Richard Wagner (1813-1883)
Many will go on pilgrimage to Adelaide this year for Australia’s first fully staged performances of Wagner’s Parsifal. Pilgrimage – that is how it would be regarded by Wagner and the guardians of his heritage. For years after the first Parsifal, at Bayreuth’s Festspielhaus in 1882, Bayreuth was the only place Parsifal could be experienced – until 1913, with only a few theatres breaking the ban on performances anywhere else. To devotees of Parsifal – and the rash of performances all over the world after 1914 showed that there were many – experiencing Wagner’s music drama had indeed the character of a pilgrimage.
The touring Quinlan Opera Company brought Wagner works to Australia in 1913, including The Ring. Quinlan planned to return and present Parsifal in 1915, but war intervened. Australia until now has seen only two sets of performances, both in concert rather than staged. In 1977 the ABC and Opera Australia collaborated to present Parsifal, with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Sydney Philharmonia Choirs, under Carlo Felice Cillario. Then it was performed at the Brisbane Biennial in 1995 with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra under Gunther Schuller.
Learning and experiencing Parsifal, reading the score, listening to records, or watching it on video or film, the imagination lights on many places. It could be the mountainous terrain of the Spanish Pyrenees, where Wagner set his drama in a mythical early middle ages. Monsalvat, the domain of the knightly guardians of the grail, received an Australian tribute in Justus Jorgensen’s Montsalvat, outside Melbourne. A tourist to Palermo, in Sicily, might discover with surprise that in the Grand Hotel et des Palmes (still grand) an aging and cantankerous Wagner resided while orchestrating Parsifal’s third act. Somehow Parsifal’s aura of religiosity sits uneasily with this hideout for targets of the Mafia. But in the hills around Palermo are other reminders, such as the Cathedral of Monreale, of the medieval past in which Wagner’s imagination had taken root.
Visual inspirations
Italy contributed to the concept: in 1880 Wagner had been moved to tears by the interior of Siena Cathedral, which inspired the design for the Grail temple in Parsifal, with its dome rising out of sight, its stepped plinth for the altar of the Grail in the centre of a circular sanctuary, and its columned side aisles receding into darkness. The magic garden of the evil enemy of the Grail knights, Klingsor, was suggested by the Palazzo Rufolo garden in Ravello, visited by Wagner with the designer of the sets and costumes, the young Russian painter Paul von Joukowsky. At Bayreuth all of this was to come together, and the visual, stage aspects were as important as the text of the drama and the music.
A staged production aims at total realisation of the work, but imagination, at first, may have been more compelling than reality. At Bayreuth in 1882, the musical side of things was by all accounts magnificent, but the staging had its problems. The moving backdrops on rollers for the long transformation scenes in Acts I and III, giving an impression of Parsifal and Gurnemanz journeying from the forest into the secret interior of the Grail temple, failed to unfurl at the necessary speed, which forced Wagner to alter the music. The costumes of the Flower Maidens were described by the conductor Felix Weingartner as ‘incomprehensibly tasteless’. The Bayreuth productions, which were copied, by and large, after the ending of that theatre’s monopoly on Parsifal were more conventional, in theatrical terms, than Wagner’s musical and dramatic concept – they remained anchored in the ‘ponderous realism’ of late 19th century theatre.
A revolution in staging
From within the Wagnerian orbit came the major revolution in Parsifal production, when the composer’s grandson Wieland Wagner and his brother Wolfgang took over the direction of a re-opened Bayreuth after the Second World War. Wieland’s 1951 production of Parsifal dispensed almost entirely with scenery, using plain backdrops for the outdoor scenes, and his setting for the Grail temple scenes reduced the original design to essentials. Lighting became the main visual feature, and all the action took place on an illuminated disc at centre stage. Ernest Newman, nearing the end of a long life studying Wagner, thought this the best Parsifal he had ever seen: ‘We were conscious, for the first time, of the characters as Wagner must have seen them in his creative imagination, and the music, with nothing intruding now between it and us, spoke to us with a poignancy beyond the power of words to express’.
Final testament
As Wagner’s final artistic testament, Parsifal has exerted a fascination and influence more powerful, perhaps, than any of his other works. Wagner had become pessimistic about the modern age’s willingness to come with him on his pilgrimage: ‘if people prefer to see the Nibelungenring’, he wrote in 1879, ‘in comfort at the theatre in their own centres of commerce instead of setting out upon the somewhat troublesome visit to Bayreuth in order to attend carefully worked out festival performances, it will be seen as a sign of contemporary progress that one no longer has to strike forth on a pilgrimage to something extraordinary, but, rather, the extraordinary, comfortably transformed into the usual, is brought to one’s door’. Wagner’s reflection on the commercial failure of the first Bayreuth season suggests that the exclusivity given to Bayreuth for Parsifal was, consciously or not, a commercial decision.
It worked. Curiosity and passion for Parsifal rose to a fever pitch during the last years of the Bayreuth ban. Parsifal was in accord with transformative aesthetic movements of the time – a compound of symbolism, impressionism, and decadence. That is why it had to wait, to come fully into its own in the theatre, for non-naturalistic productions. Between finishing The Ring and creating Parsifal, Wagner’s style had changed from the naturalistic and allegorical to the allusive and evocative. As Robert Gutman observes ‘in Parsifal little is directly named by the mysterious text or elusive motifs, and the audience is left to divine meanings. Musically and poetically, Wagner was following the path from high romanticism to impressionism and symbolism’.
It took perceptive contemporaries to grasp at least some of what Wagner was about. Debussy, for example, admired many beauties in the music of Parsifal, and his own Pelléas et Mélisande is marked by it, especially its orchestral sound (Debussy described this aspect of Parsifal ‘as if lit from behind’). But Debussy also mocked most of Parsifal’s characters and plots: Amfortas, the ‘sad knight of the Grail who moans like a shop girl’; Kundry ‘the old rose of hell…sentimental old dragon’. For Debussy, ‘the finest character in Parsifal is Klingsor (former Knight of the Grail, shown to the door of the Holy Place for his too individual views on chastity) … this cunning old magician and old offender is not only the one “human” character but also the only “moral” one in this play, in which so many wrong-headed moralistic and religious ideas are propounded – ideas of which the young Parsifal, the heroic but foolish knight, is the messenger’.
Debussy is quick to point out that all this ‘applies only to Wagner the poet, and has nothing to do with the musical side of Parsifal, which is of the utmost beauty’. Debussy was not the only critic dismissive of Parsifal’s extra-musical dimensions, though his reaction was a good deal more sophisticated than his fellow French musician Delibes, who said he liked the second act because there were pretty girls (those same Flower Maidens whose costumes Weingartner found so tasteless). Other early critics either took Parsifal’s Christian elements at face value, without noticing their questionable consistency with truly Christian doctrine and liturgy, or else considered it blasphemous that the unbeliever Wagner had dared put on the stage his simulacrum of the Mass.
The ethical core of the work?
Wagner was no Christian believer, and the beliefs Parsifal’s creator held sincerely seem closer to the Schopenhauerian idea of renunciation (found also in Buddhism). The concept of Mitleid (‘compassion’), represented by the pure, innocent, or holy fool is – on this interpretation – the ethical core of the work.
In recent productions of Parsifal sexuality has bulked large. The work presents an either/or between sex, as an evil thing, and chastity, as a good thing. The chastity in Parsifal is presented as essential for a brotherhood devoted to a great spiritual task. Sex in Wagner’s mind was associated, by this time in his life, with guilt and vice. His transcendent art on this theme struck a responsive chord in many of the work’s early admirers.
Wagner had radically transformed his literary sources: it is true that in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzifal poem, any man pledged to serve the Grail was to renounce the love of women (except the king, who might take a wife). But this rule was often flouted – in the temple resided 25 maidens to care for the Grail, and the Grail frequently instructed the knights to ride forth and beget offspring. Wolfram’s knights strove rather unsuccessfully ‘to guard themselves against incontinence’.
It has been suggested unkindly that Wagner’s view of the matter was unconscious projection of his own fading sexual powers. Parsifal’s attempted seduction by the Flower Maidens and Kundry takes place in an aphrodisiac setting of flowers, scents and flimsy clothes, rather suggestive of the devices Wagner took to using during the years of Parsifal’s composition to make himself feel more comfortable and sensual.
Another projection of Wagner’s personal preoccupations at the time is Parsifal’s sub-theme of anti-vivisection and vegetarianism, first seen in the rather horrific details of the agony of the swan killed by Parsifal on his first appearance. The knights’ preoccupation with the purity of their tribe reveals traits of anti-semitism and racialism, well-documented in Wagner’s other writings. They are hardly as explicit in Parsifal as an unsympathetic critic, Robert Gutman, would have it:
Surveying the world from the heights of Monsalvat, the Grail community in Parsifal was alarmed to observe natural selection working against its distinctive Aryanism…Amfortas contrasts the divine blood of Christ in the Grail with his own sinful blood, corrupted by sexual contact with Kundry, a racial inferior…In Parsifal, with the help of church bells, snippets of the Mass, and the paraphernalia of the Passion, Wagner sets forth a religion of racism under the cover of Christian legend.
But Wagner’s art makes us take all this seriously, for as long as we are subject to the spell of Parsifal in performance. Thomas Mann observed in a famous essay:
To the artist, new experiences of ‘truth’ are new incentives to the game, new possibilities of expression, no more. He believes in them, he takes them seriously, just so far as he needs in order to give them the fullest and most profound expression….the combination of the extremely raffiné with fairy-story simplicity…the highly intellectual under the guise of an orgy of the senses; the ability to make the essentially grotesque put on the garment of consecration, the Last Supper, the bell, the elevation of the Host; to couple sex and religion in an opera of greatly daring sex-appeal…all that is nothing but romantic…One advanced and offensive degenerate after another: a self-castrated magician; a desperate double personality, composed of a Circe and a repentant Magdalene, with cataleptic transition stages; a lovesick high-priest, awaiting the redemption that is to come to him in the person of a chaste youth; the youth himself, “pure” fool and redeemer…It is music’s power over the emotions that makes the ensemble appear not like a half-burlesque, half-uncanny impropriety of the romantic school, but as a miracle play of the highest religious significance.
“…a Spätstil, a ‘late-style’…”
The music of Parsifal is so powerful and attractive that concert performances long seemed a very worthwhile substitute for full staging. Wagner’s Parsifal poem, on which he had been working in various ways since he first read Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzifal in 1845, is a major achievement in itself. It forms the basis for musical expression in many ways more balanced and lucid than anything Wagner had previously achieved. In text and music Wagner arrived at a Spätstil, a ‘late-style’ – paralleled in the work of many other long-lived creative artists.
Wagner’s Parsifal points beyond itself to many new trends in the arts – a pointer not missed by French symbolists and decadents, and reflected in music in perhaps surprising places, such as Debussy’s Pelléas, and the music of Edward Elgar, whose The Dream of Gerontius, in choral layout and musical language, is unthinkable without the Parsifal Elgar saw at Bayreuth, and the Weltschmerz of whose Cello Concerto takes the tones of Wagner’s self-pitying Amfortas.
An artist who can create a Parsifal may be excused his propaganda and his pose as the artist-redeemer of humanity. Either accept Parsifal on Wagner’s valuation, as a Bühnenweihfestspiel, ‘a festival play for the consecration of a stage’, or regard it as a fascinating, sometimes titillating, often moving, and impressive amalgam of miracle play, myth, symbol, and depth psychology, set to music combining a highly developed symphonic orchestral fabric with elements of dramatic oratorio, the whole covered with a veil of impressionistic suggestion – either way will not exhaust Parsifal’s meanings or its capacity to give pleasure and be moving. Those who make their way to the new Bayreuth in South Australia are more than just folks who long to go on pilgrimages.
First published in Opera~Opera, 2001
Image: Paul von Joukowsky: Design for the hall of the Grail, 1882, Public Domain