Richard Wagner: A Life in Music
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But Mann was even more impressed by the darker aspects of the work: “It is really only here that these accents of contrition and torment that W[agner] spent his whole life working on achieve their ultimate intensity. Tristan’s longing pales beside this Miserere, with its piercing details and ardent cruelties.”48
Even a writer as critical of Parsifal as Nietzsche had nothing but admiration for “a synthesis of states which will seem incompatible to many people, even ‘loftier people,’ with a severity that judges, an ‘altitude’ in the terrifying sense of the word, with an intimate cognizance and perspicuity that cut through the soul like a knife—and with a compassion for what is being watched and judged. Something of that sort occurs in Dante—nowhere else.”49
A century later Nike Wagner homed in on the pathological elements in the work, diagnosing a “universal state of suffering which is all the more modern because no one knows its cause; it remains uncomprehended, nameless and unredeemed.”50 My own attitude to Parsifal has changed now that I no longer hear it as music that seeks to express a particular view of the world, an interpretation I would be bound to resist in every shape and form. Now I see it as a musical psychograph, describing twisted and damaged individuals, all of whom are in search of salvation. Here there is, of course, no scope for conciliatory gestures of the kind seen in Wolfgang Wagner’s 1975 production, in which Kundry was allowed to live and partake of the Grail. Nor is there any scope for the sort of epiphany hinted at even in Christoph Schlingensief’s 2004 production in Bayreuth, a production otherwise obsessed with images of death. We are dealing, rather, with a desperately hysterical fight against the dictates of a fear of death that Wagner’s notorious redemptive mysticism strives merely superficially to keep in check even in Parsifal. This does not contradict Nietzsche’s claim, in which admiration and malice are finely balanced: “Wagner never had better inspirations than in the end. Here the cunning in his alliance of beauty and sickness goes so far that, as it were, it casts a shadow over Wagner’s earlier art—which now seems too bright, too healthy.”51
True, this view does not salvage the work’s central religious experience in the way that Wagner wanted. But it asserts itself as art. Modern audiences can approach Parsifal not through the medium of religion but only through that of its theatricality. Listeners receptive to that theatricality and able to hear “a mystical imprimatur on the temple proceedings”52 in the final “Erlösung dem Erlöser” sung “barely audibly” by an unseen chorus and to see in this passage a vehicle for beguiling sounds are unlikely to be unimpressed by a performance of the work. Both Debussy and Proust were fascinated by Parsifal without abandoning themselves to its ideology. And the young Alban Berg—later to compose the socially critical Wozzeck—wrote in 1909, immediately after a performance of the work in Bayreuth: “You would be able to tell from the tears that keep welling to my eyes and from the dreamy otherworldliness of my thoughts how deeply and sublimely I have been moved. Words can say barely half of what I am feeling and can scarcely express the tremendously life-enhancing and shattering impression that the work has left on me. And how futile it would be to try to describe the music—such music.”53
It is no accident that Berg praises the music. We do not need to celebrate the syncretic construct that Parsifal represents as an example of “sacred world theater”54 or to dismiss it as a National Socialist handbook to admire this music as altogether unique. Ideally, I believe the work should be performed as an oratorio with a silent film in the background, clarifying Wagner’s point that the music is the “unseen soul” of the action,55 the action itself being tolerable only in the spirit of the voyeurism that the darkened auditorium of a cinema invites us to share. Like the young Parsifal attending events in the Castle of the Grail and feeling only uncomprehending astonishment, the cinemagoer would be aware of the plot only as a strangely distant expression of fin-de-siècle mysticism that can acquire a private reality only through the eloquence of Wagner’s music. Even while still working on the score, Wagner had already noted with a sigh: “Oh, I hate the thought of all those costumes and grease paint! When I think that characters like Kundry will now have to be dressed up, those dreadful artists’ balls immediately spring into my mind. Having created the invisible orchestra, I now feel like inventing the invisible theater!”56 There is something paradoxical about the fact that the work by Wagner most clearly intended to trade in ideas survives today in a form in which philosophy and ritual are merely peripheral.
Innovative features in terms of the history of music may be found at every point in the score. Werner Breig, for example, has drawn attention to the scene between Klingsor and Kundry at the start of act 2 where the “text declamation is heightened into a veritable psychological image of the character.”57 According to Wagner’s stage directions, Kundry’s voice must sound “rough and disjointed, as if she is attempting to regain the use of language,” a type of setting that looks forward to the verismo operas of the future (music example 29). As for Parsifal’s cry of “Amfortas!—Die Wunde!—Die Wunde!—Sie brennt in meinem Herzen” (Amfortas! The wound! The wound! It’s burning in my heart), Adorno notes that Wagner’s music is “poised immediately on the threshold of atonality” (music example 30).58
29. Bars 166–79 of act 2 of Parsifal.
30. Bars 994–1002 of act 2 of Parsifal.
It is by no means certain, of course, that those elements in a work that were once regarded as progressive will ensure its survival in the canon, for every example of avant-garde art is quickly consigned to history. But Parsifal deserves to be called a pivotal piece inasmuch as two levels clash in it in an altogether unique way. As a “work” in the classical and romantic sense, Parsifal has a hollow form whose content is made up for the most part of what is called “new music”—music that plays at random with elements of that form. It is this dialectic that makes it possible for us to hear Parsifal with both traditional and modern ears. Or, rather, listeners receptive to musical nuances will necessarily hear Parsifal with two different kinds of ears—in stereo, as it were. And, like it or not, such listeners will be reflecting the attitude of the composer, who on the one hand was absorbed by his confessional work in the nineteenth-century tradition, while on the other hand playing with his own feelings, like an old man in whom sadness at his own emotional involvement consorts with his professional routine as a skilled craftsman. Or like someone who believes not in God but in his own religion of art.
For me, one of the most impressive aspects of Wagner’s entire creative output is his music’s ability to convey this contradictory attitude—and this is true, no matter whether its creator would have welcomed such an interpretation or not. If the modern catchphrase about the “death of the author” has any meaning at all, then it is in the present case, in which the largely diffuse interaction of a traditional and a progressive musical language ensures that what we have here is a pivotal work that communicates the experiences of modern men and women independently of its author. And although we experience these only on a metalevel by marveling at Wagner’s skills as a magician, such experiences, while not making us any happier, at least are closer to reality than any that may be encountered in the field of “idealistic” music. After all, they reflect the inner turmoil of modern men and women: our self-pity in the face of existential insecurity and our ambivalent attitude to the various kinds of redemption that are on offer. We hear the sound of the Grail bells with a frisson, while making no attempt to follow them.
Nothing ever happens in the history of music without some prior warning. Specifically, we can regard Die Meistersinger as the model for a method of composition whose interplay between the old and the new anticipates the broken, refracted nature of Wagner’s final score, except that in the earlier work that interplay was limited to the world of comedy. And whereas the old was used in Die Meistersinger to provide a “real-idealistic” reflection of a particular moment in the history of music, in Parsifal it is a synonym for weathering, for sparseness, and for myst
eriousness in general. The impact is all the greater in that the corresponding musical figures—one scarcely dares speak of leitmotifs any longer—help to paint the old using modern colors, with the result that it simultaneously appears new and, as such, resembles a newly rediscovered primitive religion. (On a much smaller scale, Robert Schumann had demonstrated how this could be done in his song “Auf einer Burg” from his Liederkreis, op. 39.)
The mixture of piety and the search for meaning, of steadfastness and mysteriousness, of closed melodic forms and open harmonic writing typical of the “mantric formula”59 “Durch Mitleid wissend, der reine Thor, harre sein, den ich erkor” (Made wise by pity, the blameless fool, wait for him whom I have chosen) is achieved by means of a compositional process of rare refinement: on the one hand a textbook sequence of fifths lends the upper voice and hence the writing as a whole a sense of archaic beauty, while on the other, the chromatically modern and distinctly volatile harmonization ensures a feeling of instability (music example 31).
31. The “Pure Fool” motif from bars 737–41 of act 1 of Parsifal.
The distance covered by Wagner since the early stages of the Ring is clear from a comparison between the above passage (“Durch Mitleid wissend”) and the renunciation motif in scene 1 of Das Rheingold (“Nur wer der Minne Macht versagt”). In both cases we are dealing with a magic rhyme, but whereas this is set in the Ring as a vocally and harmonically unambiguous phrase, it takes the form of a musical puzzle in Parsifal. As such, it is able to fulfill its “mantric” function in various contexts, hinting at all manner of allusions in keeping with the unfolding action onstage. Shortly before the end of the work, for example, a variant of the beginning of the phrase turns up as the anacrusis of the Last Supper motif, which in turn is adapted in such a way that it can continue with the final phrase of the theme associated with the words “Durch Mitleid wissend” (music example 32).
32. Bars 1081–84 of act 3 of Parsifal.
This comparison helps us to understand why Parsifal can be described as a pivotal work in terms of the history of composition. In the good old tradition of the leitmotif, the renunciation motif is semantically unambiguous in that it uses the tried-and-tested language of a minor tonality to express the idea of renunciation in love, an idea that from the Rhinedaughters’ point of view is entirely regrettable. Such a use was familiar to listeners from ancient ballads, including the melancholy folk song “Schwesterlein, Schwesterlein, wann geh’n wir nach Haus?” collected by Zuccalmaglio and arranged by Brahms. The setting of the words “Durch Mitleid wissend” is also semantically charged, but on this occasion the listener cannot fall back on any tradition to interpret its meaning but has to rely on the overall context. And if the musical symbols lack any binding meaning that can accrue to them only from a lengthy tradition, their interpretation necessarily becomes localized, with the result that it can change in a trice, and instead of establishing meaning, it merely satisfies ornamental or decorative needs.
Wagner himself would not have referred to the work being poised on a threshold, of course, for his aim was to equip the piece with binding symbols, and he would presumably have refuted Jean Moréas’s claim in his “Symbolist Manifesto” of 1886 that the aim of symbolist art was “never to concentrate on the Idea as such.”60 For however much Wagner may have insisted on using music to introduce his ideas to the emotional world of his listeners, he left those listeners in no doubt that it was the music that had to convey those ideas. The situation changed only when audiences began to respond to Parsifal, for against this background the symbol takes on a life of its own and becomes the res ipsa. When he described the Good Friday music, baptism, anointing, and final tableau as “irresistible,” Thomas Mann was not responding to Wagner’s private religion but to a series of powerful images qua images. If there are ideas in Parsifal, music is not their reflection but—in the finest Schopenhauerian tradition—their archetype, an image behind which no listeners can ever hope to go.
Whereas Parsifal became a pivotal work only for later generations, the paintings of Gustav Klimt—generally viewed as examples of symbolism and Jugendstil—combine within them the corresponding ambivalence from the outset. The Beethoven frieze that Klimt painted for the Vienna Secession in 1902 and that was directly inspired by Wagner’s interpretation of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony demonstrates the artist’s interest in ideas, hence his description of one particular scene depicting a knight with a couple kneeling behind him as “The Longing for Happiness. The Sufferings of Weak Humanity: Their Entreaties Addressed to the Well-Armed Stronger Man.”61 On the other hand, Klimt’s art aims to aestheticize the artist’s ideas, each theme being relatively random—it is enough for it to signal an intellectual flight of fancy. Once this provision has been met, then the theme may take second place to questions of form and artistic treatment. Indeed, this is sometimes true in the literal sense, notably when a human figure disappears behind the painter’s brushstrokes.
And yet we may approach the music of Parsifal not only in the way that we might approach a painting by Klimt; we could also hear it as a piece by Debussy born before his time. This takes us a stage further, for Debussy had no time for music that seeks to convey a message. Even titles such as La mer (The sea) and Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (Prelude to a faun’s afternoon) signal that we are not dealing with existential victories and defeats and that the composer simply wanted his listeners to share what he himself saw and felt and heard before giving it musical form. Even in his symbolist opera Pelléas et Mélisande, it is—according to Boulez—the “musical structure that assumes total responsibility for what happens onstage.”62 Essentially this means that the music alone expresses all that we can ever know about Pelléas, Mélisande, Golaud, and Yniold. Or, to put it another way, we hear the music in the context of the action but not as a reaction to it.
In the case of Parsifal, we do not need to go as far as this, and yet it remains a viable approach. Boulez, whose appearances in the sunken pit at Bayreuth proved pioneering, has referred to the work as “a kind of ‘prism’ of Claude Debussy.”63 Conversely, he has compared the opening of act 3, “Parsifal’s Wanderings,” to an expressive, unsentimental, and nonironic night piece—again his point of reference is clearly Debussy.64 I would remind readers at this juncture of a comment by Wagner that I quoted in my chapter on Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: “It has not been possible to avoid a certain restriction of feeling; this does not mean that it is churchlike in tone, he says, indeed there is even a divine wildness about it, but such affecting emotions as in Tristan or even the Nibelungen would be entirely out of place. ‘You will see—diminished sevenths were just not possible!’”65
Wanderings are an integral part of Wagner’s archetypal scenario in terms of his life and art. There are obvious parallels between Tannhäuser’s Pilgrimage and Parsifal’s Wanderings. Both are “imaginary pictures,” to quote Wagner’s own taxonomy; both of them open their respective third acts and are performed with the curtains closed; and both of them serve to bridge a considerable period of time. In Tannhäuser’s case, the hero goes on a pilgrimage to Rome, his return journey being notable only for its aimlessness, while Parsifal’s wanderings take him “through pathless wildernesses” and “countless afflictions, battles, and struggles,” to quote from the second prose draft of 1877.66
As with Tannhäuser, so the orchestral introduction to act 3 of Parsifal is intended to replace the action onstage. As a precaution, Wagner reminded himself of Tannhäuser’s Pilgrimage while he was working on the compositional draft of Parsifal’s Wanderings between October 18 and October 30, 1878. During this time he played the end of act 2 and the beginning of act 3 to Cosima and two of their daughters. And yet, in spite of the fact that Parsifal is more like a reformed Tannhäuser than a reborn Siegfried, and although Tannhäuser’s Pilgrimage already contains the Dresden Amen that reappears in Parsifal’s Wanderings in the form of the Grail motif, the later introduction is far from being a remake of the earlier
interlude. In Tannhäuser’s Pilgrimage, the pervasive note of despair includes an element of passion, whereas the dominant impression in the introduction to act 3 of Parsifal is one of asceticism, desolation, and emptiness—despite the initial performance marking of “expressively,” a marking contradicted by Wagner’s own remark during the rehearsals in 1882 that bar 11 should be played “as if without expression.”67 This is reflected in the chromatic melodic writing, in the predominance of ambiguous chord combinations that repeatedly call into question the underlying tonal system, and in contrapuntal writing that creates a curiously emaciated impression. The opening motif, for example, has been described both as the motif of desolation and as that of the grief associated with the Grail and has a long prehistory. Stated by the strings alone, without any support or color from the winds, it was noted down in a rudimentary form at a time when Wagner was preoccupied with Tristan und Isolde. Here it appears on a sheet of music manuscript paper intended for Mathilde Wesendonck and headed “Parzival.” Underlying the music are the words “Wo find’ ich dich, du heil’ger Gral, dich sucht voll Sehnsucht mein Herze” (Where shall I find you, O Holy Grail? Filled with longing, my heart is seeking you) (music example 33).68
33. A transcription of the undated sketch that Wagner sent to Mathilde Wesendonck in 1858 in which Parzival tells of his longing to find the Grail.