by Martin Geck
34. The motif associated with Titurel’s obsequies in bars 804–8 of act 3 of Parsifal.
A preliminary sketch of bars 23–28 of the prelude to act 3 of Parsifal, bearing Wagner’s date “22. Oct. R.” at the end, followed by a note in Cosima’s hand: “Written out for me by R. Oct. 22, 1878.” (Photograph courtesy of the Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth: NA A III m. 4(2), folio 12r.)
The “context” to which Wagner referred in his conversation with Cosima was nothing if not tricky: “Now I am writing something which should sound like nothing, nothing at all, Robert Schumann, but there must be method in it—the theme of the march would have been much too definite,” he observed on October 21, 1878.70 The “theme of the march” was presumably the rhythmically striking funeral chorus motif that is now heard for the first time during Titurel’s obsequies (music example 34). Wagner’s surviving sketches and Cosima’s diary entries allow us to reconstruct his work on the score on an almost daily basis. A preliminary sketch of bars 23–28 of the prelude ends with a note in Cosima’s hand: “Written out for me by R. Oct. 22, 1878.”71
On October 24, 1878, Wagner spoke of the “sad strains he will now have to compose; they must not contain a single ray of light, he says, for that could lead one far astray. Parsifal’s sad wanderings, which must lead up to the situation on Monsalvat.”72 On October 29 we read: “R. says he has composed two bars, but they are very important ones, an addition in the middle of the prelude: they had occupied his mind the minute he awoke in the morning.”73 And on October 31 Cosima noted: “He plays the prelude to me; it is very much altered, even more gloomy! It begins like the lament of an extinguished star, after which one discerns, like gestures, Parsifal’s arduous wanderings and Kundry’s pleas for salvation. It seems as if none of this could be sung—only the ‘elemental’ quality can be felt here.” And in the margin Cosima added a further note: “That is to say, not the lament, but the sounds of extinction, out of which lamenting emerges.”74
Symptomatic of this mood is Wagner’s harmonic writing, which flouts the traditional rules of functional harmony and treats the chord of the diminished seventh—a dissonance—as the central sound. The writer and director Einar Schleef, who is anything but a committed Wagnerian, has examined in detail the affinities between Goethe’s Faust and Wagner’s Parsifal and in a disturbingly original way ignores the present tendency to fixate on Parsifal’s racist elements. He speaks of “notes in which Schoenberg may be glimpsed and even surpassed.”75 In adopting this approach he places these “notes” in the context of music explicitly dismissed by the National Socialists as “degenerate.”
But what is astonishing is not just the advanced nature of the compositional means that Wagner uses in Parsifal’s Wanderings, for other composers such as Liszt were able to keep pace with him and even outdo him, but rather that, as Mario Bortolotto has written, Wagner was concerned “solely with extending the tonal principle” in his final stage work, whereas Liszt—in his Parsifal paraphrase Am Grabe Richard Wagners, for example—“explored unknown regions with a merely acoustic attentiveness and in an unequivocally experimental way.”76
And it is this final point that matters here: Wagner’s harmonic temerities are not an example of art for art’s sake but aim to achieve a rare degree of semantic clarity and vividness in their depiction of the most complex emotional states. In spite of his skepticism toward what he called the “brume wagnérienne,” Debussy was so profoundly influenced by this aspect of Wagner’s harmonic writing that Robert Craft has described the musical interludes in Pelléas et Mélisande as “Xerox copies of Parsifal.”77 Wagner needed two weeks of immensely hard work to set down the forty-four bars of Parsifal’s Wanderings in their definitive form, a struggle that took place not only in his head but also on paper and at the piano and that sheds light on the passion with which he sought to reconcile the opposing elements of existential sensitivity and compositional structure.
And this brings us back to the notion of a pivotal art. By now—if not sooner—we have come to the end of idealism and romanticism, for on the one hand the expressive language of this “orchestral psychograph”78 can scarcely be described except in such negative terms as “numb,” “inhibited,” “lost,” “shrouded in gloom,” “restlessly encircling,” and so on, a language notable for its total lack of closed and rounded forms—qualities which had at least been vaguely discernible as a specific quality of music in even the most advanced works of the nineteenth century.
As a piece of music, Parsifal’s Wanderings is even more radical than Tannhäuser’s Pilgrimage, the “traurige Weise” from Tristan und Isolde, and the prelude to act 3 of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg—all of them key passages at the start of their respective final acts, where purely instrumental tone paintings seem to invalidate the usual time continuum in favor of a melancholic or deeply depressing reflection on all that has happened hitherto. But whereas the sounds of the young shepherd piping his mournful lay in Tristan und Isolde seem to encompass an element of hope, and whereas the prelude to act 3 of Die Meistersinger features not only the Wahn motif but also the optimistic sounds of the “Wittenberg Nightingale,” the introduction to act 3 of Parsifal is intended to plumb depths of unprecedented despair. Nowhere else does Wagner reveal himself so unequivocally as a disciple of Arthur Schopenhauer; and as such, nowhere else does his music reflect Schopenhauer’s blind world-will as emphatically as it does here—in other words, without recourse to a concrete action. It was no accident that Wagner spoke of “a background of elemental sorrow” that should prevail in Parsifal’s Wanderings.79
As the choice of leitmotifs indicates, we are dealing here with more than just the fate of the hero himself but also with “Kundry’s pleas for salvation” and the “vision” of the unredeemed Grail.80 In short, Parsifal’s Wanderings represent the folly of the world itself. The darkness of the music is, as it were, the black hole of the Bühnenweihfestspiel, its remoteness from God casting its shadow over the whole of the rest of the work.
Even the Last Supper motif, for all that it is conceived as a symbol of comfort and promise, has acquired a note of anguish thanks to its minor-key coloring since it was first heard in the prelude to act 1 and is now chromatically “distorted.”81 Superficially, this motif is sermon-like in its simplicity, and yet it turns out on closer inspection to be a disturbing product of the fin de siècle, extraordinarily subtle and yet diffuse in its message. The lines that originally underlay this motif appear in the 1877 edition of the libretto—published before Wagner had started work on the score—and are as follows:
Nehmet hin mein Blut
um unsrer Liebe Willen!
Nehmet hin meinen Leib,
auf daß ihr mein’ gedenkt!
[Take this my blood for the sake of our love! Take this my body that you remember me!]
When he came to set these words to music, Wagner thought that they needed expanding in order to allow him to explore every facet of their message in his music. Unusually for him, he added two more lines to produce two strophes of three lines each:
Nehmet hin meinen Leib,
nehmet hin mein Blut
um uns’rer Liebe Willen!
Nehmet hin mein Blut,
nehmet hin meinen Leib,
auf daß ihr mein gedenkt!
[Take this my body, take this my blood for the sake of our love! Take this my blood, take this my body that you remember me!]
Neither in the Last Supper motif nor anywhere else in the work is it possible to separate the Grail from the Counter-Grail or distinguish between the worlds of positive and negative experience, encouraging William Kinderman to note that “when the Redeemer’s gaze falls on Kundry or when Parsifal brandishes the sacred lance in Klingsor’s magic garden, two opposing worlds are manifest in one and the same sound, which is highly charged with tension.”82 And John Daverio tends in the same direction when he describes Amfortas’s outburst, “Wehvolles Erbe,” as a “tortured derivative” of the Las
t Supper motif (music examples 35 and 36).83
35 and 36. A comparison between the Last Supper motif from bars 1–6 of the prelude to act 1 of Parsifal and Amfortas’s lament in bars 1302–5.
Even the mystic finale has elements of Uneigentlichkeit in Heidegger’s sense of “that which does not belong to me,” a point that applies not least to its musical aspect. Readers may care to recall the dissonant choruses beset by Grail bells whose sound for many years was produced in Bayreuth by four plain metal drums. Presumably money could have been found to cast four actual bells, but a deliberate decision was evidently taken not to do so. At least the dull sound of the drums, with its relatively paucity of upper partials, was more at home in an imaginary crypt as a somber place of repression than in the light-filled dome envisaged by Wagner’s stage directions.
The ceremony associated with the Grail is an excellent indication of the way in which certain symbols can emerge from their context and become an example of art for art’s sake—not in the sense of “absolute” music but in the wake of a compositional and historical development that removes the religious element from its original context and in the spirit of symbolism and Jugendstil turns it into material that can be freely adapted and reused. In this way, the material retains its spiritual essence but loses all contact with binding rituals such as those of the Catholic Mass and Protestant Communion. Wagner made a start by constructing his own Communion ritual, a ritual which is clearly oriented to the Christian liturgy but at the same time tends in the direction of a private religion.
Writing in the wake of Wagner, Mahler took over the theme of religion for use in his symphonies. The final movement of his First Symphony includes a variant of the Grail motif, while the Adagio of his Fourth Symphony contains a theme that clearly recalls the Grail bells at an exposed point in the musical argument. His tendency to avail himself of “sacred” themes is even more pronounced in his vocal symphonies, especially his Second and Eighth, both of which deal with the question of redemption that pervades the whole of Parsifal. His Second Symphony is also known as his “Resurrection” Symphony, a name that it owes to the choral passage in the final movement, “Aufsersteh’n, ja aufersteh’n wirst, du, mein Staub, nach kurzer Ruh!” (Arise, yes you will arise, my dust, after a brief rest), while the Symphony of a Thousand, as the Eighth is also known, deals with the theme of redemption from first to last, both in the form of Hrabanus Maurus’s medieval hymn Veni creator spiritus and in that of the mystical final scene from part 2 of Goethe’s Faust.84
The qualitative leap from Parsifal to Mahler’s symphonies lies in the fact that the presentation of the divine, which in Wagner’s music drama has already been transferred from a sacred space to the boards of a secular theater, now has to make do with the concert hall. But this means that the religious ideas, however important they may have been for the composer, are now completely dissipated. It is no accident that in 1917, a decade after Mahler completed his Eighth Symphony, the theologian Rudolf Otto published his phenomenological study The Idea of the Holy in which he defined the “holy” as the “numinous” experience of something “outside the self.”85
That this “mysterium fascinans” cannot and should not be explained will be understood at once by listeners familiar with the credo of “absolute” music, and my readers will perhaps understand why I regard Parsifal as a pivotal work that mediates between two different understandings of art as a religion: for the nineteenth century the accent lay on religion in the early romantic tradition, whereas by the twentieth century the emphasis had shifted to art. Parsifal can be seen against both these horizons.
This is also true of Kundry, arguably the most enigmatic of all Wagner’s characters. As the “woman” who laughed at Christ on the road to Calvary, she is “Jewish” by birth; her lord and master Klingsor calls her “Herodias,” and Wagner himself compared her to the Wandering Jew in his 1865 prose draft, adding that as a result of her “curse,” she is “condemned, in ever new forms, to bring to men the suffering of love’s seduction; redemption, dissolution, complete extinction is vouchsafed to her only if the purest and most youthfully radiant of men resists her most powerful blandishments.”86 But the libretto also refers to her as a “heathen,” and for Ulrike Kienzle, she allowed Wagner “to illustrate the Indian idea of metempsychosis.”87
Even during Wagner’s own lifetime, the composer’s associates were already describing Kundry as a “representative of the Jewish principle” in contrast to Parsifal, who was seen as “the Aryan, Germanic figure of the Christian Redeemer.”88 Writers on Wagner continue to argue over the question as to whether the composer, too, regarded Kundry as an expression of anti-Semitism not just in passing but primarily, and yet it is all too easy to overlook the fact that in Kundry he created a genuinely fascinating character who cannot be reduced to questions of ideology or to interpretations limited to a particular point in history. In short, she cannot without further ado be identified with the decadent movement that was fashionable in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. From that point of view we may regard it as a compliment that the gender theorist Christina von Braun has seen in the role of Kundry the image of a hysterical woman of a kind that did not exist in reality but which Wagner conjured up onstage in the form of an “artificial woman.”89
But it is also worth asking whether—as visitors to the Parsifal freak show—we feel more comfortable identifying with Klingsor, Amfortas, or Parsifal himself. After all, the cultural historian Elisabeth Bronfen has argued that from the standpoint of a psychopathologist Parsifal’s imagination and his “identification” with Amfortas’s wound as a “mimetic representation of Christ’s wound” are no less “hysterical” than Kundry’s “phantasy scenario” whereby her “ecstatic laughter” at Christ’s wound triggered the curse that weighs upon her.90
Does Kundry—undoubtedly Wagner’s most complex and riveting character from a mythological point of view—not deserve our sympathy too? After all, she is not only what Thomas Mann once described as a “desperate woman of split personality, half corrupter, half penitent Mary Magdalene, with cataleptic transitions between these two states of being,”91 but is also a natural creature who laughs horribly, utters bloodcurdling screams, groans pitifully, and—following her baptism—weeps tears of redemptive release, all of them physical and emotional utterances that do not have to be reinterpreted in any unduly complex, oversophisticated way but which can be associated above all with children.
As far as I can see, all writers on Wagner have ignored the fact that in Kundry our vital component—otherwise frighteningly absent from Parsifal—comes into its own. And while its manifestation may be distorted, it is still recognizable. More importantly: once Kundry has given free rein to her provocatively animalistic emotions, she is allowed to appear as a beautiful seductress. But she is also permitted to serve others and finally to be released from her sufferings. Her various characteristics merely need to be shaken, as in a kaleidoscope, and reassembled in order to produce a new and entirely positive Kundry.
In her book Revolution in Poetic Language, the French cultural semiologist Julia Kristeva has explored the idea of “chora” that ultimately goes back to Plato and redefined it as the “semiotic bed” of those expressions of very young children, especially those who have not yet learned to talk. These expressions are dictated by physical needs but are only apparently uncoordinated and meaningless, whereas in fact they have their own specific rhythms that are conditioned by the particular situation and as a result are a part of the “genotext” of body language that Kristeva defines as “the only transfer of drive energies that organizes a space in which the subject is not yet a split unity.”92 This allows “jouissance” to infiltrate “the social and symbolic order.”93 In the medium of art, this process results in elements of improvisation and in the aphoristic, the disjointed, the fragmentary, the incomplete, the ambiguous, the wildly luxuriant, and the confusing. Kristeva cites examples from Wagner’s admirer Stéphane Mallarmé and also f
rom Joyce, but she could equally well have quoted from Wagner himself.94
Kundry, too, avails herself of a “genotext” that operates with striking noises, interjections, and interruptions and which, unlike any actual language, knows neither good nor evil, in which respect it reflects Wagner’s own composition. In general terms the music of Parsifal is less ethically unambiguous than many sections of the Ring, which take sides musically, and this is even more true of the role of Kundry. As the composer Bernd Asmus has observed, the “shock gesture” of Kundry’s motif is a symbol of expressionism: “As in a scream, the musical energy builds up in a single dissonant chord, before being carried away and continued in a monophonic line that plunges down over the notes of the chord.”95 Compositionally speaking, Kundry’s inner disunity assumes the guise of a “split sonority” (music example 37).96
37. Kundry’s motif from bars 216–20 of act 1 of Parsifal.
