. When in August of 1865 his patron Ludwig II expressed a keen interest in seeing the text, Wagner obliged by writing down in four days a long prose draft, which the young king of Bavaria received rapturously. Following another twelve-year interval Cosima recorded in her diary for 25 January 1877 that Wagner had announced his intention to begin Parzival and not to stop until it was finished. (It was during this period of composition, prompted by a false “Persian” etymology suggested by Görres, that Wagner adopted the idiosyncratic spelling “Parsifal.”) This time he set to work with his customary intensity: during the next four weeks he drafted a second prose outline and then, by mid-April, recast the libretto in verse form. In sum, then, Wagner took thirty-two years from his first acquaintance with the story to complete the libretto of Parsifal, and in the process he had to reduce a vast medieval epic to the three concentrated acts of his opera. How did he go about it?

Scholars of German literature have provided us with sophisticated and detailed comparisons of Wagner's libretto with Wolfram's Parzival.²⁷ We know that Wagner eliminated all references to King Arthur and the Round Table and to Parzival's family background as well as his marriage to Queen Kondwiramurs, and the entire Gawan plot—in short, some two-thirds of Wolfram's material. He consolidated important characters: notably, he collapsed Parzival's two preceptors, Gurnemanz and Trevrizent, into one person and combined the ugly Grail Messenger Cundrie with Sigune and the lovely temptress Orgeluse. He appropriated Klingsor from the Gawan side of Wolfram's epic and transformed him into the principal adversary of the Grail Castle. He substituted the magical touch of the spear for the ritual healing question. However, it will not be our task here to summarize in detail these various transformations. After all, Wagner hardly approached his task with scholarly rigor: the prose concept of 1857 was based on the composer's recollection of a story that he had read twelve years earlier. No wonder that entire episodes were omitted and characters conflated. More interesting and suggestive than the omissions are the inclusions and the reasons for them.

In one sense Parsifal amounts to a pastiche of themes and motifs from all of Wagner's earlier works. To anyone who surveys his oeuvre as a whole it is immediately apparent that, as a writer, Wagner worked throughout his lifetime with a very limited group of themes, motifs, and visual images, which he reshuffled to serve the needs of the plot in hand. For instance, the polar realms of sacred and sensual represented by the Grail kingdom and Klingsor's castle are familiar to us not only from the opposition of Brabant and Monsalvat in Lohengrin but especially from the antinomy of the Venusberg and the Wartburg with its self-righteous piety in Tannhäuser. The fanatical chauvinism of the Grail knights is anticipated by the animus in Tannhäuser against “the grim Guelfs,” in Lohengrin against “the rage of the Hungarians,” and in The Meistersinger against the “false foreign rule” (falsche wälsche Majestät) condemned by Hans Sachs. Parsifal and Lohengrin make their initial entrances—like father, like son—accompanied by swans: Lohengrin is conveyed by a swan and Parsifal kills one. (And both operas feature long arias to these large birds.) Parsifal, in his simplemindedness, amounts to a Christianized Siegfried. And we know from Cosima's diaries that Wagner had in mind analogies between Titurel and Wotan, between Klingsor and Alberich.²⁸

Kundry, that wondrous creature condemned to wander the earth ever since she scoffed at the crucified Jesus, is the female counterpart of the accursed Dutchman: she is redeemed by Parsifal just as the Dutchman is liberated by Senta. When Klingsor summons Kundry at the beginning of act II, the “bluish light” from which she rises is identical with the “bluish lustre” from which Wotan conjures Erda in act III of Siegfried. At the same time, she is subject to the same narcolepsy—she is always either waking up or falling asleep—that afflicts Senta and Brünnhilde, nor does she escape the death that inevitably overtakes Wagner's heroines in the last scene—from Senta, Elsa, and Elisabeth down to Isolde and Brünnhilde. Wagner himself observed that Anfortas is “my Tristan of the third act with an unimaginable intensification.”²⁹ Indeed, in the 1854 draft of Tristan he planned to have Parzival visit the dying knight, and both operas display the same macabre obsession with bloody gore and festering wounds. (Nietzsche quipped, on first reading Parsifal, that it contained “little flesh and much too much blood”;³⁰ in fact, blood is mentioned ten times in the second scene of act I alone.)

Klingsor's Flower Maidens are prefigured by the Nymphs and Sirenes of the Venusberg in Tannhäuser as well as the Rhine Daughters in Rheingold, while the enchanted pleasure realm that disintegrates—Adorno spoke maliciously of “a dreamed bordello”³¹—is already present in Die Feen and Tannhäuser. Titurel's scornful rejection of Klingsor is anticipated by the pope's rebuff of Tannhäuser—and in both cases the scenes are related rather than rendered. Siegfried breaks Wotan's spear long before Parsifal recovers a similarly phallic object symbolizing divine power from Klingsor. The dove that descends at the end of Lohengrin to take the swan's place is the same dove that appears to replenish the Grail in the last scene of Parsifal.

As for the problematical words of redemption that end the work—Erlösung dem Erlöser—Nietzsche observed that “Wagner has thought about nothing so profoundly as redemption: his opera is the opera of redemption. In his works somebody is always seeking to be redeemed”³²—sometimes an aging man like the Dutchman by a young girl and at other times a degenerate old woman by a chaste youth like Parsifal. In one sense, then, Wagner's selection of motifs from the medieval Parzival, as well as his invention of new ones, was dictated by what might be called the “deep structure” of his poetic imagination, which tended to fall back over and over again on the same archetypal characters and situations.

III

In order to accomplish this transformation Wagner had to make major revisions in his source—no great crisis of conscience for Wagner since he was convinced that Wolfram, “a thoroughly immature figure,”³³ had utterly failed to comprehend the meaning of the legend. Two decades later he assured Cosima, as she recorded in her diary (20 June 1879), that his work “actually has nothing to do with [Wolfram's Parzival]—apart from a few images, Good Friday, Kundry's wild apparition—that's all.” (Wagner, who tended to denigrate his literary sources as ungratefully as his benefactors, had a similar contempt for Gottfried von Strassburg, the author of the source for Tristan.)

Wagner had several reasons for altering his source. First, there was the practical need to reduce a complicated epic of 25,000 lines with some 180 named characters to a dramatic action encompassing only five relatively short scenes—it is the music that is long, not the words—and only four major figures. To communicate the background information necessary to the plot he had to inflate the relatively minor role of Gurnemanz to become by far the longest in the opera.

A second factor is equally important: Wagner had to reshape the legend to square with his theory of Mitleid (compassion or sympathetic suffering). In 1854 Wagner became obsessed with Schopenhauer's magnum opus, The World as Will and Idea (1819), which after years of neglect was suddenly enjoying a vogue in its second edition of 1844. Schopenhauer argued that the fundamental fact dominating human reality is will, volition, desire—at its worst, the compelling erotic lust that blinds us to the higher life of the spirit. Human action is not positive achievement but simply a response to perceived lacks or absences produced by our desire. It should be our loftiest aspiration to transcend desire by denying the will to live. As an example Schopenhauer held up the Buddhist ideal of total self-abnegation in nirvana. But in the absence of this achievement we can find temporary relief from the pain of our desires in art—especially music—which enables us for the duration to forget ourselves and our own wishes and ambitions. Beyond this aesthetic solution there is also an ethical response: in our sympathy, our Mitleid, with the suffering of others we can forget the pain of our own individuality.

Schopenhauer's romantic view of art as a surrogate for religion appealed greatly to Wagner: it is that “holy German art” that is praised in the concluding chorus of The Meistersinger. In strong response to Schopenhauer, Wagner in 1856 conceived the idea of an opera about the Buddha (Die Sieger), a project that occupied him to the end of his life. But Schopenhauer also contributed to his revaluation of Christianity and fueled his anti-Semitism. Wagner had concluded that true Christianity, before it was corrupted by the legalism of “Judification” (Ver judung), embodied the ideal of Schopenhauerian compassion. It was this new understanding of compassion that dominated his thinking when he returned to the Grail theme and that became increasingly central to his conception of the opera.

For this reason, Amfortas and Kundry moved into the center of the action, for these are the two suffering characters in need of redemption through compassion. Wolfram's Anfortas suffers from a wholly worldly affliction: wounded in the testicles while fighting in the service of the beautiful Orgeluse, he is in extreme physical pain, which can be relieved only by the touch of the lance that struck him; but he suffers from no sense of guilt because sexual love is not prohibited to the king of the Grail. Indeed, love—sexual as well as courtly—is the stated theme of Wolfram's epic. Wagner's Amfortas (note the spelling change) is another case altogether: first, he has been wounded in a more discreet place—in the side, as was Christ on the cross. More important, he was wounded because he succumbed to the sin of sexual lust in Kundry's embrace and, in that compromising position, not only received his ignominious wound at Klingsor's hands but also lost the sacred lance that he was carrying in battle. So Amfortas, wounded in both body and soul, suffers from guilt as well as pain. Paradoxically, he is prevented from the death for which he longs by his service to the life-preserving Grail.

Kundry suffers from a similarly tragic dilemma. The only possibility of release from the cycle of reincarnations to which she has been condemned is by death—a redemption that can be achieved only through the forgiveness of a man pure enough to resist her blandishments. At the same time, she is bound by Klingsor, who is able to resist her powerful sexual attraction only because he is castrated, to corrupt the knights of the Grail by the passion to which she is condemned. Her success in seduction condemns her to a life she hates; the failure for which she longs will result, paradoxically, in her liberation through death.

These are the two figures longing for redemption by the pure fool, made knowing through his compassion, who according to the inscription on the rim of the Grail, will one day liberate them. (Klingsor is a different case. In Wolfram he is a minor figure castrated by the king of Sicily, who catches him in bed with his wife. In Wagner's version he castrates himself in a misguided effort to achieve a Graillike purity but is rejected by Titurel, on the grounds that purity must be achieved through spiritual restraint, not bodily mutilation. Hence his hatred of Amfortas and the knights of the Grail. He is destroyed when Parsifal makes the sign of the cross with the recovered lance, but not redeemed.)

To the extent that our interest in the opera shifts to two figures who are relatively marginal in the epic, it moves away from the figure of the quester. Wolfram's Parzival learns immediately after his first visit to the Grail Temple that he has failed to ask the ritual question that would have relieved Anfortas from his suffering. He spends the next five years in a series of adventures as he seeks to find his way back to the Temple for a second chance to make that ritual appeal. In Wagner's version the external adventures, of Parzival as well as Gawan, are replaced by four incidents that educate the pure fool—who is so simpleminded that one unkind critic has called him a “cretin”³⁴—to the nature of Schopenhauerian compassion with the suffering of others.

In the economy of the operatic action Parsifal's education to sympathy begins immediately upon his first appearance. In a scene without precedent in the sources Parsifal commits the sin of shooting a swan in the sacred precincts of the Grail. His first words, when he is chided by Gurnemanz and the angry knights, amounts to a juvenile boast that he can hit anything that flies. But in the course of Gurnemanz's long elegy to the dead swan with its stiffening blood and broken eye Parsifal experiences a new sense of compassion that moves him to break his bow and throw away his arrows. But at this point he still doesn't understand his action or his guilt. A short time later when Kundry tells him that his mother is dead Parsifal leaps upon her in an access of rage and tries to strangle her. But immediately afterward, overcome for the second time by a sense of loss and guilt, he is seized by a fit of trembling and almost faints. Finally, toward the end of his first visit to the Grail Temple, when Parsifal hears Amfortas's cries of agony, he clutches at his own heart and stands as if petrified. But again he is incapable of speaking or understanding what he has witnessed: so Gurnemanz pushes him angrily out the door and out of the kingdom of the Grail.

The fourth and final incident occurs in Klingsor's garden when Kundry, in her attempt to seduce Parsifal, presses her lips against his in a long kiss. Suddenly Parsifal starts up with a gesture of extreme terror and again presses his hands against his heart. He realizes with painful lucidity that this sexual guilt—the primal sin exemplified by Kundry's kiss—and not the external wound is the source of Amfortas's agony and that he himself has been in danger of succumbing to the same disabling sin. It is this clairvoyant insight into the nature of the world—Kundry calls him welthellsichtig—that enables him to resist Kundry's wiles and to destroy the power of Klingsor's magic.

IV

In order to accommodate his version of the ancient theme to his Schopenhauerian view of a world in which sexual desire represents the great evil from which man must be liberated, Wagner had to do violence not only to the medieval conception but even to his own earlier view of the Grail kingdom. At the end of Lohengrin the king of the Grail is permitted, indeed expected, to marry so that he can ensure the succession of leadership. Moreover, although the knights and maidens of the Grail remain celibate while they are in residence at Monsalvat, no rules bind them from marriage or sexual union when they go abroad on their missions: it is Elisabeth's question, and not moral constraints on his part, that prevent her union with Lohengrin.

In Parsifal Monsalvat has become less a kingdom and more a monastery of strict observance. The prohibition of sex has significant consequences for the logic of the work. Nietzsche wisecracked that it was quite a trick for Parsifal to remain sexually chaste and at the same time to father Lohengrin.³⁵ In the medieval sources, of course, Parsifal is not required to be chaste: he is happily married to Queen Kondwiramurs and fathers two sons. Unfortunately for logical consistency, Wagner wrote his Lohengrin, whose hero proclaims Parsifal as his father, many years before he was driven by his new beliefs to decide that Parsifal had to remain celibate and that the Knights of the Grail constituted a kind of warrior-priest caste. Unlike Wolfram's Monsalvatch, where the Grail is tended by women, this Grail Castle admits no females. The knights flagellate themselves to control any vestiges of sexual passion, and Klingsor goes so far as to emasculate himself in his vain efforts to be accepted into their ascetic fellowship. In their contempt for women the knights regard Kundry “as a savage beast” (wie ein wildes Thier) and treat her, as Klingsor points out, “like an animal” (wie ein Vieh). Parsifal is a quick learner in the Grail practices of sexual harassment: he has been in the sacred precincts for only a few minutes when he tries to strangle her! Characteristically, Gurnemanz and the squires are less bothered by that act of violence than by his killing of the swan. The Grail kingdom is an animal preserve so delicate in its sensibilities that even the tiny creatures of the field look up in the sublime confidence that no human foot will tread on them. This attitude is possible, of course, only because the inhabitants of the Castle are nurtured by the Grail and do not have to descend to “common viands” (gemeine Atzung) or hunt for their sustenance, like any normal medieval knights. Only these circumstances explain the indignation with which Parsifal's killing of the swan is greeted.

Wagner's alterations did not come without other costs of consistency. As early as 1865 Wagner had become dissatisfied with the notion of Parzival's question as the basis for Anfortas's healing.³⁶ (That dissatisfaction, incidentally, seems paradoxical in light of the fact that he had already written an entire opera that revolves for three acts around nothing but a question with similarly drastic consequences—Lohengrin.) The substitution of the lance for the question produces one of the dramatic highpoints of the opera—the moment at the end of act II when Klingsor hurls the lance at Parsifal and it hovers harmlessly above his head. But to make the lance the agent of healing, rather than merely the principal painkiller as in the sources, makes nonsense of Gurnemanz's anger at the end of act I. If you do away with the healing question, then why should Gurnemanz be irritated at Parsifal for failing to ask a question?

As to the lance itself, in the source it was poisoned and, according to a medical theory that Wolfram carefully explains, brought relief through its touch by counteracting through its coldness the heat of the poisoned wound. Wagner has transformed the lance from the poisoned spear of a heathen warrior into the sacred lance of Longinus. When Amfortas succumbs to the seductions of Kundry and lets his lance fall to be seized by Klingsor and used against him, it is no longer a poisoned lance—a point that Amfortas seems to have forgotten toward the end of act III, when he tears opens his garment and displays his open wound to the knights: “Here flows my blood, which poisons me” (“Das mich vergiftet, hier fliesst mein Blut”).

The coalescence of three figures—the Grail messenger Cundrie, the genealogically knowledgeable Sigune, and the temptress Orgeluse—into the single figure of Kundry also poses a logical problem. Klingsor is the only person in the opera whose knowledge transcends the boundaries of the acts—in other words, who knows what is happening both in his own kingdom and at the Temple of the Grail. To be sure, Kundry is active in both realms—as the temptress in Klingsor's garden and as the faithful servant of the Grail. But each side of her radically split personality is only dimly aware of the other. Kundry as Grail messenger gives no indication that she recalls her role as Klingsor's creature. Similarly, Amfortas and Gurnemanz fail to recognize in the humble servant of the Grail the seductress who brought about their misfortunes. This schizophrenia is a device of convenience necessary to bind together different aspects that, in the source, belong to three different women. Yet in both hypostases Kundry is aware of Parsifal's genealogy. In act I he almost strangles her when she tells him that his mother is dead; and in the seduction scene of act II she uses her knowledge of his mother to arouse Parsifal's emotions.

V

Why did Wagner at long last decide, early in 1877, to take up seriously the topic that had engaged his imagination for more than thirty years? Thomas Mann suggested that art represented for the composer “a sacred arcanum, a panacea against the ills of society.”³⁷ As if in confirmation, Wagner wrote to his future biographer in 1877 that he returned to Parzival for the third time “to tear myself violently free from the most ghastly impressions of life.”³⁸

What were these “scheußlichste[n] Lebenseindrücke[n]” from which Wagner was trying to liberate himself? The year 1876 had been one of the least serene of his tumultuous life. The first Bayreuth Festival was the occasion for the last of Wagner's many love affairs—this time with the French enchantress Judith Gautier, who lent her voluptuous traits to the figure of Kundry. Judith, another in the succession of those married women Wagner seemed to covet—Jessie Laussot, Mathilde Wesendonk, Blandine Ollivier, Cosima von Bülow—also kept Wagner provided with the silks and satins that he needed for his outlandish costumes and with the exotic fragrances to stimulate his senses—a fact not without significance when added to her subsequent claim that the affair remained chaste. There is at least the suspicion that the sixty-three-year-old Wagner—the man of many love affairs who has been called the “phallocrat”³⁹ of German music and whose writings seethe with sexual imagery—felt, if not impotent, at least that his sexual powers were waning and in need of constant stimulation by artificial means. (This interpretation is consistent with the conspicuously phallic symbolism with which the spear is endowed.) It is a fact that his health was steadily deteriorating in those months. Nietzsche even remarked that the composer “in his old days was thoroughly feminini generis,”⁴⁰ hinting at a tendency toward bisexuality reflected in the figure of Parsifal—a tendency caught by Syberberg in his controversial film adaptation (1982) in which the role of Parsifal, following Kundry's kiss, is assumed by a young woman.

Second, there was the fiasco of the festival itself, which experienced numerous technical and artistic flaws in the performances, logistical chaos in the arrangements for the audience, and financial disaster. In addition to a chorus of hostile reviews, a deficit of 150,000 marks brought the threat of bankruptcy and prompted Wagner's plan to sell Wahnfried and to emigrate to the United States. Wagner complained to Nietzsche, when they saw each other for the last time in Sorrento, about the poor attendance of the festival, and his reasoning suggests a possible economic motive for returning to Parsifal: “the Germans at present don't want to hear about heathen gods and heroes; they want to see something Christian.”⁴¹

Finally, the year witnessed the breakup with Nietzsche, who had become increasingly disenchanted with Wagner's development and especially with the Wagnerites and the “idealists” of the Bayreuther Blätter, whom he caricatures scathingly in Ecce Homo. In sum, as 1876 came to a close Wagner felt that his kingdom in Bayreuth had fallen into decline and that he had been abandoned by his favorite disciple as well as his sexual powers. It is precisely the situation of Amfortas at the end of act I. No wonder that in January of 1877 Wagner turned with such urgency to this old project.

Other factors help to clarify further details. It was just at this time that Wagner was thinking through the half-baked notions that constituted his so-called regeneration essays of 1880-81. According to the theory that he outlined in “Religion and Art,” humanity has been in a state of steady decline ever since it turned away from pure religion as he imagined it to have been personified in Christ and Buddha. Because the “quality of the race” is tied up for Wagner with the mystical notion of “blood”⁴²—and we have already seen what a role blood plays in Parsifal—he sees some hope for regeneration in such contemporary health movements as the vegetarian clubs and the temperance societies.⁴³ Wagner's theory of the purity of blood also leads him to condemn racial miscegenation and to find the “domination and exploitation of the lower races” to be “(in a natural sense) thoroughly justified.”⁴⁴ These notions explain the imperialistic and racially arrogant attitudes of the Grail knights. And Wagner's powerful antivivisectionism, on which he published a pamphlet in 1879, helps to explain the characterization of the Grail Kingdom as an animal preserve.

Another factor is involved here. King Ludwig II was commonly referred to as “Parsifal” in Wagner's circle for a combination of reasons. In his role as Wagner's patron the young king had often enough saved the composer's little aesthetic realm at Bayreuth. In addition, Ludwig's own troubled sexuality was reflected in the ambivalence with which Parsifal responds to Kundry's kiss. Above all, Ludwig was obsessed by swans. As a boy growing up in the castle of Hohenschwangau, which was located near Swan Lake (Schwansee) and decorated with frescoes based on the legend of Lohengrin, Ludwig frequently drew swans in his sketchbook. His first experience of Wagner came from a performance of Lohengrin that he attended as a boy. He later spent a fortune building his fairytale castle of Neuschwanstein, which was decorated with images of swans. And for Wagner's sixty-ninth birthday in 1882 he sent the composer two black swans, which were nicknamed Parsifal and Kundry.⁴⁵ Now the swan motif was no doubt suggested to Wagner in part by its earlier use in Lohengrin: the swan was the heraldic emblem of the Parsifal-Lohengrin clan. Its association with Ludwig, along with Bayreuth antivivisectionism, would have intensified the horror among insiders at Parsifal's slaying of this iconic bird.

In the face of a reality that had declined so drastically from the racially pure, vegetarian, and sexless paradise that Wagner had hoped to recreate in Bayreuth, he sought in Parsifal to construct a surrogate world of art where reality might correspond to the ideal. As Gurnemanz leads Parsifal through the transformations of act I from the forest to the Grail Temple he tells the astounded youth: “zum Raum wird hier die Zeit (here time is transformed into space).” It was through such a mystical transformation that Wagner hoped to posit in his art a timeless realm inaccessible to the ravages of history. Indeed, critics have noted that the spatialization of time constitutes the structural principle of the entire theatrical consecration with its ritualistic aspects.⁴⁶

But it is precisely the means through which he constructs his timeless realm that make it into mummery rather than a true mystery. For Wagner was convinced that Christianity, in its original form a religion of Mitleid like Buddhism, had been corrupted by the Jewish influences creeping in from the Old Testament. The Christianity he professed had nothing whatsoever to do with Christianity in its historical forms. Yet it was precisely the imagery of a Christianity he considered debased and in which he had no faith that Wagner appropriated as the basis of Parsifal. As he put it in the famous opening sentence of his essay on “Religion and Art”: “Whenever religion becomes artificial, it is up to art to rescue its nucleus by comprehending its mythic images … in their symbolic value, in order to reveal through an ideal portrayal the profound truth concealed within them.”⁴⁷ Thomas Mann, in his essay on “Richard Wagner's Suffering and Greatness,” appreciated the extent to which Wagner was exploiting religious images in which he had no personal faith. Religiosity, especially Catholic religiosity, is for this lapsed Protestant an artistic idiom, and little more than that. If mummery in its original sense refers to masquerades or plays in which religious stories and symbols, whether heathen or Christian, are used for utterly different and secular purposes, it would be difficult to find a more precise example than Wagner's Bühnenweihfestspiel.

It is the supreme tribute to Wagner's music that we are willing to suspend our disbelief for the duration of the opera to overlook the logical inconsistencies of a text that, moreover, is racist, sexist, and elitist in its explicit and implicit meaning. In the history of a theme that has moved in the course of almost two thousand years from mystery to mummery, Parsifal is much closer to mummery than to the mystery that Wagner hoped to attain with his consecrational festival. In sum, an impartial attempt through the techniques of thematic and motivic analysis to locate Wagner's opera in its historical and literary context prompts the thought that Good Friday is perhaps a less appropriate date for performing Parsifal than, say, Halloween.

Notes

1. Richard Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Fritzsch, 1888), vol. 10, 284: “das mystisch bedeutsame Liebesmahl meiner Gralsritter.”

2. Letter to King Ludwig II, 28 Sept. 1880, in Richard Wagner, Parsifal. Texte, Materialien, Kommentare, ed. Attila Csampai and Dietmar Holland (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1984), 112 (hereafter cited as Parsifal-Materialien). The relevant documents are also conveniently available in Dokumente zur Entstehung und ersten Aufführung des Bühnenweihfestspiels Parsifal, ed. Martin Geck and Egon Voss, vol. 30 of Sämtliche Werke, ed. Carl Dahlhaus (Mainz: Schott, 1970); (hereafter cited as Dokumente zur Entstehung).

3. Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music (New York: Time, 1972), 446.

4. Hans-Joachim Bauer, Richard Wagner Lexikon (Bergisch Gladbach: Lübbe, 1988), 282-285.

5. Otto Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter, 16th ed. (Vienna: Braumüller, 1917), 467. Weininger also maintained that the music and poetry of Parsifal are “inaccessible in all eternity to the fully genuine Jew.”

6. “Theater-Lourdes,” in Thomas Mann, Gesammelte Werke in zwölf Bänden (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1960), vol. 9, 404.

7. Parsifal-Materialien, 173.

8. Cited in Richard Wagner: Ein deutsches Ärgernis, ed. Klaus Umbach (Reinbek: Spiegel, 1982), 29-30.

9. “Die Musik als Circe,” in Der Fall Wagner; Werke in drei Bänden, ed. Karl Schlechta (München: Hanser, 1955), vol. 2, 930.

10. Werke, vol. 2, 1053.

11. Cited in Parsifal-Materialien, 6.

12. Claude Debussy, Monsieur Croche et autres écrits, ed. François Lesure (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 139.

13. Theodor W. Adorno, Versuch über Wagner, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), 139.

14. Gutman, 476.

15. Hartmut Zelinsky, Richard Wagner—ein deutsches Thema. Eine Dokumentation zur Wirkungsgeschichte Richard Wagners 1876-1976 (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 1976).

16. See Arthur Groos's methodological introduction in Reading Opera, ed. Arthur Groos and Roger Parker (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 1-11.

17. See the survey in Elisabeth Frenzel, Stoffe der Weltliteratur: Ein Lexikon dichtungsgeschichtlicher Längsschnitte, 7th ed. (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1988), 592-595.

18. Jost Hermand, “Gralsmotive um die Jahrhundertwende,” in his Von Mainz nach Weimar (1793-1919) (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1969), 269-297.

19. C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Random-Vintage, 1963), 215. Emma Jung's book, written in collaboration with Marie-Louise von Franz, Die Graalslegende in psychologischer Sicht, appeared in the Publications of the C. G. Jung Institute (Zürich: Rascher, 1960).

20. W. H. Auden, “The Guilty Vicarage,” in The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1962), 146-158.

21. From Ritual to Romance (1920; rpt. New York: Doubleday-Anchor, 1957), 20. It is worth noting that Weston also published a translation of Wolfram's Parzival (London: David Nutt, 1894), dedicated to the memory of Richard Wagner, and The Legends of the Wagner Drama (New York: Scribner, 1896).

22. See Wolfgang Golther, Parzival und der Gral in der Dichtung des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1925).

23. Frenzel, 594-595.

24. The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950 (New York: Harcourt, 1952), 50.

25. Small World (1984; rpt. New York: Warner, 1986), 72.

26. See the documentation in Parsifal-Materialien as well as Dokumente zur Entstehung.

27. See esp. Peter Wapnewski, Der traurige Gott: Richard Wagner in seinen Helden (München: Beck, 1978); Lucy Beckett, Richard Wagner: Parsifal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Dieter Borchmeyer, Das Theater Richard Wagners: Idee—Dichtung—Wirkung (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1982); and Marianne Wynn, “Medieval Literature in Reception: Richard Wagner and Wolfram's Parzival,” in London German Studies 2, ed. J. P. Stern (London: Institute of Germanic Studies, University of London, 1983), 94-114.

28. Borchmeyer, 292.

29. Letter to Mathilde Wesendonk, 29-30 May 1859; Parsifal-Materialien, 121.

30. In a letter to Reinhart von Seydlitz, 4 Jan. 1878; Werke, vol. 3, 1147.

31. In Versuch über Wagner, 87: “[da]s geträumte Bordell.”

32. In Der Fall Wagner, Werke, vol. 2, 908.

33. In a letter to Mathilde Wesendonk, 29-30 May 1859, Parsifal-Materialien, 122-123: “eine durchaus unreife Erscheinung.”

34. Gutman, 326.

35. In Der Fall Wagner, Werke, vol. 2, 923.

36. See his entry in the “Brown Book” for 2 Sept. 1865, Parsifal-Materialien, 106.

37. Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9, 365.

38. Letter to Carl Friedrich Glasenapp, 25 June 1877, Dokumente zur Entstehung, 23.

39. Hans Neuenfels, in Richard Wagner: Ein deutsches Ärgernis, 100.

40. In Der Fall Wagner, Werke, vol. 2, 937.

41. Kurt Hildebrandt, Wagner und Nietzsche (Breslau: Hirt, 1924), 344.

42. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10, 280.

43. Ibid., 239.

44. Ibid., 284.

45. Derek Watson, Richard Wagner: A Biography (London: Dent, 1979), 310.

46. Borchmeyer, 296.

47. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10, 211.