The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles: How Music Has Shaped Civilization

by Howard Goodall

  All religions, even musical ones, need their Eucharist, their Pooja, their Shahada, their Pirit – moments of high observance and ritual. Wagner provided his cult with the solemn act of devotion, purification and veneration that is Parsifal.

  Set in medieval Spain, Parsifal is ostensibly a parable about the Holy Grail, the cup from which Christ drank at the Last Supper. It doesn’t so much have a plot as a series of ritualistic scenes, and its imagery and context wouldn’t be out of place if one stumbled across them at the secret tombs of the Knights Templar in Rennes-le-Château, on Glastonbury Tor, or in the pages of a Dan Brown novel. It is easy to pooh-pooh its symbols and magic, its Doctor-Who-like time travel and, since Monty Python covered the source material, it is always a struggle to see the Knights of the Holy Grail on stage without sniggering. But there is a deadly serious intent in Parsifal.

  At its heart lies a theory Wagner drew from Schopenhauer, from Buddhism and from Christianity, that self-enlightenment, or personal redemption, is achieved by denying oneself gratification, resisting temptation and seeking an understanding of fellow-suffering. Compassion, the piece teaches, has a healing and liberating power. There is nothing mad or fanciful about this idea, and the first and third acts of Parsifal, the acts that take place in the Grail’s mountain refuge of Montsalvat, contain music of breathtaking grandeur and beauty to match the deeply felt beliefs underpinning it. The so-called ‘Transformation’ music, during which the young Parsifal is taken into the castle to witness the Holy Communion of the Knights Templar, has to be one of the most awe-inspiring, heart-stopping moments in all European orchestral music. Though it is powerful, it is not triumphant; it is agonising – at its climax is a leitmotif associated with suffering. Fellow composer Gustav Mahler described hearing this as the ‘greatest and most soul-wrenching experience of my life’.

  Musically, Parsifal derives much of its seductive power from Wagner’s frequent disruption of the listener’s expectations. He had played with expectation and fulfilment liberally in Tristan und Isolde, but in that case the purpose of his harmonic delaying tactics was to portray sexual desire, arousal and consummation (or lack of it). In Parsifal, his agenda was spiritual rather than physical, and the technique he relied on to intoxicate the listener is called chromaticism.

  The term ‘chromaticism’ comes from the Greek word for colour. It is the musical equivalent of filling a painted canvas with thousands of colours instead of just a few. This is how it works.

  As we have already seen, all the world’s musical systems recognise the natural and perfect relationship between a note made by plucking a string and its little brother made by plucking a string half the length: the helpfully named ‘octave’. We have also seen that the number of times you subdivide the distance within this octave is up for grabs: in some cultures there can be as many as sixty subdivisions between the two, or even – theoretically at least – three hundred and sixty, in an ancient Chinese system, but in Western and Indian classical music the distance has in recent centuries been divided into twelve steps. Western music, being more orientated towards harmony than its non-Western counterparts, gradually formed hierarchies among the twelve notes, so that the listener’s ears latched on to a ‘home’ in the sound. It was a little bit like shaping a wild, natural landscape into identifiable patterns for the benefit of the human onlooker.

  As soon as there was a centre of gravity, or a ‘home’ in the sound, the relationship between chords also started to coalesce into hierarchies. For Mozart or Haydn, the hierarchy of chords was so strict that the listener is never far from the ‘home’ key centre. As the nineteenth century progressed, though, the lure of the three governing triads, I, IV and V, began to pall and the strength of the previously well-defined chords began to blur. The more weight composers gave to the junior notes and lesser chords, the more they allowed the harmony to lose its sense of familiarity, reassurance and comfort. It was a deliberate attempt to make harmony sound unstable and more exotic in flavour. By the time of Liszt and Wagner, the hierarchies were all but gone.

  In the opening prelude of Parsifal’s third act, the music shifts and slides around, avoiding settling on one key or chord for more than one beat. This is extreme chromaticism at work. You are meant to feel disorientated and in the grip of mysterious powers. The harmony is in meltdown because Wagner has used chromaticism, the promiscuous use of all the subdivisions in the scale, to put you in an unsettling place. As it happens, that place is the Temple of the Holy Grail, Montsalvat, and the atmosphere is tense and unresolved.

  As an intriguing footnote to the rich world of chromaticism, the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin, who was ten years old when Parsifal opened, took the ‘colour of notes’ idea to a whole new level in theories he developed from around 1907 onwards. He assigned each of the twelve notes in the scale a different colour, based on Opticks, Sir Isaac Newton’s 1704 study of light, colour and diffraction. He also helped his friend, chemist and electrical engineer Aleksandr Mozer, invent a light-projecting colour organ, the ‘Chromola’ (also known as the clavier à lumières or tastiera di luce), which could ‘play’ the coloured lights corresponding to the twelve notes of a keyboard, as directed by Scriabin’s score. Part of this contraption, looking dare I say it like something that has fallen off a stall at a fair, is preserved in the Scriabin Museum in Moscow.

  Scriabin’s music, as heard in his complex Prometheus: Poem of Fire (1910), is highly idiosyncratic, not to say hallucinogenic, like an intermingled Chopin and Debussy, with Parsifal and Stravinsky’s The Firebird being played simultaneously in the background. Scriabin was born on Christmas Day and died at Easter, and rather aptly toyed with the idea that he might be the reincarnation of Christ, once writing, ‘I am God. I am nothing, I am play, I am freedom, I am life. I am the boundary, I am the peak.’ Wagner wasn’t the only one who believed music and mysticism could fuse to become the religion of the future.

  As for Wagner, he was at pains to point out in his autobiography the symbolism of his having had the idea for an opera of the Parsifal legend on Good Friday: ‘I suddenly remembered that the day was Good Friday, and I called to mind the significance this omen had already once assumed for me when I was reading Wolfram’s Parsifal… its noble possibilities struck me with overwhelming force, and out of my thoughts about Good Friday I rapidly conceived a whole drama, of which I made a rough sketch with a few dashes of the pen, dividing the whole into three acts.’ With its heady concoction of chromaticism, rich, sweeping orchestral landscapes, ethereal musical representations of heavenly bliss, its highly developed leitmotifs and its fervent invocation of compassion and enlightenment, Parsifal is undoubtedly the work of a mountainous talent sincerely seeking to give meaning to life and the world around him. A fairly typical summary of the thousands of pages of reverential prose that it prompted when first performed is that of Charles Albert Lidgey, whose 1899 book on Wagner concluded, ‘As the “Ring” is the embodiment of human Love, so is “Parsifal” the expression of the Love Divine. “Parsifal”, in truth, is not a drama – it is a religious ceremony. It is one of those works from which the cold lance of criticism glances without piercing… It is more seemly to regard it as the last message to his fellow-creatures of a man who laboured with all his strength to propagate the noble truth – Love is of God. As such let us honour both it and its author.’

  There is, however, another side to the philosophy driving Parsifal, and it is a side that for some Wagner worshippers flipped a switch.

  It is not possible to sidestep the fact that the climax of this Crusader story homes in on the magical properties of the spear that allegedly pierced the side of the crucified Jesus of Nazareth (only ever referred to as the ‘Redeemer’ in the text). The ‘pure’ blood of Christ, the Holy Grail containing it, and the sacrificial significance of Good Friday are all presented as both real and miraculous. The holy blood itself is seen as purifying: purging the evil, the weak and the sinful. Plotting against the innocent Christian Parsifal is the Darth
Vader of the tale, a malicious sorcerer called Klingsor whose magic garden lies in the Arabic south of Spain and who – until the 1950s – was typically portrayed in Parsifal productions as of Arabic or Jewish origin.

  Klingsor, who has castrated himself, is accompanied by a possessed shape-shifter, Kundry, a reincarnation of the cursed Jewish princess Herodias. Klingsor forces Kundry to seduce Parsifal in the hope of contaminating his purity. She enlists the help of her teenage ‘daughters’, the Flower Maidens, in her task of sexual entrapment. The much-abused Kundry, having converted to Christianity at the last moment and been duly released from the curse that has trapped her in time, is then killed off at the moment the ‘pure’ Parsifal becomes chief protector of the Grail, blessed by a dove from heaven. Her final humiliation and the triumph of the Aryan hero Parsifal were not very subtly concealed metaphors for what Wagner wanted to happen to German culture. Two years earlier he had baldly compared ‘the superiority of the revelation through Jesus Christ to that through Abraham and Moses’. He may have died seven months after the opening of Parsifal, but tragically the toxic legacy of his views on Aryan supremacy did not.

  Although Wagner regarded all foreign influences as potentially threatening to German purity, he singled out the Jews for particular venom. Unfortunately, in nineteenth-century Europe, anti-Semitism was rampant, but Wagner’s views were excessive even by the standards of the time. His fanaticism partly stemmed from his own experiences of being a struggling opera composer in his earlier career, in Paris, where he developed a personal loathing for the most successful of the grand opera composers of the moment, Giacomo Meyerbeer. It was also stoked by his reading The Inequality of Human Races by Frenchman J. Arthur Gobineau, in the 1850s, in which Gobineau declared the superiority of the white European and coined the idea of ‘degenerate’ or inferior, impure races. Gradually Wagner adopted a virulently anti-Semitic attitude that polluted his views on almost everything. His avowed agenda was to give the Germans a sense of their historical destiny through the arts. To fulfil this destiny, as he conceived it, he believed that it would be necessary to remove all Jews – and all trace of Jewish culture – from the German Reich.

  He was not alone in wishing this outcome. Three years after Parsifal opened, in 1885, German Chancellor Bismarck legislated to expel all Jews and Poles from the Prussian Reich; within forty years this ultra-German nationalism evolved into the cancerous ideology of Nazism. It’s no good pretending Wagner wasn’t accessory to this slide into xenophobic vitriol. In one of his many inflammatory publications, Erkenne dich selbst (Know Thyself) of 1881, he urged the German Volk to awaken and bring about a ‘great solution’ to the Jews’ ‘now so dreaded power among and over us’: their eradication. On another occasion he ‘joked’ that all Jews should be herded into a theatre, for a performance of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s 1779 play Nathan the Wise, set during the Third Crusade and calling for religious tolerance, and immolated.

  Wagner could not, of course, have predicted that the Nazis would take him at his word, nor that Hitler would one day proclaim, ‘Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner’, or, ‘I intend to base my religion on the Parsifal legend.’ But there is no doubt that the Nazi top brass treated Bayreuth as a shrine. They were welcomed with open arms by Wagner’s surviving family members; there was even a suggestion that Hitler, known as ‘Uncle Wolf’ by the Wagner children, might have proposed marriage to Winifred Wagner, the composer’s English daughter-in-law. Bayreuth, in fact, had become Montsalvat itself, the mountain-top resting place of the Holy Grail, the high temple of Aryan culture. Joseph Goebbels, head of the Nazi propaganda ministry, idolised Parsifal, which was put on twenty-three times at Berlin’s Deutsche Oper alone during the period of the Third Reich. (The 1938 production witnessed the debut of young soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf as a Flower Maiden. Schwarzkopf, darling of the Reich’s culture department, later allegedly took the SS General and Nazi Governor of Lower Austria, Dr Hugo Jury, as her lover. He committed suicide on the day of the German surrender; her career never looked back.) New productions of Parsifal were mounted at Bayreuth in 1934 and 1937, though revivals of it were suspended during the war so as to spare the war-wounded the insensitivity of scenes involving the wounded knight Amfortas. Propaganda images in Nazi Germany variously depicted the Führer as a Montsalvat knight, or indeed as Parsifal himself, with the dove of benediction hovering above him.

  Fully understanding the racial implications of Parsifal’s message and its pre-eminence in Nazi ideology, it is uncomfortable for us to hear Wagner’s sublime music without wincing. In one way, this became the most dangerous music ever written, because, despite being motivated by a devotion to self-denial and compassion, it undoubtedly inspired hatred.

  Wagner’s influence on the other, non-musical, arts was considerable. During his lifetime alone over ten thousand books and articles were written about him. The painter Renoir asked if he could paint a portrait of him and crossed Europe to do so. Picasso made a drawing in response to Parsifal in 1934, a precursor to his world-famous Guernica. D. H. Lawrence wrote a novel, The Trespasser, which was inspired by Wagner’s version of Siegfried. Poets, philosophers and playwrights gushed and paid homage to him, including T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Oscar Wilde, whose sinister Dorian Gray was an early Wagnerite.

  Despite all this, his immediate effect on other composers was patchy. Though they were blown away by what he was attempting, very few followed his example into through-composed music drama, except the one-hit-wonder German composer of the opera Hansel and Gretel, Engelbert Humperdinck. French composer Jules Massenet wrote a Parsifal-inspired medieval epic for the opening of the Great Paris Exposition of 1889 called Esclarmonde, complete with sorceress, magic sword, masked knight, dastardly Saracens, tele-transportation and a bishop and attendant group of monks performing an exorcism. But despite its scale and mystic pretensions, Esclarmonde is musically only fleetingly Wagnerian in its biggest orchestral moments, following instead in the French grand opera tradition of Massenet’s twenty-five other operas, with gigantic triumphant choruses, pipe organ, and a lead soprano required to sing an almost impossible series of high, ‘coloratura’ virtuoso solos. The latter, never mind everything else about Massenet, would have been anathema to drama-obsessed Wagner. Meanwhile, Czech composer Zdeněk Fibich trotted out three pseudo-Wagnerian operas in the 1890s, Hedy, Šárka and Pád Arkuna, much to the irritation of his anti-German Czech compatriots, and an Englishman, Rutland Boughton, set up what he hoped would be a British Bayreuth at Glastonbury, complete with grand (though low-budget) Arthurian music dramas, a festival that ran from 1914 to 1926.

  Even Boughton, though, whose fairy opera The Immortal Hour opened at Glastonbury twenty-two days after the British Empire declared war on Germany in August 1914, didn’t emulate Wagner’s musical style. He found stimulus in Anglo-Celtic folk music instead. The Glastonbury Festival’s future wasn’t exactly Bavarian chic and hushed reverence either.

  It is not so far-fetched to suggest that, without his link to the Nazis, most people who were not hardcore opera lovers would by now have lost interest in Wagner. That may sound harsh, but the evidence of Wagner’s musical impact is nothing like as convincing as his disciples would have us believe. Everywhere you look in the 1880s, outside Bayreuth, you see composers carrying on as if nothing had happened.

  Even relatively nearby, in Vienna, Brahms ploughed his symphonic furrow, stylistically unaffected by the Bayreuth hurricanes. Brahms, admittedly a complex personality himself whose music resolutely resisted the modernising currents that hovered around him in his later years, never quite came to terms with the open hostility Wagner always showed him and his music. The problem was that Wagner felt that writing symphonies was no longer a worthwhile pursuit. In his mind, all art had been subsumed into his ‘new’ form of music drama. He once wrote scornfully in an article, ‘On Poetry & Composition’, of Brahms’s attempts to add to Beethoven’s hallowed nine symphonies, ‘I know of some
famous composers who in their concert masquerades don the disguise of a street singer one day, the hallelujah periwig of Handel the next, the dress of a Jewish Csardas-fiddler another time, and then again the guise of a highly respectable symphony dressed up as Number Ten.’

  Brahms completed his majestic, abundantly tuneful, highly respectable third symphony a few months after Wagner’s death; its first performance, by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in December 1883, was disrupted by Wagnerite hecklers but it was nevertheless well received by everyone else. On Brahms’s death, four years later, the English composer Charles Hubert Parry wrote an ‘Elegy for Brahms’, one of the loveliest tributes ever paid by one composer to another and a stylistic homage that acknowledges the deep and lasting impact the Poco Allegretto (third) movement of Brahms’s third symphony had made. In Britain, Parry’s Brahmsian lead was followed with conspicuous success by Edward Elgar. Listening to his Enigma Variations of 1899 or his first symphony of 1908, which Elgar openly admitted was modelled on Brahms’s third symphony, it is as if the whole Wagner experiment had happened in a vacuum.

  While Brahms held his nerve against the Wagnerian tide, however, his fellow symphonist Anton Bruckner did not, his numbingly long nine symphonies reflecting in various degrees his adoration of the man he unselfconsciously called ‘The Master’. Bruckner’s third symphony of 1873 was dedicated to Wagner and in its first version contained melodic quotations from his idol’s operas. His seventh symphony received its première at a Wagner memorial concert in December 1884, its second movement, Adagio, being in the form of a funeral lament for Wagner. (One has to wonder whether Bruckner’s obsession with Wagner’s music dramas was in part motivated by a voyeuristic attachment to the sexual content in them, particularly the Ring cycle and Parsifal. As a lifelong bachelor with an erotic appetite focused exclusively on young girls – whom he continued to stalk, observe and proposition even into his seventies – the mental image of the seductive Flower Maidens in Parsifal must have enhanced his guilty pleasure in the music no end.)