Parsifal: An Explanation of Richard Wagner's Music Drama 1495508730, 9781495508738

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PARSIFAL An Explanation of Richard Wagner’s Music Drama

Adam J. Sacks

The Edwin Mellen Press Lewiston, New York mellenpress.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Control Number: 2021933697 Sacks, Adam. Parsifal: An explanation of Richard Wagner’s Music Drama / Adam Sacks. 1. Music--Genres & Styles--Opera. 2. Music--Instruction & Study-Techniques. 3. Music--History and Criticism. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-4955-0873-8 (hardcover) ISBN-10: 1-4955-0873-0 (hardcover) I. Title. hors série.

Copyright © 2021 Adam Sacks The Edwin Mellen Press Box 450 Lewiston, New York USA 14092-0450 Printed in the United States of America To order books, telephone 1-716-754-2788 or go to mellenpress.com

Table of Contents

Author Preface .....................................................

.i

Parsifal And Its World: An Orientation ................................1

I.

Prelude and Act One ....................................

21

II.

Act Two ...................................................

55

III.

Act Three .................................................

85

IV.

Conclusion ..............................................

107

Author Preface: An Orientation to Parsifal

This text provides a close reading of Wagner's last work for the stage, Parsifal, which premiered on July 26th, 1882 at the Festival Theater in Bayreuth. The aim here is to strike a balance between an introduction for the general reader (which stays on the surface of plot and character) and an analysis engulfed in a world of theory. The reader will therefore find neither a guide to leitmotifs nor an extensive account of the complex performance history of subsequent interpretive and revisionist stagings, which vary widely and wildly. The objective is to provide an orientation that highlights deeper layers of meaning and gestures to wider echoes in history, religion and philosophy. This focus admittedly prioritizes story and symbol over music, orchestration and staging. As prose about music has been likened to an inevtiably intolerable listening to dreams of others, any musical discussion has been kept to a broad, nontechnical minimum. The reader will not find any technical specifications in this discussion, nor is there reference to music theory or any jargon beyond descriptive language. I have endeavored to keep the terms of this reading in those most readily graspable, not venturing beyond aural description of volume, tempo, or resemblance to generally familiar sounds. The reader should also not expect a compact synopsis, list of characters or index of Wagner's musical motifs, all of which are easily accessible in any number of digests that have been written since the original premiere in 1882. This reading does though presuppose at least a passing acquaintance with the rudimentary fundamentals of Parsifal, as the goal here is

to accompany the listener on a journey of engagement that provides an additional challenging layer in the search for meaning. Along this path, I eschew mysticized Jungian "decoder ring" deciphering which substitutes one set of character names and labels for another more symbolic and representative. The aim here is to uncover fields of dynamic tension in the story and in cultural references without being reduced to static puzzle solving a la "The Da Vinci Code." In the full knowledge that no one may really ever truly understand Parsifal, my approach cannot but be partial and modest. Wagner's intentions for the production of Parsifal based on a close reading of his stage instructions and directions remains a starting point for consideration throughout . No substantive background in either modem European art-music or Wagner is presupposed, though I do briefly discuss previous works of his that bear directly on Parsifal. The intent is to engage directly with the original vision for Parsifal and to further support this approach by elaboration upon the historical moment in time of its creation in the late-nineteenth-century German Empire. Consciously bracketed aside, upon editorial directive, is any voluminous body of secondary sources from a variety of academic fields. There will be neither harvesting of quotations nor any broad literature survey nor intervention into decades-old debates. The goal at present is a close reading of one source text that does not inject any further source material not explicitly claimed and named by Wagner's original text. Important contextual issues are highlighted in crucial instances but again only when they can be gleaned from the text. The basic circumstances of Parsifal's time and place, namely the start of the second decade of existence of the newly formed 11

Second German Reich raises enough issues to provide for a thick description of the atmosphere and preoccupations of the original audience. Finally as this analysis concerns a work that is explicitly and self-consciously ,,sacred," in the Christian tradition, there are numerous passages that demand reference and discussion of stories from the Bible, rituals and even questions of comparative religion. Along these lines, religious concepts and references are explained in full. Above all, I hope that this close reading comes close to comprehensive coverage of contextual issues as well as a supportive if probing introduction for a wide audience for this audacious and contentious entry in the European artmusic canon.

Parsifal And Its World: An Orientation

Richard Wagner's Parsifal was his last work. The original premiere occurred in June 1882 and Wagner died in Venice less than a year later, in February 1883. Epochal and even transgressive, Parsifal holds a singular place in the history of music and perhaps in all of modem cultural history. Even the proper designation of this work proves a challenge. To term Parsifal an opera would not be accurate, as Wagner long before jettisoned that label in favor of his more serious and imperious coinage: music drama. As a program for a new type of opera, music drama was to serve a higher symbiosis of dramatic and musical action while disposing of previous features of the genre, such as ballet or ornamental solo recitation. Wagner's self-consciously Germanic project linked such stage accessories to French and Italian grand opera, and deemed them superficial or insufficiently dramatic, especially for a composer who conscious sought the evocation of myth and the sacred. Music drama consolidated Wagner's ambition for a formal fusion of all the arts, well known as the Gesamtkunstwerk or total work of art. Wagner moved to reintegrate various forms of art previously set in separate silos in the modem world: poetry, song, music, costume, design, architecture, and storytelling. Parsifal may be seen as a culmination point for

Wagner's highest ambitions and a return to his fundamental concerns. To call Paris/a/ a "music drama" alone did not satisfy Wagner's groundbreaking intentions. He rather took a brave new leap into uncharted territory and deemed Parsifal no less than a Buhnenweihfestspiel (literally: festival play for 1

the consecration of the stage). Taking full advantage of the German language's singular capacity for fashioning new and ever more complex compound nouns, this original appellation for a work of musical theater has not been used since. Each of the four elements in this name calls for elaboration. With "festival play for the consecration of the stage," Wagner takes the most celebratory form of performance, a festival, and raises it to a level traditionally reserved for the religious or the cultic. He relies on the fundamental platform of theatrical performance, the "stage," and in the German, the word for stage comes first and festival play occurs last. Whichever element is emphasized, this unwieldy noun fuses a physical space with a reserved moment in time, as a festival is always a performance that occurs on a specifically reserved occasion in time. A "stage consecration" denotes the engagement of a specific physical space in a given place, which is somehow specially elevated in status as if it forms part of a holy rite. This new-found classification already suggests Wagner's express desire, passed along like a covenant for the future, that Parsifal be performed only at the Bayreuth Festival Theater. Unlike all other entries in the art-music repertoire, this work was not intended to be the part of just any concert calendar or shared repertoire. This theater, founded in 1876 and which saw the premier of his Ring des Niebelungen, was specially designed by the composer (and based to a great extent on the collective, cultic style of the Greek amphitheater) and reserved solely for a yearly festival of a performance of his oeuvre. Innovative design elements unique to Bayreuth only served to heighten ceremonial 2

qualities, with the orchestra entirely submerged under the stage and an audience plunged into darkness and hushed into silence before and after performances, respectively. By thus raising the stakes so high for this last work, Wagner brought stage performance onto the level of religion or at least akin to ritual practice. At the end of his career, his artistic efforts brought him back toward the one moment where indeed all the arts had been unified, while serving a higher purpose, namely, the pre-Reformation church. For a composer whose spiritual home and restless imagination lay largely in the medieval era, Parsifal made a homecoming in multiple senses. By extension, any study of Parsifal is one of uncanny religion, familiar and unfamiliar, traditionally medieval and highly modem, and artistically a logical outgrowth and apotheosis of extreme romanticism. Beyond its unique artistic form, the thematic content itself is very bound up with a religious sensibility, a celebration of forces supernatural and miraculous. Culturally, Parsifal is a paradoxical cri de coeur against the secular disenchantment of the post-Protestant era. Wagner presides over a secular expansion of artistic forms and practices while heightening spiritual claims, a combination which may fairly be said to confound and overwhelm audiences. Wagner confrontationally stages a refashioning of Christianity, one he presumably finds more adequate for the dislocations of modernity, but one that is also distorted and distended. In this venture of neo-Christian rehabilitation, Wagner was by no means in the wilderness. In fact, his Parsifal project is simultaneous and forms a counterpart with Leo Tolstoy's Kingdom of God is Within You movement of Christian pacifist anarchism. Derived from a work of 3

previously unforeseen scope (writings that total almost fifteen thousand pages, longer than the combined length of his two previous colossally long epic masterworks, War and Peace and Anna Karenina) Tolstoy enacted a modem distillation and even re-editing of the Christian Gospel for the modem era. In 1881, Tolstoy first published his own version of the Gospel story qua de-deified psychological drama, The Gospel In Brief followed by The Kingdom of God Is Within You in 1894. Neither of the texts could be published in his Russian homeland then in the throes of the radically reactionary regime of Alexander III and OberProcurator Pobedonostsev. Neverthless, by the census of 1897 many thousands of Russians were identifying as "Tolstoyans." An approximate phenomenon in the musical world with regard to Wagnerites could be noticed at the same time in Germany. Tolstoy's anarcho-pacifist religious reimagining was designed to respond to an era in which nominally Christian states and societies waged war on one another with bewildering regularity. Tolstoy, like Wagner, erupted over the boundaries of traditional artistic forms and more than suggested a new genre of life concept movement. Unlike Wagner, Tolstoy's profound anti-clericalism arrested any gestures toward full institutionalization. Wagner's project was more state and bureaucracy friendly, carrying forward a medieval romance of arms, which while less biblical, was more esoteric and significantly more deferential to the powers that be. While Wagner bowed to his Emperor at Bayeuth, Tolstoy wrote letters addressed informally to his, instructing the sovereign what he really ought to be doing. Tolstoy's works were banned by the state and his teachings were declared anathema by the Orthodox Church. Though largely forgotten today, the genealogy of Gandhian non4

violent resistance (Gandhi established a "Tolstoy Fann" outside Johannesburg in 1910) and the American civil rights movement leads us right back to Tolstoy. While, in a parallel fashion, the world building epics of arguably retrogressive mass entertainment, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and even Harry Potter, lead us eventually back to Wagner. These two singular modem European greats align in rethinking Christianity anew for their audiences, and both appear to have worked from the premise of a fallen age. They share a penchant for grand narrative, and the conviction in the clarity and managerial power of authorial intention with its implicit belief in the redemptive powers of the artist. However, in content and conclusion, Wagner and Tolstoy could not be more opposite. Tolstoy was plagued by the dilemma of power and sought a path out of militarism and nationalism; Wagner in Parsifal meditates instead on questions of purity and longs for the capacity to reactivate the sacred, in a methodical and institutionalized manner. If Tolstoy sought out and gave rise to a great mass movement amongst the broad populace, Wagner both staged and enacted, via the ritualistic performances at the Bayreuth Festival House, an experience of an inner sanctum, available only for the select few. And it is this experience of enclosed fraternity that is literally embodied and represented on stage by the brotherhood of Grail knights, with that ultimate old boys club, the homosocial miinnerbund. In the history of musical forms, a Biihnenweihfestspiel is sui generis, a novum without model nor successor. The one form to which it does bear a resemblance would be that of the oratorio, a concert work written for orchestra and solo singers, a genre reserved 5

almost exclusively for sacred matters. The emphasis is on contemplation rather than drama, with a heavy reliance on recitative, which although a form of song, approximates speech. Parsifal heavily features these two elements, recitative to provide narration and an emphasis on contemplation rather than dramatic action. Wagner's consistent use of hymn-like choral climaxes also bears out this greater resemblance to oratorio than traditional opera. Yet the outsized claims of Parsifal should retain their historical novelty. It is a uniquely modem attempt to forge something akin to an updated "Passion Play." This panEuropean medieval phenomenon of mass religious drama gave voice to popular religious enthusiasms and was largely suppressed by the Council of Trent during the era of the Reformation. (Its survival in the modem era is found almost exclusively in the Bavarian-Austrian Alpine region descended out of the crise period of the 30 Years War. Crucially these spectacles were designed not as primarily theaterical but rather as spiritual appeasements meant to ward off the wrath of the Almighty.) Himself an enthusiastic attendee of the Oberammergau Passion Play, Wagner departs from purely biblical sources as he channels miraculous forces while expanding and overloading customary notions of audience experience. Wagner envelops and develops the audience as a community more than in any way typical of nineteenth-century art-music. Parsifal revives several other elements of the passion plays such the theme of reconquista, the featuring of oppositional or "heathen" forces as well as the conflation of Jews and Muslims. Passion Plays would often revolve around the attempted desecration of sacred relics by "non-

6

believers," who are then miraculously thwarted, redeemed and/or baptized, as, we shall see, is precisely the case with the central antagonist of Parsifal, Kundry. Finally, the "special effects" of Parsifal are almost entirely dedicated to the evocation of the supernatural: using light, trap doors, and sudden set transformations. In the timespan of centuries, Parsifal can be framed as a transitional moment between the medieval Passion Play and the post-modern "miracle pageant" plays of the Mormons and the "sight and sound" theaters of American evangelical Protestants, both of which monumentalize and bowlderize the standard toolkit of Broadway. An additional point of reference for understanding Parsifal, particularly relevant for American audiences, is the first generation of so-called new religious movements of the 19th Century, often conflated with the history of modern esotericism or the occult. As distinct from so-called historic world religions, scholars have struggled to adequately group together this dizzying array of modern revitalizing phenomenon from the highly institutionalized Mormons to the cargo cults of Melanesia. As distinctly modern forms of spiritual effervesence, these reimaginings of traditional religious forms take on varying degrees of sectarian character. Particularly relevant here are the highly textual, and therefore "post-Pr~testant," movements that especially appealed to the progressive and daring fringes of the educated middle class of the industrialized world. Christian Science and Theosophy, founded by Mary Baker Eddy and Helena Blavatsky respectively, are most representative of this era of the late - nineteenth century. Offering direct experience and communion with spiritual wisdom, with talk of astral planes and mental healing, both provided a gateway 7

to the resacralization of modem life. Though such movements possessed an outright sectarian character and betrayed little or no interest in cultural performance or creation, much is shared in the motivations animating Parsifal. A final critical framework for understanding the broader themes of Parsifal as a text is as a further entry in those that embody the crises of modernity, in particular, anxieties surrounding transgenerational succession. The heart of this inner storyline I have in mind here almost functions independently from the pious outer cloak of solemnity and religiosity. If one were to remove, so to speak, the holy garments of Parsifal, one is left with a generational saga of succession akin to Turgenev's Fathers and Sons (originally published in Russian in 1862 with the title Fathers and Children). A couple of decades after Parsifal, fears of generational decline erupted into outright panic as seen in the infamous pair of Strauss "scandal operas" Salome and Elektra, which feature murderously possessed children gripped by erotic derangement. The generational drama inside the drama, inside Parsifal, would more accurately be titled Amfortas. The crisis, which animates the plot, is the mysterious illness of the "son-king" Amfortas who is unable to carry out the tasks handed down to him by his father, depicted literally as "undead," Titurel, continues to haunt his son. Here is an instance of Wagner's creative refashioning, even manipulation, of Arthurian mythology. Amfortas is roughly based upon the legend of the Fisher King of the Arthur legend, an ailing monarch whose illness has spread to impact and weaken his entire kingdom. This condition of an 8

immuno-compromised society is the defining atmosphere of Parsifal. The title character is an entirely external redeemer figure, who functions as a kind of deus ex machina, separate and apart from the tension of the central family drama. (While Passion Plays often arose in response to the arrival of an infected and dangerous outsider, Parsifal is the opposite, only the outsider is pure and uncompromised.) Such familial crisis is one, which would have been most familiar to the generation of Wagner's audience. It was they who had built the newly established German Empire, which for their children was an inherited given. The dilemma of fathers who doubt sons and sons who in turn doubt themselves is explicitly diagetic or embedded within the plot of the drama. This element of the story of Parsifal is one that precisely articulated - and prophetically imagined - a dominating generational concern of its historical moment. As astonishingly rapid was the ascent of this new entity which upset the balance in Europe, perhaps just as easily could one have imagined its disappearance. At the very least, Wagner's adult audience could all well remember a time before the existence of said German Empire. The early 1880s were the years of the so-called Griinderzeit (literally "time of the founders," usually translated as "take-off period") of Imperial Germany, the years after unification in 1871 when political and economic forces merged to create this new industrial and military powerhouse. Destabilizing the balance of power in Europe and soon to rival the greatest powers in the world, advertently or not, the whole world knows how this story culminates in the two world wars. Awkardly situated without natural boundaries on the European landmass between 9

France and Russia, Germany was too large to be easily countered or fenced in, but not quite large enough to assert a natural position of dominance on the world stage. The specific rivalry with Great Britain would revive the notion of a "Thucydides trap," or cycle of conflict between an aging and a rising power, to culiminate in two cataclysms from which the world has arguably still not fully recovered. Specific fears in Germany that the children of the founders would not be able to manage the reins of an unwieldy empire and might even squander their inheritance would have been incredibly alive for those in the audience. Such fears coalesced into anxieties regarding the deleterious effects of concomitant over-rapid industrialization and modernity, specifically those that manifested in physical ailments of weakness, sexual temptation and even the thinning of the blood. The thematic motifs of Parsifal match quite neatly with the mental preoccupations of the epoch. Understanding Parsifal as a story of generational crisis also allows us to reexamine its novel, religious character. For the crisis at the center of the story is not about faith or belief, rather it concerns the maintenance and production of ritual, namely the Grail ceremony. Parsifal is self-consciously about the procedure and function of ritual and its institutional structure. The Grail is presented as a selfevident reality, an a priori feature of faith, which needs neither argument nor proof. This is especially curious as the Grail is neither a cardinal nor canonical item of Christian faith, and that in psychoanalytic terms, it forms the ultimate, even sublime Christian fetish object. The Grail is a substitute, a projection field, for the lack and absence of the missing Christ, as such it is imbued with both more and less power than traditional Christian faith, while also serving to

repress the contradictions and shortcomings of said faith. Thus even if Parsifal may not know it on the surface level, it functions as a reinscription of faith that redoubles the repression of its absence and inadequacies. Finally, as a late work of Wagner, his final musical thoughts, his own legacy could not have been far from his mind. Written with the worries of mortality and anxieties over the afterlife of his work, Wagner may have transferred his personal doubts about the future of his own institutionalized enterprise into this drama. The defining quality of Wagner's authorial project, which sets him apart from every other major composer, more than his resort to myth and religion, is his investment in institutionality. No other composer formed a shrine-like theater and festival devoted solely to their work, nor did they produce volumes of programmatic writings to accompany creations for the musical theater. Wagner is always as much about production and institutionalizing itself as the mythology and magic which they offer forth. And his Parsifal is riddled with doubts about institutional succession and the continued viability of ritual practice. Parsifal as Wagnerian Capstone Creation

Though not a work of religion in the orthodox or traditional sense, Wagner drew upon stories and motifs that rest upon multiple layers, implying a seriousness and multidimensionality of meaning usually reserved for religious texts. These source stories go back to the Bible, pre-Christian mythology, and fairy tales for children and even into deep reservoirs of of the psyche, drive and motivation. The notion of the Holy Grail, around which Parsifal is based, links suggestively to the historical Jesus 11

and the Crucifixion, but remains outside of biblical tradition. It lies in the realm of folklore and oral transmission, its millennial staying power evidence of its magical quality, and one outside of official sanction by the Church. A magical object like the Grail, often hidden or guarded, enshrined, underground or underwater, was not uncommon in pagan lore where nature, nymphs and spirits often veiled instruments of special power. Grail lore remained the exclusive preserve of the Western or Latin church, largely a symptom of the degrees of difference and distance that began to accumulate doctrinally and interpretively from the more primary Greek tradition. In practice and doxy, the Greek church retained a kind of originary enchantment which arguably alleviated the need for secondary non-biblical sources of captivation. The Grail might be thought of as Western Christian Aggadah. Deriving from the Hebraic tradition meaning tales, this term comprises non-halachic (Halachic denotes the legal corpus of Judaism roughly equivalent to Islamic sharia) or non-legally sanctioned material.) Aggadah often veers into the fantastic and even carries a whiff of the subversive for religious orthodoxy. They are sustained more by popular imagination than clerical sanction. Alongside tales of the Grail, one might think of Prester John or the Fisher King, both mysterious rulers of Christian kingdoms, the former of a realm of great abundance in a land far away (often conflated with the African Christian kingdom of Abyssinia) and the latter, one in a state of ailing decline, but both filled with marvels and broadly linked with the Grail myth. King Arthur, of course, enjoyed something of the status of a national myth for the British Isles. But it is 12

German Arthurian lore that fixates even more centrally on the Grail myth. At root of the Arthur legend, the sole historical basis for which is a ninth-century reference to a sixth-century battle of Anglo-Saxons against the Romans, is the wish to ground Christianity authentically and indigenously in Northern Europe. An example is the so-called Glastonbury myth, wherein Joseph of Arimathea, who donated his tomb for Christ, was said to have travelled to Britain with the Holy Grail. From Jerusalem direct to Britain in the first century came also several holy relics and the establishment of the first church on the island. The importance of the Grail myth is overdetermined, not only as a substitute for the void of the unreturned Christ, but also for the lack of some stable and authentic connection to Christian origins and Church history in the Germanic lands. Wagner's source text, Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzifal of the thirteenth century, even has the Grail as a magic stone, a lapsit exillis, which serves as a fountain of youth for the celibate temple knights who defend it. The magical life-giving powers of the relic are retained to some extent in Parsifal itself, as the Grail is shown to keep both the fortress founder, Titurel, and his son Amfortas in a state somewhere between life and death. And if properly embedded in ritual practice, the Grail is an everlasting force for healing. The centerpiece of Eschenbach's drama, as with Wagner's, features a weakened Grail Knight, Amfortas, suffering from a sexually encoded injury, kept from death by the Grail, and in sore need of redemption. Wagner's community of Grail Knights in Parsifal also evokes the crusading Knights Templar, founded in Jerusalem in the 13

twelth century, known in legend as keepers of the Holy Grail. Quite literally holy warriors, references throughout to the "Arabian" other testifes to the crusader logic of the work. Wolfram von Eschenbach's medieval romance would have been vaguely familiar to most educated audiences. The archetypal religious motifs at work in the story, from sin and redemption, to the magic Grail, are obviously familiar to any community absorbed in Christian cultural imaginary. Wagner's own audience, at his specially created shrine-like theater in Bayreuth, would certainly also have heard the name Parsifal before. For in an intertextual move familiar to contemporary audiences as a "prequel," Parsifal expands upon a narrative begun in an earlier Wagnerian music drama that premiered three qecades earlier. Parsifal is in fact the backstory to Lohengrin which opened in 1850. In their relationship as operatic characters, Parsifal is the father to Lohengrin, though as works of the stage it is Lohengrin that is the father to Parsifal. For it is at the end of that earlier music drama that Lohengrin announces his identity and lineage. This is climatic act resolves the central mystery of that music drama which had been the obscure origins of the hero. In fact it is the promise to keep silent about questions of origins that forms the chief condition for Lohengrin's rescue of the historically grounded, medieval kingdom of Brabant and of the heroine, Elsa. When this promise not to inquire after his identity is finally betrayed, Lohengrin must depart onto the magic swan from whence he arrived at the start of the work. Before he leaves, however, he delivers a long dramatic monologue, on the nature of his mysterious lineage and the parameters that govern his special existence. (Parsifal will begin with, rather

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than end on, such an expository monologue in Act One of Parsifal where the old hermit Gurnemanz delivers the necessary background to the story of Parsifal. In terms of both form and narrative, Parsifal is a kind of reverse of Lohengrin. Rather than dissapear at the end, Parsifal is enshrined as messianic priest-king in perpetuity.) Lohengrin is clearly a miraculous hero, and his role is not one that can neatly be assimilated into the categories of knight, lord or king. For all of the aura of the mysterious that surrounds Lohengrin, his quest is still very worldly and concerns· the transformation of a governmental polity rather than one mostly spiritual. (Brabant was an actual duchy of the Holy Roman Empire, now part of Belgium.) The signs of realpolitik cannot be overlooked and the central challenge of the work is not any spiritual quest of the hero but rather a quest for the community at large: everyone must pledge not to assail the hero with their urge to know more about him. While Lohengrin gestures to an otherworldly, more ethereal realm .largely on the level of rhetoric, in Parsifal this spiritually elevated world is presented and actually enacted on stage. Lohengrin remains the story of a test of faith, a faith that operates on many levels - trust in a romantic partner, belief in human and divine word, as well as acceptance of mystery while resisting the temptation to probe further. Parsifal is faith itself; it is an affirmative demonstration of the secrets and miracles of the Grail knights only obliquely revealed at by the end of Lohengrin. Though Wagner's oeuvre does contain one other major work of Arthuriana, namely, Tristan and Isolde, only Lohengrin that sets the stage and provides the introduction for the story of Parsifal. By contrast, the central focus upon 15

romantic love in the Tristan story makes it a kind of antiParsifal. For if Tristan is all about longing, Parsfial is about renunciation. In Parsifal, Wagner has seized upon an overlooked, if not subterranean element in Christian lore, namely, celibacy or even erotophobia. This central conceit marks a clear break with Lohengrin where the vitality of the hero is so clearly libidinal as well as militaristic. In Parsifal, these two elements are not only not fused; they are at war with each other. Parsifal is a kind of holy war against the passions, ironically much akin to the literal Islamic meaning of jihad or struggle in the path to the divine. As Wagner takes great pains to make clear, the threat posed by sexual temptation is as much to health and physicality as to spiritual well-being. Wagner represents and even advocates a renunciation or sublimation of desire in favor of something pure or sacred. At the same time, Pars/al is so intensely overwrought in tertns of music and atmosphere, especially the setting of Klingsor's flower garden in Act Two, that it as often as not resembles an intensely perfumed, sexualized fantasy. Historical apocrypha has it that Parsifal was written mostly in the bath with the composer surrounded by candles and incense. Any account of modem European cultural history must award Parsifal pride of place as a forerunner to the so-called Decadent movement in the arts of the fin-desiecle. Quite akin to the pre-Raphaelite movement in English art, Wagner's romantic medievalism was suffused with the otherworldly and ethereal yet in terms decidedly ethnocentrically European. One could not imagine Strauss' shocking representations of Eros and female sexuality in Salome, or that of painters such as Redon in France, Klimt in Austria or Vrubel in Russia without the precedent of 16

Parsifal's wild imaginings. The neo-Byzantine fantasies of fin-de-siecle symbolism and art nouveau turned to the medieval and the mythic as means of enhancing a rejuvenating confrontation with the demonic and erotic. What they all shared was an atmosphere of "nervous splendor," a loosening of the hold of rationalism and narratives of advancing progress now stymied by primal fears of an ailing civilization growing gradually unhinged.

Akin to overripe fruit, the line between the succulent and sickly was an underlying dynamic of this art. Such an evolution was greatly foreshadowed and prefigured in Parsifal. As much a project of Christian resacraliziation by way of the Grail myth, Parsifal is also about healing, health and anxiety around mental and physical malady. The frantic attempts to cure the languid king, and the task of the hero to avoid temptations that may weaken, are consistently represented in a physical even medical sense as much as those spiritual. Musically, so much of Parsifal is a soundtrack to a fever. Within just mere years of its premiere, much of Europe, in particular the new fields of neurology and psychology, was awash in talk of neurasthenia, hysteria, and other ailments of modernity, often aligned with fears of mental imbalance brought about by the speed of modem, urban life as well as the sexually transmitted diseases resulting from its temptations. Syphilis to name an example of one commonly feared disease was associated with and resulted in mental illness and insanity. During the oncoming world war prostitution was tightly regulated to prevent the transmission of such diseases among both officers and enlisted men, and it is just such a scenario, replete with knights at warfare, which Parsifal envisions. 17

The philosophical figure most crucial for understanding Wagner's musings in Parsifal was Arthur Schopenhauer. Wagner's Gospel update was most clearly informed by an acquaintance with this crucial intermediary thinker in the generation that separated Hegel from Nietzsche and Freud. The author of The World as Will and Representation was well known for his mediation of Sanskritic religio-philosophic concepts of the world as illusion, e.g. maya, and as platform for benighted, fruitless striving. As Schopenhauer famously stated, "life is a business that does not cover its costs," and he elaborated a philosophy that elevated the value of eliminating and avoiding torments and overcoming suffering over mastery of the faculty of reason or any decryption of the riddle of history. The Schopenhauerian notion of pleasure as delusion forms an essential precondition for grasping Wagner's fixation on renouncing material pleasure for more ethereal realms in Parsifal. Wagner's master philosophical motif of Parsifal, namely compassion ("mitleid''), as a form of human awareness and connection higher than the sexual plane, is a direct lift from Schopenhauer's Germanic rerendering of Ahimsa, an unyielding dedication to compassion in both Jainism and Hinduism. A confounding contradiction of Parsifal is Wagner's adaption of these concepts into a crusader narrative quite removed from the renunciation of violence essential to the Sanskritic faiths. (Jains famously wear masks and walk with brooms to avoid any inadvertent treading on the bodies of souls of even barely visible organisms.) Schopenhauer posited a noumenal world of the Will underlying the world of appearances, the animating force underneath truly everything. It has long been noted that 18

Freud would never have come to his breakthrough of the idea of the unconscious without such important advances of Schopenhauer. The "will" allows one to imagine a vast realm of uncontrolled instinct and passion, barely under human control, that may strike up at points and ways unexpected and unintended. This philosophical idea amounts to a vast revision of the Kantian Enlightenment which proposes inherent faculties for human judgment and reasoning. The world of Parsifal rather exchanges enlightenment for salvation, and secularism for resacralization. For his final career statement, Wagner stages a battle for the control of urges and passions constantly on the precipice of deluge and destabilization.

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Prelude and Act One Much like his preference for music drama rather than opera, Wagner refers to his opening music as Vorspiel rather than the more common term Overture. The literal meaning in German, "to play before," indicates action before the story begins. More than just opening ornamentation, the Prelude serves to prepare the audience and to introduce and begin the action through already advancing dramatic tension inside the music. The drama that is Parsifal begins thus not with the conclusion of the Prelude but rather with the first sounds heard by the audience. The audience is immediately transported into its enchanting world right with the opening bars. The music for Parsifal begins with solitary notes on the trumpet, which solemnly announce melody and then float away like stars floating through the ether. The very first lines of music heard rise and then die out as they ascend to a very high note as if to peel away the curtain onto a loftier, otherworldly realm. The second major musical idea in the prelude is a series of quite ominous strings rattling which outline the threat of darkness that hangs over this beatified world. It suggests that however ideal this world might be there is something equally powerful that overshadows it. Finally, these two contrasting tones are superseded by a trumpet fanfare. This musical idea would have been most familiar for the audience as it conjures up martial and royal associations, hinting here though at something more, at a majestic power, kingship of a special kind. Wagner's musical aesthetic here is inextricable from a fixed gallery of late-nineteenth-century conceptions of what romantic medievalism should sound like. Such a stately tragic-heroic

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sound world has become so uncannily familiar to audiences after Wagner as he did so much to shape preconceptions about what a soundtrack to any medieval world should be. Underlying this sensuous, quasi-hypnotic sound world, Wagner had a very clear and systematic approach regarding the organization of musical materials. Namely, much like the wardrobe or accessories to dress characters in a narrative, his musical phrases were grouped into precise motifs which can be thought of as signposts, almost like readily identifiable "playing cards" or even "brands" that swiftly conjure up ideas and associations for the audience. These motifs brand his musical materials so that they might be more readily followed and understood by his audience. What for some is a significant technical innovation can in the eyes of others be read as a strident means to manipulate, almost akin to total commodification of modem advertising. Wagner's music thus amounts to a reinforced set of characters and ideas, one invisible and delivered directly into the ears and mind of the audience. His system of musical motifs is an institution unto itself, one that could easily be the entire substance of any explanation which remains on a surface level of self-reference, which is precisely why it will not detain us further in this discussion. At the close of the Prelude, Wagner layers melodies first on flute, then strings and finally on brass. Only at the end is percussion introduced for the first time, introducing the sound of a full orchestra which then ascends sharply until the Prelude returns to its original musical idea and fades out on a high fevered pitch. The opening scene is outside of the "Grail Fortress" to which a visible path does lead. The action then begins, literally on the territory of the Grail, as if 22

this is a kingdom ruled over by the Grail itself. This is clearly a royal realm, a feudal world where two of the initial characters we meet are introduced as squires. The first named character, Gurnemanz, is described as the sort of vigorous elderly man that fits well into the archetype of the wizened hermit of the woods. It is clear he is to be guide to both of the young squires he awakens, half in jest, to the call of trumpets as well as for the audience who function as observers and participants. Raising a sleight of hand, opening the door to magic without too abrupt an imposition upon the audience, Wagner describes these trumpets "as if' they are coming from the Grail fortress. Disembodied sounds convey the otherworldly and bespeak a realm of heightened senses. Such off-stage music, a special effect technology of its time in the 19th Century, serves also as the sound of the forest waking up. From the very start, it is nature, though unnamed, which is the dominant protagonist, a force greater than all others. The forest in particular has a strong musical persona, often subsumed as the emanation of healing powers of nature. There is a biomusical metaphor to be found within Wagner's soundtrack of nature, which constrasts the health of nature to the ailments of humanity. The music takes upon cycles of organic growth as if it is part of the natural world. Verging on a contradiction, there is throughout unresolved tension between quasi-pagan reverence for nature and the narrative overlay of Christian themes and ideas, a tradition that subordinates the natural world to the human. The next action on stage conclusively sets the religious tone for the story to come, for Gurnemanz then sinks to his knees and joins the young knights in training in a morning prayer. "Give thanks to God, you that are called to hear it," he bellows, clearly indicating that yes, Wagner is 23

taking this bold, if not unprecedented step to begin Parsifal with a morning prayer. Coming as it does at the very start of the work, this prayer of reverence fits into the storyline but the prayer also functions on a "meta" level for both Parsifal as a text, and as a performance as a whole. It signals to the audience, with a startling jolt, before the action begins in earnest, to ready themselves in a moment of reverence and quiet contemplation, for what is to come is no ordinary opera. This is prayer as and for "breakfast," a convocation before the proceedings are to begin The Silent Prayer, which takes the characters on stage to their knees, is also the music of the Grail, layered in a mix of the harmonies of various instruments. As prayer, the Grail music is synonymous with the sound of daybreak, of arising and of new mornings, like the sunlight breaking through the canopy of the forest. Peace is soon disturbed by the arrival of King Amfortas' cortege accompanied by the first new music since the start of the Prelude. Carried on a litter, flat on his back, the ailing Amfortas is on his way to a therapeutic bath. A previous remedy, namely, a special medicinal herb obtained by the knight Gawain has not brought restoration. Such herbs, which may be understood as a stand-in for pharmaceuticals, have barely brought him temporary relief, as he is hardly able to sleep through the night. These combined symptoms of sleeplessness and prostration could indicate both severe weakness and respiratory impairment. Receiving the news of the king's continued distress, Gurnemanz outlines a key distinction, relevant for understanding Parsifal as a whole. The hermit contrasts the idea of linderung as opposed to heilung, namely relief versus cure. Momentary abatement does not address the root of the ailment which no herb or potion can address. This distinction

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raises doubts and questions among the knights, now eager to learn more from the wise, old man. The suggestion first raised here is that, perhaps Amfortas cannot be cured at all, that there is something wrong on a much deeper level, that the root of his illness may not be physical at all. Gumemanz goes on to relate that potions and herbs deal in magic or superstition while cure can only come from true belief. A further dimension of genuine cure is that it is singular, and must come from another person, one especially anointed. The broader hypothesis of the work established at the outset is that a cure must carry a spiritual dimension; it must be a spiritual healing and must be delivered by one specially consecrated, one that cannot arise from medicine alone. Such gentle shades of messianism would have been well understood by audiences immersed in Christian tradition. In an innovative fashion Wagner places much emphasis on physical and bodily ailment which reflects as much a nineteenth- century world of medical consciousness as much as a medieval world of Christian spirituality. He harnesses a spiritual language to mount a critique of technical, rationalized medical care. Gumemanz is interrupted just as he was about to reveal the identity of the redeemer, as a demonic gallop of music, with crashing, chromatic crescendos of flailing angular strings disrupts the solemn atmosphere. This music is the soundtrack to a wild rider that flies through the sky astride an animal labeled literally as the devil's female horse. More animal than human, this character then crawls, with wild hair sweeping the forest ground, wearing a snake for a belt. Wagner describes her as one of dark complexion and with a deathly stare. The abrupt entry and truly frightening 25

image calls upon several orientalist tropes that would have been familiar to audiences at a time when colonialism reached an apogee. (The German Reich had just embarked upon the occupation of significant African territories in southwest and southeast Africa.) This character, named Kundry, moving at great haste, arrives to deliver another magical balsam encased in a crystal vial. Dialogue confirms that this is not the first time she has gone on a wild chase after medicinal ointments. Kundry's own words then provide the first real world reference point for the action of Parsifal. "Arabia hides nothing more to heal him," she says, implying that the wonders and wisdom of the Orient can offer nothing more to aid this distinctly Christian crisis of health and faith. By directly invoking Arabia, Kundry makes the categories of insider and outsider unmistakable and dichotomous. One may often read that the action of Parsifal takes place in Christian medieval Spain specifically at the knights' fortress Montsalvat, the mountain of salvation, often assumed to be based on the Montserrat Abbey in Catalonia. However, Wagner's libretto contains no such direct designation. And while "Arabia" could indicate the lands of Andalucfa still under Moorish domination, a close reading does not allow for any such uncomplicated extrapolation. Arabia in the literal sense in German can only be taken to mean the Arabian peninsula or Hijaz which borders no lands of Christian Europe. Arabia is thus the cradle of Islamic civilization, which contains the two holiest cities of Islam, Mecca and Medina. "Arabia" could easily and deliberately be conflated with Islam, such mixing of linguistic and religious categories is also commonplace for Orientalism. The overtly Christian ethos of Parsifal already more than well established, Wagner poses an adversarial "clash of 26

civilizations" between the Christian West and the Islamic Orient. The "weariness" of Kundry that "hides no more cures" piles on more Orientalist cliches of arrested, undynamic civilization: tired and old and whose magic spells are wearing off. Kundry falls to the ground just as the sufferings of King Amfortas are confirmed to be ills that go beyond mere fatigue. We observe the King through the dismayed eyes of Gumemanz who sings of a once "siegreichsten Geschlechtes Herrn, " or lord of a victorious lineage. Contrasting this status with his current state as a slave to sickness, the use of the term Geschlecht has powerful and multiple resonances. The German word indicates more than just a dynastic line of kingship; it conjures up notions of kinship, peoplehood or a lineage more akin to descent by blood. In an era of both growing nationalist consciousness along with the rise of social Darwinism, eugenics and ideas of racialism, Wagner is suggesting that this sickness is corrupting a quasiracialized, inherited nobility inherited by dint of birth. This inner decline and physical degeneration is taking place amid the backdrop of "brothers fighting in far off lands," which rounds out the picture of a besieged Christian sanctuary amidst holy war and crusade. These conditions of siege mirror the predicament of the body of the king, where illness, in steady and methodical fashion, lays waste to his well-being. Illness as the centerpiece of Parsifal brings to mind the notion of "illness as metaphor" made iconic by Susan Sontag. Writing in the 1970s, uncannily prescient of the AIDS crisis, Sontag sought to parry the romantic notion that illness is bound up with and a reflection of the character of the sufferer. Parsifal is 27

entirely emblematic of this older conceit and aggravates the understanding of Amfortas as corrupted and as a failed soldier, which in turn burdens and ostracizies the sufferering king from his community. Illness serves as an x-ray that exposes hidden truths and serves as portal to an as yet undiscovered dimension of deeper truths. Critical here is the notion that sick bodies have their counterparts in the imagination, in the mind of the sufferer, onlookers and audiences. This sickness at the heart of Wagner's last work extends and resounds over all the other characters and shapes the very environment of the world of Parsifal. While Sontag would likely object precisely to the use of fantasy to illustrate and make sense of illness, Wagner supercharges illness via fantasy, myth and religion to give voice to the wild fears and imaginings of his characters. Perhaps suffering from fevered dreams or delusions, Amfortas sings of morning light over the lake, another reference to the possible healing powers of nature. He readily admits that his sickness is sowing dissension in the ranks of the knights. The knight Gawain has set off again in search of medicinal herbs, but without the king's permission, which only adds to Amfortas' anxiety and distress. It is Amfortas who first introduces the audience to the antagonist of Parsifal, when he refers to as "the snares of Klingsor." Amfortas also repeats Gurnemanz's description of the redeemer as a perfect savior. The one who is called to cure Amfortas will be one who achieves "wisdom through compassion," and will be a "pure fool." While Amfortas wants to thank Kundry for bringing yet more medicine, he affirms that it is a spiritual healing that he needs, which no medicine can satisfy. 28

In verses barely two lines apart, Amfortas sets out the entire trajectory of the hero Parsifal's quest, namely, that he will ascend from the state of a fool to that of supreme wisdom. That the hero is at first an innocent naif is taken directly from Arthurian lore. Yet Parsifal's prophesized ascent into wisdom via compassion is an innovative update that breaks with traditional forms of Christian caritas and fraternity. While the Christian Gospel obliges assistance to the suffering and disadvantaged, this more stringent morale of compassion impels the onlooker to mentally participate in the suffering of the other. A result of his reading of Schopenhauer's reading of Sanskritic texts, Wagner also seems to echo a mainstay of "the search for the historical Jesus," a largely German-speaking nineteenth-century historicist project of his era. A conception popular at the time was that Jesus's supposed missing middle years before his ministry were spent in India, studying Buddhism. These waves of philosophical critique of Christiany as a rule stood in the service of advancing secularization. Wagner stakes clear ground for remysitification and revivalism. (Nietzsche, a one-time advocate of Wagner's supposed revival of ancient Greek tragedy, was notoriously skeptical regarding the composer's embrace of religious revival. Nietzsche framed his soul searching as evidence of a widespread "soulnessness," as summarized in his concept of a generation of "last men.") Parsifal strives to model a renewed, updated and even more demanding Christian ethic which corresponds not to the historically deconstructed Jesus of Nazareth, but to a phase beyond historicism, rather the magical phantasm of an entirely new and improved redeemer 29

figure. With Parsifal as Wagner's last statement to the world, he launches a parting shot against that fundamental element of modernity, secularization. All stage elements seem to share in the awareness and belief in renewed messianic prophecy, in the necessity of new redemption in the midst of great agony. To return to the action in Act One, Gurnemanz looks on while Kundry is mocked, by the young squires of Amfortas, first as an outsider, then as a heathen sorceress. Responding to these epithets, he unravels a history lesson that doubles as a lesson in spiritual ethics for his young apprentices. He models the meaning of compassion with reference to Kundry. While their youthful impetuousness leads them to scapegoat Kundry for the decline of their master, as they say, "she will entirely ruin him," Gurnemanz quickly retorts with the question, "did she ever harm you?" He describes how quick she is to respond when danger looms for the knights. They can only see hate and heathen power in her eyes, while Gumemanz insists on her good deeds in the present. He does however allude mysteriously to some grave sin in a past life, for which she has been reborn to do atonement. Still concerned, the knights wonder if these sins may affect them, really whether she is contagious. For the first time Gurnemanz relates the history of the construction of the Grail fortress undertaken by Titurel. Gurnemanz, singing "Titurel has known her longer," reveals that Kundry has always been a nearby witness for the Grail brotherhood, a role she is to reprise for the redemption soon at hand. As the music that first accompanied Amfortas' sickness returns, the audience now gradually learns the 30

nature of his ailment: he was wounded in a disastrous battle. As placed near the inner thigh, the wound carries connotations of the sexually perilous. Gurnemanz confronts Kundry as to where she was when Amfortas fatefully lost his spear during this battle, the phallic resonance of which, for intact masculinity writ large, is as plain as it is obvious. Alluding to an antagonist even more powerful than Kundry, Gurnemanz speaks of an evil one beyond the mountains who brought ignominy to the knights. Interrupting the wizened hermit, the third squire blurts out the real source of the knights' crisis, that the sacred spear has gone missing. For the Grail ritual to function, the holy chalice must be paired with the spear; without both together, the fortress brotherhood cannot be maintained. Amfortas apparently attempted to storm the enemy fortress, but he was thwarted by the seductive wiles of a woman. When he fell to temptation, he cried out, and was wounded, as Klingsor laughingly stole the spear away. Blithely avoiding the direct queries of the squires about Klingsor, Gurnemanz turns again to the condition of the king, emphasizing more than once that Amfortas' wound will never heal, even as the relief brought from bath waters and balsam is acknowledged. Finally, Gurnemanz delivers the longest segment of his interlaced monologue, in which he finally provides the full backstory to the action of Parsifal. A pagan horde of enemies had besieged an unnamed Christian realm, he relates. No less than angels came down from heaven on a holy night, delivered the Holy Grail to Titurel, along with the spear that pierced the savior's side. Befitting Catholic tradition, a sanctuary was built to house these relics. Claiming inheritance of all legend stories of the Grail, which usually only feature one element of the Passion story, 31

Wagner is sure to include that the Grail of Parsifal was both the cup used at the Last Supper as well as the vessel that caught the blood at the Crucifixion, while the lance is the same that Longinus used to pierce the side of the Lord. Deriving from the Latin relinquo, or to relinquish, relics are a concrete sign of the accessibility of heaven, informed by an underlying anxiety about the absent Redeemer. Gumemanz relates that service in the Grail sanctuary was allowed only for those pure of sin, who in turn were entitled to receive the benefit of the power of the Grail. At this moment, the orchestra sounds the opening Prelude of daybreak Grail music again. If only suggested at earlier, now it is clear that this music is meant to illustrate a supernatural power from heaven bestowed upon certain select on earth. The Grail Fortress, as Gumemanz clearly underlines, was not merely divinely inspired, but divinely crafted. The Holy Grail and spear were delivered by means supernatural and must remain in a sanctum of purity, which in this case denotes exclusive reserve for male warriors. Obvious with out additional emphasis is that all these male warriors are also culturally coded Eurocentric, if not specifically Germanic. Such racialized homogeneity is a distinctly modem projection onto the medieval period which would have been far more diverse, as depictions of Muslim and African Arthurian knights were far from unknown in the medieval period. Klingsor represents a case of one who wished to enter the blessed brotherhood but was not pure enough to qualify. So instead he settled in lush and pagan land. The source of his sin is not specified, and Gumemanz claims not to know, revealing only that he committed some kind of self32

mutilation in a vam effort to vanquish his sin and was subsequently repelled by the Grail guardians. Wagner's words are that "he laid his sinner's hands on himself." Could this be the kind of "cutting" adolescents engage in to distract from other pain, the flagellation of ascetics or even the circumcision of Jews and Muslims? The suggestion is left open that this act may have even gone one step further, that Klingsor was "unmanned," and committed castration so that he woµld no longer feel temptation. Though unspecified, this "act of sacrifice" gained Klingsor knowledge of black magic through which he transformed the desert valley into a garden of delights wherein beautiful women grew to ensnare the knights. The music acts out the enticement of demons who pose as flowers and practice temptation. Amfortas seems to be just one in a line of knights who tried to subdue Klingsor's realm only to end up weakened or overwhelmed by its vices. More than that, Amfortas let go of possession of the holy spear, which was then immediately used to injure him. Now Klingsor, with the holy spear in his hands, is halfway to a full conquest of the Grail fortress, and thus the capture of the Holy Grail itself. The music accompanying mention of Klingsor is eerily reminiscent to that of Kundry; it is stormy, minor, angular and jagged like lightning. The battles lines of this story are now clarified; it is a fight for possession of the Grail. In closing his introduction, Gurnemanz finally reveals the source of the prophecy of the Redeemer uttered on-stage once before by the ailing prostrate Amfortas. In front of the looted sanctuary, a radiant illumination came forth from the Grail, which alighted a vision with the words: "enlightened through compassion, the 33

pure fool." The music accompanying this revelation is the most tender rendering yet of the opening Grail music. It starts smaller and quieter than ever with much longer sustaining pauses. For the first time, the words of the pronouncement, "he is the chosen one," are treated as a church choir-like call and response from the assembled squires. This plays upon the double meaning of the archaic German verb erkoren, which is used to deliver news of the Redeemer. For erkoren can mean to appoint or choose, but it is also a speech act, as this word itself accomplishes the act of election. Rounding out this opening backstory, Wagner sets forth an astounding if not radical premise, namely, the postscriptural survival of prophecy and divine vision. The fundamental shared premise of the Abrahamic faiths, despite disagreement on details, is that religion is the product of divine revelation, which then ceases to reoccur until redemption is achieved. The enshrinement into text of these divine messages literally closes the book on any further revelation or even the possibility of prophetic faculty in the future. Parsifal by contrast takes as its starting point, not only the notion that prophecy could continue, but that there is in fact another redeemer figure, one different from the prophet-messiah(s) already known of through the scriptural text. Wagner harnesses Arthurian legend to Christian lore to create a new messiah figure, who entirely departs from previous appearance. Unintentionally, this story echoes Judaic traditions of two separate distinct messiahs. By contrast, Christian, as well as Islamic doctrine, normally hold that Jesus of Nazareth will return at the end of days, thereby 34

reinforcing his unique status as the one true Messiah. Nonnative rabbinic Judaism claims that the Messiah that will come at the end of days will have come only for the first time. A lesser-known Judaic tradition, however, holds that there will be not one but two different distinct Messiahs that shall come in succession, one a suffering servant and the other a King-warrior (Moshiach ben YosejMoschiach ben David). In Islam, there is significant denominational difference regarding such issues of eschatology. The dominant Sunni tradition holds that Isa (Jesus in Arabic) and Mahdi will be one and the same but the minority Shia tradition believes the identity of the Mahdi will be that of the occulted twelfth Imam, who will work in partnership with the returned Jesus. In this case the two messianic figures do not come in sucession but in concert. Legends of the Mahdi, as with Parsifal, hold that he begins his path in impiety without the knowledge of believers. The two Messiahs of Judaic tradition have distinct personality profiles as well as historic functions. The betterknown Messiah ben (son of/house of) David is an earthly king who restores sovereignty to Israel at the End of Days and presides over the resurrection of the dead. There are numerous legends about this Messiah but all sources agree that this first non-Davidic Messiah will die. (Only a minority of sectarian, Jewish-Christians hold that Jesus of Nazareth may have actually been this first Judaic messianic figure.) Not only will conditions of general redemption not hold after his death, but rather calamities will also befall the faithful. Wagner's proposal of Parsifal as a redeemer to restore kingship and to restore the relics of a murdered messiah is strangely more commensurate with this Judaic lore than that of any prominent Christian tradition. 35

Just as Gumemanz is about to repeat the prophecy of Parsifal's coming, the title character makes his long-awaited first appearance. His arrival is at first incongruous with a beneficent messiah, as he has just committed the outrage of murdering what was considered a good omen, namely, a pure white swan. Such a swan would have been familiar to Wagner's audience, as Lohengrin rides into Brabant astride exactly this animal. In Parsifal, however, no sooner does the swan appear flying in the sky then it is shot to the ground. Gumemanz and the squires are horrified, and as Parsifal enters the scene he is chastised for this act of despoliation of the "holy forest." Parsifal's music upon entry into the scene is stormy but indeterminate as if it could possibly morph either into the themes of the Grail or those of Kundry and Klingsor. Gumemanz is sure to inform the audience that the swan was in the mating process when it was cruelly brought down. Within legend, the swan often figures as a metamorphosed human maidens. Parsifal's act of murder inflight, intercepting the swan in pursuit of mating, foreshadows his role as one destined to arrest the temptation of female sexuality, even to bring about the removal of female presence via sacrificial dispatch. Parsifal's entry act foreshadows that he is made of sterner mettle than Amfortas or Klingsor and can fight off flights of the flesh. This opening salvo of Parsifal literally signals that although Wagner was inspired by Eschenbach' s medieval romance, the composer has in mind something very different from any hymn to chivalric love. The absence and even rejection of courtship, marital love or any sort of male-female bonding in Parsifal marks a most significant, telling departure from the medieval source text for Parsifal. In a creative act of fusion, 36

Wagner revisits the original brotherhood of holy apostles from the Gospels in his vision of knights fraternity which brooks no female nor chivalry of love; it is rather homosociality, a spiritual bonding of men alone. Parsifal's remarks to Gurnemanz that "I hit in flight whatever flies" confirms that he is dim and far from righteous. He is guided by animal instinct, even the childlike satisfaction in torture for the sake of it. Parsifal as we first meet him does not know the good from the bad. He has violated the forest where there is peace everywhere, and for which he should normally be punished. The incipient Christian redeemer here violates the pagan pacific scene of nature reverence. As the audience hears bird calls in the strings, and as Gurnemanz shows Parsifal the wound from which the blood flows in the swan, Parsifal can feel no awe, nor can he recognize guilt. Fittingly, the orchestra intones a hunting-march-like music, but rendered almost juvenile in tone. When Parsifal repeatedly answers "I don't know" to a quick succession of queries about his identity (his father, his commander, even his name) faint echoes of Grail music are intoned, lending a touch of mystique, then also combined with the angular Kundry theme, which rumbles in the background. This exchange is carried out through Wagnerian Sprechstimme (literally: "spoken voice," a recitative manner of singing), a kind of sung dialogue that is in between standard declamation and operatic singing. Wagner relies heavily on this mode in the first Act as a means to convey the vast amount of background information necessary to follow the story. Gurnemanz sets out to learn the secrets of Parsifal's identity. The old hermit senses something noble and 37

aristocratic despite the apparent backstory of a boy raised in the wild woods, as presented by Parsifal. With a mother called "suffering of the heart" (Herzeleide), who is at home back in the forest, Parsifal relates that he crafted his own bow for defense against savage eagles. Kundry is as keen as Gurnemanz to unravel the mystery of Parsifal. Wagner describes her as angrily shifting about in a corner of the forest as if she is trying to master uncontrolled, sexualized urges, as she fixes her stern gaze on Parsifal. A sprawled female chaotically writhing is another clearly discernable Orientalist trope, which Wagner marshals to set upon Kundry. Highlighted is the uncontrolled physicality of the strewn body that defies composure. Revealing again that she has access to guarded secrets, it is Kundry who inexplicably knows that Parsifal was raised an orphan and kept deliberately far from the world of weapons and knights on quest. Kundry laughs relating that he was "raised a fool," which rings callously awkward if not insidious. Kundry's approach to her opening dialogue with Parsifal turns deliberately provocative. She gains the attention of Parsifal and incites him by revealing that evil people fear him. But Parsifal understands neither friend nor enemy, nor good from evil. She then suddenly discloses that his mother has died; upon hearing this, he leaps at Kundry, seizing her throat. This emotional turbulence in which Kundry ensnares him also works as a form of seduction. In his disturbingly aggressive action in response, Parsifal has become drawn to her. His sudden fainting spell, after the attempted choke hold, may be read as an unfamiliar surge of arousal. Seeing Parsifal act out, Gurnemanz calls him a madman Accompanied by crashing and noisy decrescendos, Kundry in turn has a violent trembling fit, a panic attack 38

where she repeats her longing for sleep. Her weariness suggests something more than physical fatigue but rather a transcendental haunting in which she desperately longs for release. She is clearly at war with herself, battling demonic possession, a torment that will soon come to an end, as she says with foreboding "die zeit ist da, " the time has come. As Kundry fades into the natural world of the forest, Gumemanz wraps his arm around Parsifal, embracing and lifting him up. Just then the trail of knights with the litter carrying Amfortas re-emerge from the bath around noon and announce the Grail ritual, singing "if you are pure, you will be refreshed." Parsifal's spiritual ignorance is such that when he asks after the nature of the Grail he does so using the interrogative pronouns "who" rather than "what," assuming the Grail to be a person. Gumemanz takes the lead from Parsifal's inquiry and affirms that the Grail is unnameable. The mystery of identity that hovered over Lohengrin in the earlier music drama resurfaces in Parsifal transferred over to the Grail itself, which is ultimately the true protagonist of this work. The mystical power of the Grail is such that it uncovers its true nature only to those who are called, it is the Grail that chooses those who will come to know its power. Further, Gumemanz elaborates that kein weg fuhrt zu ihm durch das Land (no path leads to it over land) and no words can account for what it is, and no one can step to it by dint of their own will. The Grail is something metaphysical, beyond words or logic: it can only be approached if one is invited. This supernatural quality of the Grail in Wagner breaks with certain conventions of Arthuriana, namely, that such a thing like a Grail quest, a physical search, could even be possible. In Wagner's terms, it is only the Grail that can do any search. Parsifal's final statement of this scene, "I 39

hardly walked, but feel already to have come far," occasions one of the key statements of the entire work. This line amounts to the master conceptual proposition of Parsifal. Gurnemanz declares that here "time becomes space." (zum Raum wird hier die Zeit). The announcement that time and space are becoming one, unleashes a magical scene signaled by entirely changed music, a shift to a major key with hypnotic phrases descending throughout all parts of the orchestra. The audience is being prepared for the full envelopment of the narrative by the sacred, namely, that the eruption of the ritual eliminates and dissolves structures and distinctions, the most primary of which in human existence is that between time and space. The import of this statement resounds on multiple levels, on both the musical-formal, as well as the religiousphilosophical. Wagner reveals here the formal operating procedure of Parsifal, which may be summarized with the idea of phantasmagoria. Literally a phantasm on a space (agora), this is also the basic principle of a "special effect," namely one imagines an alteration of natural law which one believes to occur in a space in front of one's eyes and not merely in the imagination. The artistic aim is not conventional storytelling of a sequence of events over time, but rather to fully envelop the audience in a newly created and wholly different world apart from their familiar everyday. Phantasmagoria is also supported by the workings of hypnosis; such experience brackets the subject out from a standard understanding of linear time and offers a glimpse of timelessness. Whether hours or minutes may pass, one is not able to register the standard passage of time. Operating as phantasmagoria, Parsifal contains within itself the 40

contrasting worlds of the Grail temple service and the pleasure garden of Klingsor. In religio-philosophical understandings, the notion of time dissolved into space evokes the eternal, cyclical time of sacred ritual. While the linear occurrence of human activity may vary from year to year, on the sacred calendar, all holy days remain fixed no matter the year and occur in an unbroken cycle. The space of sacred ritual, one might say, suspends the quotidian understanding of time. Eternal recurrence therefore nullifies time and sets humans into pure space, unconfined by time. Indeed, there is hardly a religious tradition in the world that does not set its regular recurring ritual against some particular configuration in space. As a statement on the temporal dimension of history, the claim that time becomes space, that the former is suspended by the latter, amounts to nothing less than the "end of history." Unique again to the Abrahamic faiths is this teleological dimension of human history, that there is a clear beginning and end. These traditions all share and posit an eschatology that supposes that in the coming messianic age human history as we know it will cease, and time will be suspended in a kind of blissful eternal present. In the nineteenth century, secular versions of this conception of history abound, whether Marxist historical materialism or utopian nationalism; all retain this consciousness of a progressive future. Wagner pithily integrates the suspension of human, historical time, in the service of a syncretic and revisionist, neo-religious story of eternally available redemption, albeit one available only for a select few. More familiar than the concept of phantasmagoria, the notion of "special effects" designed to overwhelm and 41

transfix audiences are commonplace and a given. Unique to Wagner is that such effects were seamlessly integrated into his musical score and libretto. He composed a new musical Prelude for the scene of transformation that magically funnels the viewer into the Grail ceremony. This music highlights the sense of anticipation by the use of timpani and ends with the ringing of bells for a noontime service. What follows next in Scene 2 of Act I is as clear a phantasmagoria as one can find in the history of the operatic world. Wagner literally instructs that the stage be transformed and that the forest, simply, "disappear." (verschwindet). The musical interlude composed for this transition is accordingly known as "transformation music." His stage instructions at this point, which are often not completely translated into English, include musical instructions as well. These provide insight into Wagner's conviction of the role music is to play in a stage drama, namely that music may constitute a quasiphysical part of his sets upon the stage. He describes how Gumemanz and Parsifal walk through a passageway that emerges in the walls of rock. Then another upward gangway becomes suddenly visible, which, as he clearly denotes, they "appear" to ride across. Musically, long sustained trombones swell, and as they approach, the ringing of bells arises. And in a description which doubles the effect of phantasmagoria, the Grail hall into which they enter is itself lost in the ray of light that comes down from the top of the dome. He writes that the sound of growing ringing comes even from above the top of the dome, as if from heaven itself. Gumemanz again doubles as the guide for Parsifal and also for the audience. When he says, "you will watch this and see if you are pure, " he is mediating the action on stage and also testing the viewer for their readiness, credulity 42

and even complicity for the shared ascent into envisioning. The Grail ceremony is inaugurated by a choral procession of knights, accompanied by the deepest brass of the orchestra, the center of which is an actual on-stage Eucharist, paramount among Christian sacraments. For the second time in this first Act, the audience is confronted with the performance in its entirety of a religious ritual. If Parsifal began with a prayer in its opening sequence, it now concludes before an intermission with communion. Wagner carefully illustrates the procession of the knights, their parallel formation, the arrival of the Grail itself, and the verbal recitation of the doctrine of blood sacrifice from the assembled squires. The brotherhood of the Grail knights here are not mere lay adherents of the church; rather as warriors they stand ready to match the blood sacrifice of the Redeemer through their own, in the service of military defense of the sacred realm. As the sign of a new convenant for the entirety of the community of believers, the transubstantiation, where bread and wine transform into the body and blood of Christ, is here reserved for a most exclusive guard. It is the presence of the Lord in the form of the Holy Spirit that makes this transformation possible, symbolized by the dove in the Gospel story, which Wagner directly evokes and represents. He has the squires sing from on high "der Taubeschwebt," the dove hovers. Communion or the collective ingesting of bread and wine is a Christian ritual with multiple roots and antecedents, ranging from the Jewish Passover Seder and Sabbath meal, to the Mithraic communal meal. While in the Judaic tradition, humans are forbidden from ingesting life-giving blood, which must be spilled out for the Lord, Christian practice makes such consumption central. This metaphysical 43

ritual, the transformation of wine and bread into blood and flesh, enacts and sets the boundary marker for community. The crisis, which afflicts the knights' fraternity in Parsifal, also threatens the integrity of those bonds which define insider from outsider. The illness of Amfortas not only obstructs the functioning of monarchy, fraternity and fortress but also throws a wrench into all levels of society, as all members are obstructed in their identity as part of a sacred community bonded by their symbolic cannibalism. The central paradox of Parsifal is that it is titled as a work of art to consecrate the stage but in fact details a crisis in the process of consecration. This central plot point in Parsifal is a compelling inversion of the other major biblical moment of sacred revelation interrupted and thwarted, namely the story of the construction and worship of the Golden Calf. At the time of the revelation of the Ten Commandments, the community of believers succumbed to transgressive, communal self-consecration, one filled with animalistic, sexual abandon, violating a covenant of divine promise and liberation. An entire community needed to be punished, and ultimately removed to expire in the desert, before a new generation could enter the Promised Land. Moses who remained pristine in his charge to receive the tablets as law-giver preferred to smash those sacred tablets upon his return than have them be received by intransigent sinners. The case of Parsifal is an inversion whereby the community of knights remains pure and clamors for receipt of the Grail, while the leader alone is who that lies corrupted, stricken and unable to fulfill his part in transmission. The Eucharist is both one of the most defining but also divisive miracles and sacraments at the heart of the 44

Christian faith, a major flash point of difference. Though the ritual always remains central, for Catholics the Eucharist is a literally miraculous transubstantiation while for Protestants it is largely symbolic. And no other land in Europe was more marked by the rendering asunder of the Western Church than Germany, home to the Thirty Years War which engulfed one third of the population and resulted in countless villages destroyed numerous times. No other European nation-state entered the modern world almost evenly split between Catholic and Protestant denominations as Imperial Germany. Such a divide further burdened and complicated the belated path to a modern German state, finally accomplished only a decade before Parsifal. Wagner's full staging of the Eucharist, in an allegorical mythological version, rather than a version denominationally coded, presents a culturally unifying moment, even one dedicated to reconciliation among his audience. The Bayreuth theater which claimed exclusive propriety for Parsifal lies geographically as close as could be attainable to the midpoint beween Protestant and Catholic Germany. These fault lines in German society often led to repeated antagonisms, reflexes of scapegoating or an ongoing search for safety valves for discontent. The Kulturkampf of Wagner's own era wherein the Imperial German government dissolved the Jesuit order, placed Catholic schools under the state and broke off relations with the Vatican remains the classic example. In reponse, Catholics, especially those from the rural south, turned with fervor to the adoration of the Virgin Mary as a response to this sidelining of autonomy from the government in Berlin. A whole series of Marian apparitions, eventually sanctioned by the Vatican, would ensue, forming a parallel to Wagner's own project of the revitalization of the sacred. 45

Bayreuth lies almost precisely on a boundary line between the Southern Catholic, Bavarian part of Germany and the Protestant Saxon and Prussian North. To be more precise, Bayreuth is located within the region of Franken (Franconia), one of the few border regions in the country where Catholic villages co-exist side by side in this predominantly Protestant enclave inside of Bavaria. It is as if through the Bayreuth theater itself, much like Parsifal, meant to enact truce and unity in a Germany long fractured. The institutional build-up of the Bayreuth theater complex may be seen as a construct in parallel and miniature to the unifying, modern German state itself. Even a project as ethereal and otherworldly as Parsifal cannot be disentangled from his career-long project of reinforcing German cultural nationalism. Wagner's modern mysticism often lies beside consciousness of tradition. His theatrical staging of the Eucharist could well be taken as sacrilege, both then and now, by the traditionalist faithful. His story line quickly moves in a direction that ignores biblical precedent or fidelity. Amfortas takes his seat in front of the covered shrine of the Grail atop a marble table. During the ceremony, his father Titurel, builder of the Grail fortress, begins to speak from beyond the grave. The Bible of course includes almost a dozen cases of resurrection of the dead, but nowhere is there any case of a mortal speaking from the grave. As Titurel sings, "within the grave, I live by the Savior's grace, but I am too feeble to serve him." From a netherworld between life and death, Titurel is kept in a limbo state thanks to the presence of the Grail. From beyond the grave, the father questions whether his son can continue the Grail service. He lodges an almost accusatory query to his son, 46

"Bist du am Amt?" (literally: Are you at your post?) using a standard German term of officialdom, (Amt is till used to refer to ministries and governmental departments but also carries the more general meaning of authority writ large) much in the sense of a military or governmental post. He insists that Amfortas do his duty and uncover the Grail, but the latter refuses. "Will you officiate?" asks the father's voice from a distance, openly doubting whether the son can fulfill the responsibilities of his inheritance. The uncertainty heard in Titurel is embedded in the story as a whole, and revolves around whether the son can fill the shoes of the father. Yes he has inherited the position, but seems crippled and unable to actually carry out the function implied. This fear of a legacy squandered is emblematic of the sucession crisis of modernity within Wagner's historical moment. His generation arriving at the sunset of life in the 1880s would have been old enough to recall serfdom, communication before the telegraph, transportation before the railroad and city streets before electric lightning. Politically, the German lands of their youth were divided into dozens of diverse principalities and kingdoms, some in forms unchanged since Charlemagne. In the span of a long lifetime, their world of childhood transformed unrecognizably, even, unimaginably so. Never before had one generation bequeathed such a towering legacy of such breathtaking transformation to the next. The emergence of a modern German state had been a fraught, belated and protracted process. Wagner himself was caught up in generational upheavals including those militate on the one hand for nationalization, but also for a republican form of government, with universal suffrage and a limited, 47

constituional monarchy during the uprisings of 1848-9. This disappointing failure of those aspirations (suppressed via brute military force) gave way to a gradual reconiliation with a form of more absolutist, quasi-feudal mode of government ultimately taken by the modem German state. And this unification, ultimately more of an annexation by Prussia of the remaining non-Austrian German states, came at the cost of three wars against Germany's neighbors: against Austria, Denmark and France from 1866-1871, and leaving a legacy of violence, grievance and dispute of borders. Within a decade, this newest and largest European state had by the 1880s fashioned itself into a military-industrial powerhouse to rival the greatest of world powers, with a population left to confront the effects of a excruciatingly condensed process of urbanization and industrialization. The weight of immense power and seemingly limitless potential must have been a psychological burden upon the children of the elite strata of society. And their parents may well have harbored doubts as to their ability to lead and carry on what the children had only known as a given. Wagner's audience was forced to confront a generation of children who had lost touch with the premodem world of their own youth. They also faced a physical, moral and emotional world of entirely different tempi, contour and temptation. Unsurprisingly, artists of the late-nineteenth century began fixate upon the allure of Eros, and moral corrosion, that would threaten the fortress of new empire from within. Nowhere is this fear better embodied than in the characterization of Amfortas as the impotent failed son, literally dying on the vine of his lineage. In the throes of torment, Amfortas asks his father to preside over the Grail ceremony for him one last time. He prefers his 48

father take his place, but the father denies the request, as he too is too weak. It is a cruel fate for the knights' fraternity that the only apparent sinner of the brotherhood happens to be their leader, who has brought their world upside down. Unlike the classical tragic hero with a flaw, Amfortas seems to hardly have any redeeming qualities. He succumbed wholly to dangers that lurk outside the protected fortress which only amplify the fears and wild imaginings of the rest of the encumbered fraternity. And as we now tum to Act Two, Wagner devotes the middle act of Parsifal to the nature of this threat from without and to vividly illustrating the alternative world that it offers as temptation. This is a portrait in decadence as far away as possible from the tradition and piety so carefully realized in the first Act. Amfortas' own descriptions of his torments leave little doubt as to the nature of the creeping specter of decadence. des heiligsten Blutes Quell fiihl' ich sie giessen in mein Herz; des eignen sundigen Blutes Gewell' in wahnsinniger Flucht muss muss mir zurilck dann fliessen, in die Welt der Siindensucht mit wilder Scheu sich ergiessen

feel the fount of divine blood pour into my heart: the ebb of my own sinful blood in mad tumult must surge back into me, to gush in wild terror into the world of sinful passion 49

This description resembles a medical account of a blood transfusion gone wrong. Such an injection of pure blood from outside causing internally corrupted blood to surge suggests an out-of-control infection. The dangers of surrendering to temptation create the toxic environment of a body at war with itself, fated to be weakened from the inside. Amfortas longs for a redemption through death, but his knights and squires remind him of the prophecy of the redeemer, and his father's encouragement to carry onward the Grail ceremony. The supernatural power of the Grail is imparted in the stage directions a crimson radiance stronger than daylight. But even this power seems unable to vanquish the mysterious disease and suffering of Amfortas. The sacred relic buoys Amfortas aloft just long enough for him to perform the blessing over the bread and the wine. The Grail is more like a brace or a crutch; its glow behind the veil can only support him in his infirmity, without nullifying the invalidity. Once the sacred radiance of the chalice recedes, he collapses again into fatigue, gripping his wound, which has begun anew to bleed. The knights take in the sacred meal as fortification for another battle to come. They sing of the wine as transformative for "Lebens-feurigen Blute," (a blossoming of the fire of life) and as renewal of their resolve to fight "mit seligem Mute" (with blessed courage). Wagner's vision of Christian brotherhood is clearly that of knights militant at the ready, prepared for violence upon hostile non-believers in the valley outside the fortress. Yet their leader, lapsed into weakness inside their fortress, poses an even more critical challenge, one that threatens to unravel the very heart of their mission. There is never any suggestion that the knights should have compassion for Amfortas; rather their 50

celebration of courage and fire is related as an unambiguous absolute, a standard against which their leader clearly falls short. Wagner imparts how Amfortas' blood recoils from the Grail. Such sinful blood is described as swollen with desire, filled with sickness and a corruption that cannot be reversed. The precise nature of Amfortas' wound is left ambiguous. His wound clearly functions as the "anti-Grail"; it is the mirror counterpart of that sacred object which cannot be made fully transparent or explained. Yet the Grail itself also functions as a wound or a lack, a case of magic displacing theology, evidence of the insufficiency of religious energy left by an absent redeemer. These two wounds, pillars of Parsifal, are presented as a priori and are not subject to questioning or critical examination from within the text. Amfortas' wound that bleeds on a recurring basis conjures up the specter of menstruation, and that of the female genitalia as the site of castration. Fears of weakened men, especially sons who might not be able to fill the shoes of their fathers, were often rendered in terms of "feminization," the notion then current that a weakening of men constituted a form of feminization. (Early psychoanalytic theorists also posited male menstruation during the same period.) The highly theatrical, almost paranoid anxiety that Amfortas communicates throughout reflects symptoms of what would come to be known as "hysteria," that distinctly modern illness first elaborated upon with reference to women, most notably in Breuer and Freud's Studies on Hysteria. The wound of Amfortas is thus emblematic of a wider crisis of the subject, gender and masculinity, understood as wider ailments of modernity. The 51

crisis of generational succession is greatly consonant with this crisis of masculinity. The more literal variant of a bleeding that cannot be controlled is hemophilia. Made iconic historically for its incidence with the last Tsarevich of Imperial Russia, this ailment was widespread throughout the royal houses of Europe. Uncontrolled blood-letting as a symptom of an aristocracy in decay was so widespread that the expression "thinning of the blood" emerged as a catch phrase for elite generational decline. The term that would soon be coined to capture this reversal of progressive growth, degeneration, was popularized by a doctor from Budapest, Max Nordau,also in this same period. (The original German term for which translation for degeneration serves as English translation is Entartung, which literally means something becoming less like itself.) The unresolved origin and constitution of such ongoing woundedness, especially in elevated and sensitive social spaces, serves as emblematic for wider waves of suffering and unrest in a given order. Amfortas' conflict is so severe because it is his duty, which occasions and redoubles his suffering. He writhes in pain at the very mention of unveiling the Grail, which is the very essence of his function in the knights' community. In a case of telepathic empathy, it is only Parsifal who clutches his heart instinctively at Amfortas' cry of agony. This outbreak of compassion is followed by a stunned, catatonic silence. Wagner's description of Parsifal spasmodically clutching at his heart suggests a panic attack, or even cardiac arrest. Wagner specifies that Parsifal's blood literally recoils. These convulsions leave him at a loss for words, which the wise 52

hermit Gumemanz interprets as mere foolishness and dismises Parsifal after their viewing of the Grail ceremony. Wagner's abrupt end to the lengthy proceedings of the First Act leaves the audience without the comforting presence of the counsel of Gumemanz, but does little to clarify the nature of Amfortas' suffering or the mysterious character of Parsifal. The closing music of the First Act takes us back to the Prelude heard at the start of the work. The audience can now hear and identify these opening sounds with new ears, for it is the sonic exposition of Amfortas' suffering. This music is eclipsed by the only music of love in the work; neither courtly nor explicitly romantic, it is the love that the knights have for one another. As a love is based in the exclusively masculine, shared consumption of the Eucharist, their intake of blood and their willingness to shed the same in mutual service is their bond. This love of the knights is a mutual conquest of urges associated with female sexuality. And whereas the knights must constantly carry on this fight, Parsifal seems to hint at a state of stasis where those cravings can be quelled once and for all.

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Act Two Act One of Parsifal is flanked by an on-stage prayer, and then a full Eucharist ceremony, both ground breaking. This is the most complete theatrical dramatization of ritual acts yet seen in stage art neither in ant traditional form of Mass or requiem. Religion is rather harnessed in the service of drama. Wagner elevated his proceeding music drama to a level of the sacred for which there is hardly any direct precedent. While Wagner's thematic material is deeply antimodem, even reactionary, his formal creative fusions mark him as an artistic innovator, even a proto-modemist. His juxtaposition of scenic transformation, and cut aways with religious ceremonies even bear early signs of montage, a first inkling of representations of the disjointed nature of modem reality. His dramatic and textural project of updating traditional religion can be seen as a distinctly modem rereading. The opening music of Act Two forms a stark contrast with the start of Parsifal. We hear again flying music of storms, reminiscent of Kundry, tormented sentences of angular call and response. On stage, Act Two begins by conjuring forth.a familiar centerpiece in romantic imaginary, that of the Devil's Pleasure Palace. Wagner is echoing himself, amending one of his own creations, the Venusberg, another hyper-erotic bewitching phantasmagoric realm of the fairie Queen Venus, from Tannhauser,which forms Act One for that music drama. That erotic lair is fully illustrated, graphic and explicit while in Parsifal as we shall see, the counterworld of temptation is more suggestive than overt in its terms of rendering.

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Unlike Lohengrin, Tannhauser is not linked to Parsifal neither through shared characters or storyline, nor is it broadly derivative of Arthuriana as is the case with Tristan und Isolde. Yet no work of Wagner more closely presages Parsifal's theatrical piety and on-stage religious genuflection, along with an overweening emphasis on the magic/faith dichotomy. A quasi-historical work set in the Germanic Holy Roman Empire, the depictions of faith in Tannhauser are quite traditional and do not rely upon supernatural transformations or reference to para-religious lore we see in Parsifal. The vitality of the action in Tannhauser makes for a far more traditional drama than the more ceremonial and contemplative Parsifal. Though Wagner stops short of the actual prayers or depictions of sacraments that he fully embraces for Parsifal,Tannhauser does feature on-stage praises to the Lord, as well as processions of the penitent mendicants of a monastic brotherhood. Hovering over that drama throughout and featured at its conclusion is the on-stage miracle of the sprouting of a garland upon a priestly staff, but even that carries nowhere near the transcendental implications of the Grail ceremony. The internal evolution of the main character in Tannhaser serves as precursor to Parsifal. There is a similar conflict between the calling of a higher faith and irrepressible carnal longings, again nowhere near as extreme as in Parsifal. The two main female characters, Venus and Elizabeth, fit a more familiar, if oft distorted, Catholic duality of Virgin Mary/Mary Magdalene. Though Tannhauser speaks of being tom between heaven and hell, his battle is not between renunciation of eros and toxic sexual infection but rather between lascivious abandon, and 56

the mature, responsible bourgeois pair bonding that sets sex within clearly demarcated social boundaries. Yet the Venusberg in Tannhauser as well as Klingsor's pleasure garden in Parsifal stand as the most vividly realized creations inside Wagner's creations. Such achievements confirm the truism that artists, and even humans generally, often devote more energy and imagination to vividly illustrating their supposed fears, and nemeses, than to that which they seek to uphold and defend. The dramatic start to Act Two introduces Klingsor, this spumed knight aspirant, the character of greatest energy and charisma more than any yet seen on stage. "Die Zeit ist da" (the time has come) he declares, revealing himself as a man who lives within the countdowns of time, not the ethereal world of space of the Grail. He personifies desire and work, and is busy, plotting with spies, and looks to Kundry as a slave-like quasi-ally to entrap Parsifal. What a marked contrast Klingsor forms to the exhausted and lifeless Amfortas! The opposition between the world of the Grail knights and that of Klingsor, which is the central subject of Act Two, neatly fits that of a phobic relationship. On the surface, the knights and their apprentices are gripped by fear, an attitude Wagner viscerally conveys to his audience. Yet the luxuriant world of Klingsor is so captivatingly rendered as to betray secret longing on the part of Wagner, and by extension, that of the knights themselves. Such supposition is also embedded in the movement of the plot as well. After all, Amfortas ostensibly sets out to conquer and remove the threat of Klingsor but he ultimately ends up seduced and weakened by that same threat he hoped to allay. He is ultimately penetrated by what he hoped to exclude. 57

If one were to invent a title for the second act, "The Plot Against Parsifal" would be close to the mark. Wagner shows the two principal antagonists, Klingsor and Kundry, working in concert in a complex, conspiratorial manner. They are energized by a dark power source, a counterreligion in its own right, a demonic analog to the mixture of Arthuriana and Christian spirituality seen in Act One. The evocative music of the start of Act Two - stormy, contrasting lines on string instruments, punctuated by loud cries of the brass - sounds out a witches' spell and the churning of some cauldron of the dark arts. This musical language fits well with Wagner's stage instructions for the projection of a dark tower leading to an even greater darkness below. The dynamic tension at the heart of Act Two is the "civil war" between these two supposed demons. As much as Kundry and Klingsor try to coordinate their designs on Parsifal, more of their energy is devoted to warring between themselves than it is seeking to subdue Parsifal and the knights. Klingsor's backstory is straightforward, a knight who once wanted to belong and is then irrevocably cast out, making him all the more pernicious and poised for revenge. Kundry's otherness is more mysterious, even spiritual. She is more highly conflicted, and veers erratically between the bidding of Klingsor and her search for some kind of redemption from the knights. Unlike Klingsor, who longed for entry to the knights and then became an implacable foe after rejection, Kundry confounds these borders, and inhabits both worlds in ambivalent, unsettling ways. If Klingsor is a resolute antagonist, Kundry is "the Other" writ large, who both confronts and represents the threat of dissolution, inside and out. 58

The world of Klingsor is another tower fortress, like the world of the Grail, but a dark counterpart, one born under a bad sign. In his description of Scene I, Wagner explicitly indicates that "tools of magic" and "necromantic devices" are strewn about. Left to speculation is whether the specific art of communing with the dead is meant to be evoked or just black magic in general. The black arts, from a romantic era and medieval Christian perspective, are those that blur the boundary between life and death, and usually form part of the demonic realm, whether of possession, spirit manipulation, or unclean sacrifice. In the Orientalist imaginary, necromancy was often represented in depictions of Islam. This subtle reference by Wagner in his stage instructions carries a heavy freight of associations with even theological implication. Invoking necromancy as a stigma for Klingsor is ironic given that it is the character of Titurel, the Grail founder, who is shown able to speak from beyond the grave. Klingsor emerges in dramatic fashion staring in a mirror. Shown looking at himself, he recognizes his identity and knows who he .is, in contradistinction to Parsifal. He is forthright about his plans: to ensnare Parsifal and manipulate the accursed Kundry to do the same. It is immediately clear that the characters, drama and music have taken an entirely different direction in the second act. Klingsor's dynamism contrasts with almost all of the characters introduced in Act One who were staid, sedate and even icon-like, embedded in a solemn atmosphere. This contrast between agitated antagonists and placid protagonists is a convention that goes back to the Passion Plays of the medieval era. Wagner's antagonists are drawn with greater energy and complexity; they are not only more interesting, but also formally more 59

innovative. After all, Wagner hardly deviates from the Arthurian archetypal templates of Parsifal as the innocent foolish hero, and Amfortas as the sickly distressed "Fisher King." On the other hand, Kundry and Klingsor are unprecedented and innovative creations of great ferocity. For all the rhetoric of sanctification, the audience could easily depart with the impression that evil is more interesting. Wagner thus participates in pioneering fashion in the modem tendency to project and allay magic, wizards and witches onto depictions of the medieval era. Such construct of the demonic supernatural is hardly to be found in the primary sources, secure as they were in the hands of strict church doctrine. Klingsor proceeds to light incense which fills the air with blue smoke and then conjures forth a being from the depths by use of what Wagner calls mysterious signs. Such Orientalist colorations fill out a picture of strange and threatening magic. It is Kundry whom Klingsor summons forth, whom he addresses in a striking series of titles, "Urteufelin, " (primal devil), rose of hell, Herodias and then Gundryiggia. Kundry is depicted as an inhabitant of hellish netherworlds and as an incarnation of the most notorious female characters of the past. Denounced by John the Baptist, Herodias would be well known to Christians as the Queen of Judea, said to have encouraged her daughter Salome to pursue that herald of Jesus' arrival . She like the Germanic mythological Valkyrie Gundryiggia was a byword for woman as huntress. This reference to the Herodian dynasty, the Judean (albeit originally converted Edomites) kings of the Gospel story, brings us as close as possible within Parsifal to 60

touching that third rail of European politics in this period of high imperialism and increasingly oppressive nationalism: antisemitism. The question of Wagner and antisemitism is a field unto itself, one that continues to spark volumes of debate (especially given the involvement of the Wagner family and the Bayreuth festival in the crimes of Nazism). For this discussion, dedicated to a close reading of Parsifal, this mention is the one unambiguous occasion where evem the casual observer cannot but be compelled to confront this issue. After all, this is the closest Wagner comes to identifying Kundry, or anyone else in his oeuvre, as a character to be understood as Jewish. (The attribution to Klingsor as Judaic, by contrast, lies outside the realm of any faithful close reading.) Previous to this mention of Herodias, Kundry had only been linked with Arabian origins. Her dwelling underground may link Kundry to the Niebelungen "race of dwarfs" well known from Wagner's Ring cycle, also seen by some as Judaic stand-ins, but again without the striking step of legible historical reference. Living underground, Kundry, like Titurel, exists in a limbo state, half-trapped, under the power of an overlord, Amfortas/Klingsor too tormented and conflicted to provide passage to liberty. Though she helped Klingsor ensnare Amfortas, she escaped such bondage by Klingsor and then fled to the knights, which is where we meet her at the start of Act One. Though not dead in the sense of entombement as Titurel, Kundry is in great agony, like an un-dead character, apparently suffering from multiple reincarnations with a burdensome historical genealogy stretching back centuries. Her disassociating self is tom between bursts of pain and anger. Her multiple memories of different personalities also align with symptoms of schizophreniaThe depiction of 61

Kundry as embodying a kind of hall of fame of threatening females throughout history embodies much of the paranoiac irrationalism in the process of "othering" which constantly projects and doubles its fears. Rather than embodying a Sanskritic notion of karma, Wagner's Kundry more resembles the construction of a hate object is a spiraling and multiplying process that often brooks no truck with logic or focus on a stable object. Klingsor magically summons forth a sleepwalking Kundry ensconced in blue light. She arises with a terrifying wail, letting out cries of frenzy and rage. She is a shape shifter who delivered Amfortas to Klingsor, luring him with her feminine wiles. Kingsor suspects she seeks redemption in the eyes of the knights to provide recompense for their compromised leader. When Klingsor commands Kundry to the task of capturing Parsifal, whom he deems all the more dangerous for being a fool, Kundry resists. Her torment seems the result of an age-old curse, as well as a symptom of internal warring. Beyond Kundry's ambivalence, she and Klingsor share a common project, which they refer to as work, in contrast to the knights who speak of service. Klingsor's power lies in the fact that he cannot be seduced, a state achieved not through the will to renunciation, but rather via manual, mechanical shortcut. They are united in the experience of rejection: Klingsor by Amfortas, and both by the entire knights fraternity. Ultimately, they are an unhappy couple that pursues their work with dogged determination but without joy. In their dialogue, Kundry bursts out for selfempowerment and autonomy, declaring "you cannot force me." When Klingsor tries to affirm his status as her master, 62

because her power "cannot work over him," Kundry's query in response, "are you chaste?" stops him dead in his tracks. If Klingsor may be immune to her seductive powers, it is not because he is pure, as is the case with Parsifal, but because of the opposite: his corruption is so advanced as to make him no longer functionally sexual. Klingsor is deeply pained by what he takes to be Kundry's mocking here. Ricocheting rapidly from anger to brooding, he confesses that so great was his desire that he took drastic steps to silence it. Ever clearer, the reasonable deduction is that Klingsor felt himself so oversexed that he undertook a self-administered castration. Klingsor diagnoses Kundry, whom he calls the bride of the devil, as having the pain of untamed desire, which he has silenced in himself: "does it now laugh and mock through you"? Klingsor seems to imagine only extremes when it comes to desire, either demonic possession or crippling paralysis, self-inflicted or not. His disabling of Amfortas is such that the entire tribe of knights has fallen to him ("sein Stamm verfiel mir ") ("his tribe fell to me") so that they can know of no redemption and will be forced to deliver the Grail unto Klingsor himself. Wagner continues to evoke ethnos or clan as he resorts to the term "tribe," as well as notions of contagion: the sickness of a leader means illness for all. Whether material or psychological, a pattern of contagion dictates that infecting one would mean by necessity a quarantine-like distancing of the Grail sanctuary for the entire brotherhood of knights. The two main characters of Act Two, Kundry and Klingsor, are both tormented, and must battle themselves as well as each other. What unites them is their shared target, 63

Parsifal, whom they plot to ensnare. Though Kundry appears to be reluctant to join Klingsor's plan, they diverge more in matters of approach than objective. Klingsor fears Parsifal as a threat and wants to maintain sufficient wariness. Kundry on the other hand seeks proximity; her maternal instincts are awakened by his presence. Klingsor seeks to manipulate this arousal by assuring her that the road to redemption and the eternal sleep for which she longs lays through him: "he who spurns you sets you free." This tormented dialogue is interrupted by Parsifal's arrival, as he is scaling the heights of the castle, while Klingsor orders his guards in to do battle. Kundry delivers her signature laugh as Parsifal fights his way in. Off stage, his battle prowess a given, he takes on Klingsor's minions who are wounded and in retreat. Speaking again of work, "schon am Werk" (already at work) Klingsor reveals that Kundry is now under his spell and well aware of the foreordained destiny upon which Parsifal moves. This scene climaxes in an off-stage battle where Parsifal handily dispatches the knights of Klingsor after mounting the heights of his dark tower. Kundry disappears during the battle, while Klingsor derives a perverse glee in seeing his own soldiers wounded. His sadistic impulses mixing with satisfaction, Klingsor imagines the prowess of Parsifal will soon be under his control. The child-like grin on the face of Parsifal as he mounts the ramparts delivers more proof to Klingsor that Parsifal is too dim-witted to be a true conqueror. For Klingsor, it is Parsifal's purity that must be compromised; it is precisely Parsifal's "foolery," his sexual immaturity, that provides his greatest armor against threats of ensnarement.

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Scene Two brings the audience directly into grips with the well-known convention of a garden of delights, which Wagner equips with tropical vegetation and luxurious flowers. The terraces that jut out from the castle are explicitly noted as drawn in a rich Arabian style, conjuring associations with the Alhambra in Andalucia. Wagner clearly associates "Arabian" not with hygienic water canalization and Islamic piety, but with the sensuality entirely typical of late- nineteenth-century Romantic European Orientalism. In the specifically German imagination, the combined presence of heavy perfumes and lushly colored silk would also fit stereotypes of French culture, where Orientalism had its earliest advance. The lush overgrowth of the world of the tropics functions as a kind of basement for human fantasies, a psychic underworld where thoughts and desires grow wildly unkempt. (The uncontrolled growth combined with mass replication of the flower maidens also evoke the bewildering mass production of commodities characteristic of the Second Industrial era of Wagner's time.) This garden of women cries out for the wounded knights and sees in Parsifal an accursed foe. Parsifal is enchanted, and at first wants to frolic. When they flock to him as magical, they promise him rewards and love. A clear counterpoint to the Grail fortress, where the knights are celibate men, Klingsor' s garden is filled exclusively with highly sexed females. Fulfilling orgiastic fantasies, the women throw themselves at him, but then shame him for being shy. Parsifal's look of astonishment well doubles for a stupefied audience. Wagner's knowingly excessive depiction conjures the seductive sirens of Homer, as well as the frenzied Dionysian maeneds of Bacchic ritual. He amplifies 65

classical reference with the most sophisticated theatrical technology available. Here the sirens are anything but stationary; they rush in from all directions, "in wild confusion," in ever greater numbers with brightly colored robes hastily put on as if just arising from sleep. Maidens that rush in ever-greater numbers use a sleight of hand of stagecraft, a mirror funhouse effect of growth out of control. Endlessly, self-replicating flower maidens suggests a modem idea of self-generating automatons, which, in no obedience to natural laws are able to reproduce without any natural or biological contingency. The scene of Klingsor and his pleasure garden, in advance of H.G. Well's The Island of Dr. Moreau a decade or so later (1896), suggests a tropical enclave where a mutilated mad scientist has created a mutated, uncontrolled breed of new creatures. Wagner's garden poses a threat to purity, not as the result of misguided or thwarted utopian goals, but as it is entirely devoted to the pursuit of physical, orgiastic pleasure. This is made clear by the words of the flower maidens in first approach to Parsifal: "we do not play for gold, we play for love's dues." As they emerge on stage Wagner has the garden maidens sing in unison, alternating choruses. They are outraged at the dismal fate of Klingsor's warriors who unsuccessfully did battle off-stage, whom they call their "play things" (Gespielen). Their dismay at loss melts away instantly when Parsifal arrives to play with them. Overtaken by their color and scent, Parsifal asks whether they be flowers in fact. In explaining their origin, the maidens respond that they grow much as flowers. They grow in summer out of the perfumed essence of the garden and wither if they cannot be loved, confirming that the dark 66

magic of the mad Klingsor is at hand. Infatuated, they coo over Parsifal and attempt to convince him that it is a good, even noble deed to succumb to their advances. When he does not respond, they begin to fight over him. At first wind of this tumult, Parsifal backs off, but immediately receives a revealing and emblematic accusation: "are you afraid of women?" Parisfal inverts a conventional deficiency of masculinity; his strength is that he can overcome desire. Though incongruous for a stylized medieval Christian warrior, Wagner reaffirms a Buddhist noble truth by way of Schopenhauer, that the root of suffering is desire. Kundry reemerges to frighten off the maidens. She transforms herself to better ensnare Parsifal. Awash in competition, rather than pursue seduction via sexual invitation, Kundry assumes a maternal figure, one Parsifal once knew but must now live without. As the fundamental act of maternity is bestowing a name on a child, imparting identity, it is fitting that here, the first time in the entire music drama, the name Parsifal is spoken out loud. Upon now seeing Kundry again, and aware of his lack of identity, Parsifal asks, "Did you call upon me, who am nameless?" As Kundry moves to pronounce the name Parsifal, she shifts into the role of mother and brings the youth a sense of ego identity he lived in ignorance of. The Kundry who declares that "I named you foolish innocent, 'Fal Parsi"' (emphasizing Orientalist otherness), then magically transforms into a young woman of greatest beauty bedecked in fantastic Arabian attire. Her beguiling metamorphosis is entrancingly incongruous, but Oedipally astute, just as she assumes a parental role, she appears a more fitting partner for his loss of innocence. 67

Kundry, unlike the flower maidens, is a serious woman. She not only possesses strong identity but can also bestow such on others. She calls the flower maidens children, to shoo them away, just as they profess ever-greater heated anguish for the young innocent. Upon hearing his name, Parsifal recalls that his mother also once called him "Fal Parsi," the pure fool who affirms innocence. Living without a name is, after all, the ultimate form of innocence. The human production of names for the natural world was regarded in biblical tradition as a sign of the loss of innocence. Abrahamic faiths holds that in Eden "Adamic" names were inherent, produced by the things in themselves. Names were neither produced nor projected by humans onto others. After the Fall from Paradise and the Tower of Babel, humans could then create and produce names, but they would never again know the true names of things. Names that come after the Fall reflect human dispersion and ingenuity, but nonetheless lack a fundamental authenticity. So while Kundry delivers Parsifal his name, this small act compromises his innocence: his true name in the state of pure innocence remains unknown. The true origins of Parsifal remain cloaked in the supernatural as if he comes to us out of a prelapsarian Edenic state. As Kundry is the source of his name, she is the true author of Wagner's creation. Kundry as muse and co-creator emerges and struggles to be an autonomous creative force despite vilification and resistance. Though constantly stigmatized, Kundry mothers this music drama and sets Parsifal's internal struggle onto its further course, which aims not at the recovery of innocence but rather its mastery, suppression and ultimately destruction. Such authorship she disavows, as she relates it was Parsifal's father during death 68

throes on the battlefield that first uttered this name. Kundry relays that Parsifal's father, called Gamuret, died as a soldier in "Araby" as a crusader against the infidels. For the second time in Parsifal this location is signalled as the Other writ large. (How she could have known Gamuret' s dying words remains a mystery, but it may confirm Kundry as hailing from Arabia, from whence she brought the balsam for Amfortas at the beginning of Parsifal.) This knowledge of paternal heritage continues to erode the innocence of Parsifal. Kundry implants consciousness of the will to know, imparting self-awareness to Parsifal by asking, "What drew you here if not the wish to know?" (Well in line with biblical tradition, the pursuit of knowledge always carries along a dimension charged with the erotic.) Though still scared of what he has just seen in Klingsor's pleasure garden, his ignorance still abounds, when he asks if Kundry also blooms amongst the flowers. She implants the will to know via a suggestion infused with sexual innuendo. Parsifal responds less with excitement than fear and self-accusation. Wounded and helpless, he is without memory, unaware of the path upon which Kundry guides him. She then erupts into a more forceful monologue, and recounts the most intimate scene possible, one no individual retains memory of, namely, the cradling in the bosom of the mother. An ingenious if perverse form of seduction, Kundry recalls motherly love to teach Parsifal to not fear kisses. Receiving such information, especially from a somewhat wild and disconcerting stranger, is understandably bewildering. Kundry describes the tragic scene of an infant "sad at heart" with a mother, a "child of pain, all crying." Parsifal's mother wished he would avoid the soldier's fate of his father. His mother, named "sorrow of 69

the heart," (Herzeleide) kept him removed from civilization. In Arthurian legend, Parsifal is associated with an upbringing in the wild, a feral child like Kipling's Mogwli. Wagner emphasizes not the dimension of wild nature in Parsifal's childhood but rather that of shelter and isolation. Pursuing this emotionally manipulative course, Kundry builds to a chilling "guilt trip" that holds Parsifal accountable for maternal abandonment. It is as if Kundry has hovered over him since birth, observing Parsifal and preparing for this encounter. Kundry's gaze is that of a harmful and judgemental mother who refuses to intervene and allows grief to befall him. She then pursues him like a hunter moving toward her prey. She conveys his mother waited for him "until grief consumed her pain and sorrow broke her heart." Kundry's aims to effectuate a mental breakdown: Parsifal collapses at her feet upon hearing this news. Parsifal's response is to label himself a "blundering fool." This is the first time he claims this descriptor given him by others numerous times. His distress is a productive sign of adolescent growing pains in assuming a pose of ego and mastery. Kundry's canny response is that his grief is paradoxically advantageous because it opens him up for consolation. Woe opens one to love, for comfort can come only to those who mourn, as Kundry prefigures Freud's idea of mourning which supposes certitude regarding the object of loss. This is in contradistinction to melancholia, which unlike mourning is a phenomenon where certainty over what one is missing is itself missing. (Contemporary parlance has generally exchanged the term melancholia in favor of depression.) She aims to convert Parsifal into knowledge 70

rather than compassion, to confront the reality of the demise of his parents. Parsifal's prior aimlessness is revealed to be the result of this ignorance, because he did not know of the fate of his parents. While Parsifal again castigates himself for stupidity, Kundry moves in closer for the strike. With the greatest intimacy yet between the two, she touches his forehead and puts her arm around his neck, providing comfort for the emotional wound, which she herself delivered. Kundry then turns her seduction into a class in sexual education. She wants Parsifal to understand how his parents came to mate, how his father was engulfed in the fire of his mother. Making explicit the maternal form of her erotic approach, Kundry does not present the overtures as coming from her, but rather from Parsifal's mother as if she is a channeling medium: "she who once gave you life ... send this day as a last token of a mother's blessing the first kiss of love." Kundry reaffirms the total state of Parsifal's innocence, confirming it is she who will deliver his first kiss. She proceeds stepwise and logical as his carnal tutor. Before she moves to kiss, she has him call up the image of parental copulation that led to his existence. Freud would later call this the "primal scene": the psychic lynchpin event where a child glimpses unknowingly parental copulation. Such an encounter is traumatic enough to leave residues throughout life. Freud would later contend that the child viewing this event would be prone to misinterpret love making as aggressive, even as a violent act upon the mother. Kundry guides Parsifal through the process of converting wild aggression, which he has repeatedly demonstrated, back into Eros and love. First mother, now psychoanalyst, Kundry 71

supports the path of recognition that relations, which seem infused with aggression, may be reimagined as loving. These gestures toward love and pacifism are nonetheless discarded by Parsifal as nefarious and distracting from his militant . . .. mess1an1cm1ss10n. At this moment listeners are treated to the most vociferous and stupendous singing of the entire work. As she summons the resolve to move in to kiss Parsifal, Kundry draws upon tremendous reserves of energy that pour out into powerful aural release. And so it is as mother, albeit a calculating, manipulative dark, shadow mother, that Kundry delivers Parsifal's first kiss. This is the climax to which all momentum in the work thus far has been building. Strikingly, Wagner shuts off the music just as Kundry moves in to kiss him, as if this moment blocks out and overwhelms all speech, sound and accompaniment, as if Parsifal has blacked out. Kundry's lean into intimacy is as a mother delivering a kiss of fond farewell. Wagner specifies this movement as a deliberate and complete bowing of her head under his, followed by a long kiss upon the mouth. Parsifal's reaction, equally physically precise, resembles a heart attack more than mere disgust. He forcibly presses her hand against his heart, a gesture in "greatest terror." In a genuinely startlingly turn, the first words out of his mouth are neither accusatory, nor directed against Kundry, but simply the name "Amfortas." He shouts out that the wound, seen with his own eyes on the side of Amfortas, bleeds in his own heart. Like stigmata, the wound empathetically and miraculously appears inside of him He cries out in suffering. A moment later, Parsifal corrects himself; what he feels is not the wound of Amfortas, but 72

something else, the flame of desire, the "torment of love," in whose wake everything quakes. Desire itself is wounding and the source of suffering. The stormy music of Kundry can again be heard again, revealing the deeper drama behind these sounds, the pangs of desire. The source of Parsifal's sudden awakening, delivered by the lips of Kundry, is a telepathic, sympathetic assumption of the pain of Amfortas. This awakening transforms quickly into something even more primordial. Parsifal's arresting jolt of pain is the shock of arousal, a sudden burst of carnal desire. Parsifal now realizes it was the kiss of Kundry that lay Amfortas low. This cursory exposure to a taste of Eros was sufficient to break open his awareness of sexuality and the sickness that can be its corollary. Parsifal's physical state suddenly veers to one of trance-like calm, while his tone shifts to the lowest vocal register yet heard from this character. He has a vision of the Grail, and sees the holy blood glowing red. He is no longer a callow youth, but a visionary. His thoughts shift back to the Grail fortress and to the Grail, as it is from this chalice that "holy blood" flows. Reminded of the pains of Amfortas, Parsifal echos the lament that Amfortas cannot receive for himself the redemptive elixir he is charged to distribute for the brotherhood. Parsifal feels the anguish of the knights' fraternity as a stand-in for the sufferings of all humanity. Illustrating a prophetic consciousness, Parsifal connects his mental wavelength and awareness of his past to an understanding of the plight of Amfortas. He calls himself a "fool, coward" and a sinner who fled to childish play. The sin that embattled Amfortas now reaches potential inside Parsifal, who seems to possess the will, if not a mystical ability to overcome desire. 73

Wagner portrays Kundry as genuinely astonished by his sudden transformation. She tries to recalibrate to somehow still get Parsifal submit to her designs. No longer speaking as a maternal figure, she addresses him as knight, as "praised hero," and exhorts him to throw off this "madness." Further intimacy from Kundry only reinforces Parsifal's telepathic empathy for Amfortas: his repulsion is now programmed in. He now recognizes every slight bat of the eyes, facial gesture and bodily movement as all the temptation signs Amfortas could not resist. His rejection implies that sex is no solace, that salvation must come from a different source, even if the kiss of Kundry seems transcendental. When delivered to Amfortas, Kundry' s erotic embrace was enough for "soul salvation" to be "kissed away." A kiss as betrayal is iconic in the Christian tradition, chiefly the kiss Judas delivers to Jesus in Gethsemane in the Gospel of Luke. (The original Greek text of Luke denotes this culturally primal kiss of betrayal as non-amorous; it was interpreted to foretell the death of the Savior.) With Kundry and Parsifal, Wagner engages in a gender reversal: the aggressor is a female, while the male hero assumes the position of reluctance and renunciation, asexuality or even feminization. The resort to violence is never far; toward the end of this scene, Parsifal responds with physical force, strongly pushing Kundry away. Situating Kundry in a position normally reserved for men, while making her suffer the plight of marginalization, makes her one of the most complex and absorbing female characters in all opera, even an unintentional proto-feminist icon. Ever incisive and lucid, Kundry readily identifies the blind spot, even the hypocrisy of Parsifal's compassionate awakening, namely, that it stops short with her. Kundry has a 74

mental stirring of her own, as she grasps and communicates, before anyone else in the drama, the underlying mission of Parsifal and the arc of his destiny. She names him as the salvation for which she has waited eternities, equal to the coming of the one she once reviled. It is left to Kundry to connect Parsifal with the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and her story as commensurate with the legend of the Wandering Jew, in another astonishing reveal that also manipulates gender reversal. Spelling out clearly so that there can be no mistake, Kundry reveals that a curse has followed her endlessly, since she mocked "him." In her darkest moments, she feels his gaze on her. Though Jesus is not mentioned by name, the contours of the curse along with the demonstrative pronoun "him" could not mean anything else. Laughter at the Crucifixion followed by accursed wandering leaves scarce room for alternative deductions. Though repentant, she cannot wake from the nightmare of this curse. Wagner captures the paradox of the legend of the Wandering Jew: though cursed for mocking the Savior, the wanderer becomes the most vigilant watchperson for the Second Coming, the one imost keen on the approaching signs and most eagerly in wait. (This logic, originally laid out by St. Augustine, was used to bolster medieval Church policy of Jewish ghettoization, namely, their preservation being necessary to bear witness to the onset of the Second Coming.) This legend of the Wandering Jew is essential for understanding the construction of the Jew as primal other in the European Christian imaginary. (Notably, the condemnatory wandering myth was also applied to the Roma people who were said to have obstructed the flight of the "Holy Family" in Egypt, their misattributed land of origin.) The Jew constitutes the negative mirror, the monstrous 75

double of Christendom. Whether or not she is definitively a Jew in the literal text of Parsifal, she narratively functions as "the figure of the Jew" did in in the medieval Christian world. Fundamentally, this cipher is one haunted by the absence and elusive quest for "rootedness," cast into the void of place and insecurity in belonging. In the microcosm of the world of Parsifal, Kundry is the ultimate insider as outsider: female while the knights are male, she is overcome with sin, while they are purified; she roams about in wild nature, whilst they abide in an armed and protected fortress; she is alone, while they enjoy fraternity. She dwells amidst them and at times even amongst them, but she is not of their kind. Kundry now revises her quest for union with Parsifal as one more fitting for one who will deliver the world from sin. This is the third stage of Kundry' s attempted seduction; after the sensual and the maternal now comes the spiritual and cosmic, reminding the audience of the breathtakingly bold pseudo-religious claims of this drama. Wagner makes explicit that he really intends an aesthetic experience on stage about the central figure in European tradition and imagination, namely, Jesus Christ. Wagner clearly identifies his hero as completing the work of the Second Coming. Evoking the Crucifixion, the second coming and legend of the Wandering Jew assigns a precise cultural claim for Parsifal, a reconstruction of Christianity, informed by a nineteenth-century Romantic artistic vision of medieval Christendom, Orientalism, the Crusades cum modem imperialism, and German transcendental idealist philosophy. The figure of the Wandering Jew first emerged at the time of the Crusades as an allegory of the suffering and 76

dispersion of the Jews in the wake of their rejection of Jesus as redeemer. This accursed symbol carried a quasisupernatural attribute, immortality, negatively connoted as one condemned to roam in time and space. In German, this legend is known as the ewige Jude, the eternal Jew, with the emphasis on its timeless and unchanging nature. The legend writ large is a culturally specific update of the story of Cain in the book of Genesis. When Cain surrenders the control of his will to obey the Almighty, he is condemned to wander the earth as a fugitive forfeiting the right to dwell in one place. The Bible story is clear that his brother Abel was innocent and that his use as sacrifice was improper. Contrary to the distressingly protracted tradition of projecting modem racism into the Bible, the biblical mark of Cain applied upon his body by the Lord was not a sign of punishment. Rather it served as a device to protect this wayfaring human from becoming the prey of the animals of the world. Variously interpreted as a letter, as leprosy or even as a horn, this mark became another element later amalgamated into the wandering Jew. Wagner's creative fusion of symbols and legends forms a pseudo-religious drama to serve cultural tripwire that can trigger all manner of barely repressed passions and demons. The "coming out" of Kundry as Cain/the wandering Jew is, on the one hand, a part of her rhetorical strategy to further seduce Parsifal, but also further raises the stakes of the threat she poses for the audience. Kundry continues to hope for sympathy and sexual interest on the part of Parsifal. The sexually deterministic nature of her character is unyielding and incorrigible. The story of Cain also has some often unremarked upon underlying sexual themes, as the primal fraternal conflict disguised as a battle over sexual 77

conquest and possession. And after receiving the notorious mark, Cain journeys back to the fabled "east of Eden," the very same spot where Adam tread after the expulsion from the garden, due to his sexual transgression. Christian and Jewish traditions notably differ on the fundamental question of whether the first human pair lived in paradise without sexual intercourse. Presupposing a sexless ideal state marks a vast divergence in starting points for the appropriate comportment of humankind. Some Jewish sources maintain the existence of a "married life" for the world's first couple prior to the Fall, while others suggest that Cain and Abel were supernaturally born on the same day that their parents were created. Christian interpretations have generally taken the Fall as the loss writ large for a humanity consigned to a fallen state due entirely to the sexual drive, and not as a blessing in disguise for matters of free will. Despite the numerous departures from Christian sources, Wagner's Parsifal fundamentally aligns with a worldview that holds matters of the flesh with suspicion if not hostility. Wagner provides little support for those resistant to the idea that there is a whiff of the satanic in Kundry. The notion of tempting the Messiah in the garden, by the Devil, is immediately recognizable to anyone familiar with the Gospels. The wandering Cain, as the issue of Eve's temptation is said in legend also to be the descendant of Satan. Wagner's step to align Judaically inflected characters with a demonic anti-messianic force raises up the most serious problem at the heart of the Christian story, an unavoidably anti-Judaic animus. The noble Redeemer must have a satanic antagonist, and this satanic figure must draw upon an energy source entirely distinct from the purely 78

righteous force of the divine. Wagner's scattering of Judaic markers throughout the text are more than ornaments of the story, of the search for redemptive purity and a state beyond sexual need. Kundry is the pillar upon which the story revolves. She forms the antipode, the tormented, impure sexcrazed; she wills the extremes and even opts for an eternity of damnation in exchange for one hour of "divine love": "grant me one hour" she pleads. Wagner was deeply invested in the notion of rootlessness and the archetype of the "wandering Jew." Well-established is the interpretation that his early music drama, the Flying Dutchman, was a generally sympathetic, aquaborne variation of the legend. In Parsifal, Wagner modernized the Wandering Jew, depicted not as an ultrasenior with a greybeard to the ground (as usually illustrated in the history of art), but rather a seductive temptress. Wagner supersedes traditional legend with little regard to fealty or even a pretense of authenticity. His premise of proto-modernist rethinking is consistent and parallel throughout: if Kundry supplants the Wandering Jew, then Parsifal also supplants Christ himself. From a traditional Christian perspective, there could be no more conceivably un-Christian act, one sacrilegious and un-biblical. As we end Act Two, this is precisely the direction the narrative takes: Parsifal is revealed as the long-awaited deliverer, possessed of the power to redeem. As he rebuffs the last of Kundry's increasingly desperate overtures, she cries out to him in singing that resembles blood-curdling screams. Her parting wish for him, if she cannot have him intimately, is that he too will be bound by the curse to wander. She condemns Parsifal:"the path will elude you... All the roads in the 79

world ... that path you shall not find." Kundry wishes him to roam the earth like her, eternally homeless. As Parsifal steps away, Klingsor, who is brandishing the sacred spear, blocks his way. Parsifal proves able to not only seize and repossess the spear, but lifts it above his head, swinging it to make a sign of the cross, like a priest to a congregation in church. Uttering the words, "with this sign I banish your magic," Parsifal's powers are such that the wave of the arms is enough to disappear the entire pleasure garden of Klingso, in an instant leaving nothing but some strewn flowers on the ground. Wagner evokes Eusebius' account of the apparition of the cross in the vision of Constantine, "in hoc signo vinces" ("in this sign you are victorious"), the first Roman Emperor to adopt the Christian faith, which arose in the context of battle not brotherly love. Parsifal's sudden repossession of the spear magically dissolves Klingsor's garden of temptation, revealed as a world of illusion. Historical allusions cascade anew, with Parsifal gesturing as priest and emperor. In his rarefied claim to these two offices, this Parsifal is more than either pope or Aharonic high priest, but rather the oft unremarked upon Christian tradition of Christ as sole successor to the order of Melchizedek. This first individual named as priest in the Book of Genesis was also a King of Salem. Fusing kingship with priesthood, the order of Melchizedek is markedly distinct from the later more familial, Levite priesthood carved out from among and within the Twelve Tribes to serve the Israelites. Melchizedek, then Christ, serve neither representing a tribe nor form a priesthood who serve in tandem to officiate at specific sites, whether the Holy Temple in Jerusalem or the Vatican, but rather constitute a 80

one and sole priest set to officiate universally for unlimited duration. (The figure of Melchizedek plays a principal role in Mormon thought, a post-Protestant, New Christian religious movement parallel to Parsifal.) Kingship is traditionally not a part of Judaic priesthood, as biblically and historically these roles and lineages were kept distinct. For the origin story of European Christianity, kingship and monarchy were indissolubly linked with the formation of the Christian clerisy. In Europe, the Christian religion was first legitimized and sanctioned via imperial fiat. Parsifal emerges, in this cultural reference point, as a priestly-warrior who relegitimates and asumes royal sovereignty via religious sanctification. Parsifal's enmeshment of the two roles assumes this long pedigree in European history, from Aethelbert of Kent to the conversion of the Rus via Prince Vladimir. Throughout, it was the warrior monarch that adopted the new faith in the mold of the Roman Emperor Constantine, rather than the template of the wandering rabbi Jesus, as spiritual founding father. (INRI, or "king of the Jews" as written on the cross during the Crucifixion, was written by Roman soldiers, using their own categories to mock the quasi-monastic Jewish followers who presumably dissented even from the Judaic monarchy still extant at that time.) By displacing Jesus with Parsifal Wagner seeks to decouple Christianity from its Judaic roots. His postDarwinian era of imperialism saw an increasing emphasis on the body as a vessel with immutable characteristics carried transgenerationally. This age of Spencer and Galton, of the survival of the fittest and eugenics, meant a Christianity viewed through a lens of descent and even race. (It was 81

Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the English race theorist who married into the Wagner clan, who most forcefully pursued the idea of an Aryan Jesus.) If the ailing knights fraternity is metonymy, then what Parsifal has come to rescue and cleanse is more than the Grail; it is rather Christianity itself. As a modem European neo-Christian redeemer, Parsifal is legitimized as much by magic and monarchy than anything biblical or ethical. Wagner's reimagining of Christianity forms a part of the largely Germanic nineteenth-century project of removing the "stain" of Judaic descent from Christianity's founder. The attempt to historicize and transcend the biblical Jesus occurred along a spectrum of desacralization to remystification, from philological analysis to the creation of new religious movements. In this vein, one may also count Nietzsche's prominent urge to emancipate Europe from the Christian burden of "slave morality," a set of crippling moral standards that could only plague modem society. The "prosthetic God" of the modem Promethean human (as formulated by Freud in Civilization and its Discontents) chafed at an autonomy curtailed by an ancient ethics of the Near East. Parsifal forms a narrative of mastery over the external environment, conquest of instinct that subdues foes in the interest of a high functioning warrior bureaucracy. Underneath these cosmic overtones, Parsifal is a story of a corporation gone off the rails, where an invigorating new leadership must sweep away an older one felled by corruption and impurities. The allegorical heft of martial, corporatist and crusader elements was resonant with the context of 1880s of high imperialism and the second industrial revolution. The infusion of biopolitical ideas of disease and blood purity marks Parsifal as decisively 82

consequential and unsettling. As Act Two closes, audiences are left with a redeemer not as peacemaker but as supernatural knight-priest who silences foes on the field of battle. Parsifal's parting words at the close of the act, "you know where you can find me," convey a clear message both for his nemeses and the audience. A spiritual terminator, he will be where he is needed to counter threats to the sacred community as one who now fully knows what he is: a new, untainted redeemer now in complete control of his mission.

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Act Three The Third and final Act of Parsifal is the most succinct of all. Here we encounter the least amount of action in either dialogue, content or plot development. The quality of stasis lends the work a ceremonial quality, one though hinted at earlier, now comes to the fore to dominate the proceedings. Act Three begins as a return to the scene where we began the drama, with Gurnemanz on the forest floor outside of the Grail castle. The opening music echoes the musical progressions of the Prelude in a more mournful tone. The isolated string swells convey a more despairing, ominous atmosphere. Uneasy with anticipation for the concluding events to come, the tones climb up hesitantly; they are not serene but rather heavy with implication. Here we face a repetition with a difference, a return to the original scene of Parsifal, though one changed by intervening proceedings. The return to the original subject adheres to the basic principle of theme and variation, on the far grander scale of music drama. The recapitulation of the setting and tone of the First Act in the Third is consonant with traditional forms, reassuring the audience after the startling, bewildering, though also formally conventional counterpoint of Act Two. Some time has clearly transpired since the start of the story, as when Gurnemanz reappears spring flowers are now rising from the ground. Wagner's description of Gurnemanz as "zur hohen Greise gealtert" (matured into old age) leaves the impression that multiple seasons have passed since we last encountered him. The rhythms and cycles of nature that undergird Parsifal come again to the fore. Nature hovers over all other characters as dominant in the entire work, 85

gesturing to a pagan imaginary that looms over a putative Christian tale. Not merely a backdrop, nature is a sign and agent of transformation upon human characters. Nature here has transitioned from fall to spring, from the seasoning of withering, to one of rebirth. Implied here is that the removal of the Grail ceremony from this society has left all its inhabitants prematurely aged. Stately, church-like music is abruptly disturbed by a cry, which Gurnemanz deems more piteous than that of any beast. This shrieking wail of Kundry sonically interrupts the completion of the Grail motif. This is an aural illustration of her interference in the world of sacred ceremony. This groan of lament bellows up from a Kundry who apparently spent the winter months in hibernation buried under a dense thicket of thorns. Kundry appears as a wounded, submerged animal, not as a human equal to the knights' brotherhood. The parting image of Kundry from Act Two was likewise a creature unable to transcend animalistic desire. Just as Gurnemanz has rapidly aged, Wagner points out that Kundry has lost color in her complexion and her unkempt appearance has found some ghostly composure. It is as if the wild torment of her soul has been softened or possibly silenced, as she appears ready to serve as a Magd, or maidservant, as Parsifal's Mary Magdalene-like apostle. As if hypnotized by Parsifal after his revelation as redeemer, she repeats "service, service" like a chant. Gurnemanz relates that the brothers have become more self-reliant on mutual aid, foraging together, so that this Act emerges to unveil service reforged rather than conflict. (The use of the word Magd in German would have been familiar from the Luther 86

Bible translation of the phrase "handmaiden of the Lord," and in its use as a descriptor for the two most prominent Marys of the Gospel. Gumemanz, astounded by Kundry' s transformation, takes specific note of her changed gait, with the emphasis on her physical bearing again placing images of the body as female as cultural and biopolitical radar front and center. When trying to solve the riddle of Kundry's transformation, Gumemanz asks: "Has the holy day brought this about? 0 day of mercy beyond compare." It is not just any day as we observe Gumemanz stumble upon Kundry but none other than the holiest day of the year, Good Friday. In German the term for this day is Karfreitag, which more clearly signifies sorrow and lamentation ("chara '') rather than the English term "Good," a derivation of the word for God. The mournful tone heard in the music resonates more with the connotation in German for this holy day, as Karfreitag would be instantly recognizable to the audience. Wagner has considerably raised the stakes in Act Three, moving from an on-stage enactment of the Eucharist in Act One to enveloping the entirety of the action within the sacred time of the holiest day of the Christian calendar. This designation not only triggers the experiential memory of the audience, it fuses the staging of Parsifal as a theatrical work with the special atmosphere of the holiest day that normally occurs only once per year, a day fraught with spiritual expectation. Subtly transgressive, inserting this feature has the de facto effect of doubling this annual holiday on the sacred calendar of the audience. Wagner, in essence, is instituting a new and alternate Good Friday. (The Parsifalian Good Friday is not coincident with traditional Easter as the musical festival at Bayreuth always occurs in late summer.) 87

Good Friday signals the Crucifixion and death of Jesus Christ and inaugurates this grand sacrifice as that which wipes away the sins of humanity and paves the way to redemption. For Christian theology, this sacrifice supersedes and renders superfluous the prior Judaic Temple practice of animal sacrifice. Wagner continues to supersede Jesus with Parsifal, omitting any reference to the parables and miracles in the Gospel story. As if to aurally signify something new, Wagner composed a distinct passage of music set apart and titled after this holy day to further bolster the reverential atmosphere Act Three. When Parsifal reemerges it is to underscore the radicality and novelty of Wagner's agenda. After his mysterious disappearance at the end of Act I, Parsifal materializes reinvigorated at the start of Act Three, precisely on this holiday of Good Friday. While it is clear that Parsifal is a redemptive figure set in the mold of Jesus, his character is dramatically divergent. Parsifal has always appeared as anything but a resolute preacher pouring forth words of wisdom. He has been defined by his innocence, worldlessness and even foolishness. Not a peacemaker, Parsifal is met as swan-killer, proud of his prowess as a hunter, reproached by the wise hermit. When we again meet Parsifal, he surfaces as one poised for battle. The reunion with Gumemanz reprises the dismay of their original meeting. Gumemanz at once recognizes he is not one of the Grail knights. Parsifal is again reproached for bestriding holy ground with weapons at the ready. Further astonishment follows with Parsifal's selfprofessed ignorance that the day is Good Friday; he lacks both education and traditional piety. Parsifal as a redeemer is entirely outside the mold of the familiar or Christian expectation. 88

Parsifal returns enshrouded, fully clad, Darth Vaderlike, in dark body armor. Far from a sandal-wearing desert mendicant, this is redeemer as crusading warrior-knight complete with lance in hand. Gumemanz takes note of the "somber apparel of war," while Wagner specifies that the armor is black, a striking contrast to the white apparel otherwise favored by the knights' brethren. The miracle that accompanies and confirms Parsifal's return as redeemer is not one of saving souls or feeding the hungry, but that the sacred relic of the lance, presumably used in battle, is returned unscathed and unblemished. After having retrieved it from Klingsor, who used it to wound Amfortas, the conspicuous brandishing of this relic further blurs the line between the miraculous and the martial. There is something utterly strange and even incommensurate for Parsifal to arrive back to the Grail fortress precinct on Good Friday as a black-clad warrior. The peculiarity of this appearance is matched by the uncanny quality of his demeanor and temperament. Wagner describes his appearance as hesitant, as if in a dream state, to emphasize his uncertainty and the irrresolution of his role fulfillment. Gumemanz grows slowly angry that this cloaked individual would dare to arrive clad for war on the holiest day of the year. When Parsifal does not answer whether he is aware of the day, he is commanded to lay down his weapons to not offend the Lord on the day he offered his blood for the sins of the world. Parsifal finally reveals himself with a silent prayer, kneeling down to his spear with his helmet removed. The opening theme of the entire work resounds in a mournful register. Wagner's magical hero's soundtrack is a 19th Century Romantic dream projection, anachronistic and faux medieval. 89

The first line uttered by this re-revealed Parsifal is a praise to God, a sign that with his newfound knowledge has come piety and reverence. When Gumemanz asks him how he found his way back, Parsifal has a clear and compelling answer: no longer is he a wanderer in the woods shooting whatever flies. Now he is aware of the path of sorrow, and this taken has brought him to wisdom and maturity. Parsifal is now in possession of mastery; he is also aware of the stringency of vanquishing one's own passions. When Parsifal replies that he has come on the path of suffering through the murmur of the forest, a low murmur of cellos resounds, like the echo of the trees. His transformation into a vessel for healing has come from the primal forces of nature. Parsifal's sojourn in the woods has brought him rejuvenation and wholeness. This messenger had to retreat away from civilization into the purity of the natural world to do battle with demons, like the biblical prophets in the desert. In Parsifal, this redeemer does actual military battle, prepared for in European forests that provide a stark counterpoint to the purely spiritualized pacifism of the barren desert landscapes of the biblical Near East. Parsifal states he has come back for Amfortas, as if instructed to do so by the cry he heard. The audience is reminded of the hauntingly telepathic, out-of-body experience of Parsifal as Kundry came in for the kiss. Parsifal's empathetic realization of the great pain of Amfortas is the motor behind his mission. Wagner structures Parsifal's mental state as one driven by involuntary thought or obsession, now often construed as a sign of trauma or mental illness. Parsifal is clearly plagued by what he has experienced and cannot banish it from his newly awakened consciousness. It is such mental torment Wagner has in mind 90

when Parsifal refers to the paths of sorrow from whence he has returned. Parsifal may be a vessel for otherworldly healing, but he certainly stands in need of it also. Indeed, Parsifal then recounts his "wounds earned from every weapon," a line punctuated out loudly by the brass section which then emit the shiny music of the Grail, as Parsifal unfolds the story of his defense of the spear. He sings that he "dared not wield it" and has borne it beside him, "gleaming clean ... the holy spear of the Grail," for which Wagner rings out a harmony of organ and winds to resemble a church chorus. The language of gleaming clean is both verbal and aural. The language of purity consistent throughout, Wagner fuses such musical and verbal elements of the immaculate as the drama approaches a climax. Gumemanz enters a state of rapture, singing of grace, the holiest of wonders and the "highest of a hailing," as the audience again hears in Grail music the repeated use of the Dresdner Amen, a climax of six ascending notes, a church cadence always sung to "Amen." With onstage utterances matching the religious resonances of the music, Gumemanz receives a fitting a musical soundtrack to when Gumemanz, for the first time, addresses Parsifal directly as Lord. Gumemanz now senses his own life is near an end, as he awaits death to follow his comrade in arms Titurel, who has recently passed. He tells Parsifal that the knights are awaiting his arrival and in need of healing. In an echo of his monologue in the First Act, Gumemanz recounts the anguish and distress of the brothers, whose sorrows have only gotten deeper. The dismay in Act One has turned to an outright crisis of faith and community in Act Three, as doubts have begun to grow amongst the knights. They face a prolonged 91

deprivation of the holy nourishment; without the Grail, their regular food does not impart courage or strength. This is all the result of the relentless torments of Amfortas who longs for death more than ever. These mutually reinforcing torments have created a state of deadlock, and so the Grail community persists in a nether world. Though the knights plead for the Grail, which they have not seen in a long time, Amfortas cannot be moved to unsheathe its majesty. Yet the very presence of the Grail, even if not used for, in a state of paralysis, ceremony, keeps Amfortas alive, such is its strength. If the knights cannot partake of the sacrament, their material and spiritual nourishment is depleted, and they cannot fight for the lord and thus wander lost. Wandering is the principal spiritual antipode to the grounded community of the knights; to wander homeless is the worst of all possible fates. The knights and Amfortas are buoyed by the Grail as community and as institution. This crisis of weakened leadership where normal functioning grinds to a halt is a wholly familiar form of corporate, even political dysfunction, one highly resonant for Wagner's audiences. Hearing that circumstances have worsened, Parsifal cries out, delivering his most tormented outburst of the whole drama. He wonders if it is he who has caused all the woes afflicting the righteous community. This paroxysm is proof that he is no longer an innocent fool, exchanging feelings of guilt for pure ignorance. Kundry's music with its erratic swooping gestures makes an orchestral return as she tries once again, mirroring her first arrival, to present a balsam, or magical potion for the ailing king. In the first Act, Gurnemanz praised her steadfast dedication; here he 92

solemnly and knowingly replies to her that it is the holy spring alone that can do that, a reemphasis that true healing can come from the sanctified supernatural alone. As a summary judgment claim of Parsifal as a whole, this censure is not just on magic, but also could extend to a broad notion of modem medicine. Gumemanz articulates Wagner's larger proposition, subtly presented throughout that healing must ultimately be of the spirit and needs to come from a source of holiness. Balsam, ointments, potions or berries (from this perspective magic potions function similarly) may temporarily relieve some of the symptoms but leave root causes unaddressed. Wagner illustrates ailments of modernity, decadence, and generational decline but provides a critique and inadequacies of modem medical responses to said challenges. His striking critique of medical practices that treat sickness in a localized fashion or through medicine alone, foreshadows the thesis of Stefan Zweig's later groundbreaking 1931 work Die Heilung Durch Den Geist ("Healing through the Spirit," which has sometimes been unfortunately translated as "mental healers"). A main thrust of ~weig's lament was the studied avoidance by medical professionals of holistic, spirit-centered treatment and instead the championing methods that focused on discreet, even mechanical aspects of the human being. Wagner's instinctual intimations in Parsifal already suggests that a more holistic, even spiritual understanding of healing should be on the frontier of consciousness and sought after as a worthy cultural goal of modem European society. Naturally he presents his own work as just that most suited to provide such a remedy, through the reintroduction of an experience of ritual and sacrament at the center of art. Though Zweig 93

generally champions Enlightenment-adjacent figures such as Mesmer and Freud in this quest, Wagner's proclomations could easily lend themselves to the science skeptical, which inform the more occult-like New Age tendencies of later develeopments such as Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy, unsurprisingly a fount of later Wagner enthusiasm, in particular surrounding the "mystical secrets of the Grail." Parsifal's long-awaited return finally allows for the long-awaited burial of Titurel and the revival of the Grail ceremony. While the funeral was long in coming, Parsifal's definitive arrival as redeemer signals the passing of previous generations into safe posterity. Only such a momentous entry brings Amfortas to promise he will finally again unveil the Grail. Gurnemanz as harbinger and guide leads Parsifal back again into the inner sanctum of the Grail community. And if Gumemanz is revealed to be Parsifal's )ohn the Baptist, it is Kundry who becomes his first disciple, in the mold of the Gospel of John's Mary Magdalene. Already visually transformed into a more orderly and subdued figure, Kundry washes the feet of her new master. This highly symbolic act of cleansing is heavy with biblical overtones, marking a master-disciple relationship in the New Testament (found earlier as well in Homer, most notably upon Odysseus' return to Ithaca). For Kundry, her baptism confirms her former status as possibly "heathen" outsider: if she requires baptism she was clearly no Christian to begin with. Gumemanz then sings an ode to taintlessness, to the "pure one," and blesses and anoints Parsifal, sealing his mission as herald and forerunner of Parsifal's messiahship. This term is entirely appropriate as the Hebrew word for messiah refers to one who has been anointed by oil. In the 94

Bible, the first instance of anointing by oil is for King David, the purported ancestor of the messiah. This ritual has its roots in kingship, as the messiah is intended to be a latterday representative of this royal line. Indeed, Parsifal asks to be acclaimed as king, accompanied by a big trumpet fanfare. The contours of Parsifal's assumed role begin here to coalesce. He is to take over from Amfortas, the pitied sufferer, and thus become the deliverer of all, the spiritual messiah and the new king of the Grail community. Parsifal's legitimacy is that "he suffered anything you suffered," but also a proven battle-hardened warrior. It is finally this Third Act that provides a credible and dramatic staging of Parsifal's transformation. The notion of the messiah as "suffering servant," is found in Isaiah 53, a line held almost universally by Christians to be an unequivocal prophecy of the tribulations of Jesus during his time on earth. (Jews usually interpret the "servant" to stand in for the whole people of Israel whose sojourns on earth comprise the "suffering.") It is Parsifal's vicarious suffering via Amfortas and all others that makes him worthy of his role. This was his preparation for his spiritual ascent in the finale of the drama. In marked contrast to the Gospels, however, the suffering of the messiah in Parsifal is prelude to rather than climax of the ministry. Parsifal's "ministry" only properly begins with Act Three and his anointing by Gumemanz. The first action of his mission is the baptism of Kundry, when we hear again the Grail music, descending string lines, followed by a solo clarinet. Kundry's spiritual awakening further brightens his own. He now recognizes the beauty of the meadow around him and that of all of nature, as if finally in communion with 95

the natural world. If mutated, demonically conjured flowers tried to capture and tie him up in Act Two, he now sees the true beauty of flowers unalloyed by impurities. Parsifal previously saw nature as his hunting ground, as foe, and now he has exchanged feelings of the hunt for an experience of the radiance of life. Parsifal has fallen under the spell of Good Friday. Eluding ensnarment in the earthly desires of the flower maidens of Act Two, he has been uplifted into sacred time, a transcendent, immaterial realm, one reinforced and supported by the cycles of nature. Wagner composed a new bloc of music for this passage, fittingly known as "Good Friday Spell." Though lasting for approximately ten minutes, the amount of entirely new music here is quite limited, as Wagner weaves in variations of melodies already heard. The start of the "Good Friday Spell" raises trumpet swells followed by strings intoning what is unmistakably akin to a church processional. This is Wagnerian music at its most explicitly religious, a modem update of the traditional music of the Church. The next musical phrases convey unmistakably a sense of the human yearning to break through to a transcendental plane, with emotive string wells moving ever skyward. The final build up to the end of this piece is filled with anticipation and a kind of circular aural motion as if one can hear a heavenly sorcerer's wand hovering over and preparing the spell of Good Friday, as if Wagner's evocation of the sacred cannot entirely free itself of conventions of the magical. Finally, Wagner ends this musical interlude with the most tender sonic utterances of the whole work, almost lullaby like, as strings, echoing back and forth with flutes, reach the highest pitch yet heard in the whole drama 96

When told of the solemnity of the day, Parsifal emits a scream of grief declaring it a time for mourning and weeping. Gumemanz corrects him: it is an occasion for joy, as it commemorates a monumental act of repentance, alluding to the self-sacrifice of Jesus on behalf of humanity, when humanity receives the grace of the Redeemer. As if even the animals of the forest are aware of the special nature of the day, Wagner has bird-like flutes flutter in rejoicing. The grace at hand is illustrated in how the spring brings mercy to humans in a harsh climate, enacting harmony between humans and an otherwise forbidding ecosystem. Gurnemanz explains that it is time for humans to give thanks, for this cleansing, this restoration of innocence as a great orchestral climax, again reaches the highest pitches in the strings. With a faint but detectable note of triumphalism, Parsifal remarks that those who once laughed now clamor for salvation, conjuring up Kundry, if not also signaling a note of the avenger. In a moment of compassion he tells Kundry that her tears sanctify the earth, and even fertilize the meadows that now awaken with a smile. As the blessing rings out, the bells resound for midday, and that means time for sacred service. Gurnemanz transforms from Parsifal's guide to his servant, as the opening music returns followed by a trumpet fanfare. From here on in through the final close of this music drama, the proceedings of Parsifal are elevated again to a plane beyond time and space, recalling Gurnemanz's claim from Act One. The remainder of the Third Act is entirely devoted to ritual service, and so the audience is enveloped in a world of ceremony where actual narrative is suspended. 97

The characters on stage transition from subjective agents of interaction to participants in a sacred drama, whose objective roles to fulfill are beyond emotions or thoughts. The start of the ceremony is resounding trumpet music, at once ominous, powerful and ceremonial. The miraculous transformation, which preceded the first grail ceremony no longer, seems necessary under the magic spell of Good Friday. We instead immediately witness the procession of the knights' choir, the removal of the Grail from the shrine and its placement onto the altar. The agony of Amfortas, which hangs over the grail community, is mixed with a sense of mourning and grief for his father Titurel as the knights carry his casket. They speak of him as a shield for the Lord, felled by old age when the lifesustaining force of the Grail was removed from his presence. His demise was an ultimate act of filial infidelity. The son who inherited the throne could not fulfill his father's mission. His inaction amounted to involuntary manslaughter of the father by the son. This ultimate failure of the generation of the sons realizes the worst fears for those who have doubt in the succession of power and mission. So father and son are brought into the ceremonial sanctuary, for one last time together. Despite his personal torment and misgivings, Amfortas will honor the office and the institution, elevating priority over his own suffering. Just as the knights clear the path, the bells start to ring. Wagner's use of the bells is notable throughout as they form not a part of the orchestral score but rather instead ring within the action on stage as part of the set design itself. Bells, not a part of original Christian practice, are an element of the architecture of the fortress, as if the bells provide the music 98

internal to the institution itself. Noontime prayers were among the original seven, fixed prayer times for Christians, an observance still held by adherents of Oriental Orthodox Churches, including the Armenian Church. It is fitting that Wagner should choose noontime, for even on days not Good Friday, noontime prayers are devoted to the Crucifixion of Christ, and human fallibility. The stately choir of knights emits a shout directed at Amfortas, and in response he self-pities, exclaiming: "woe is me." Amfortas accepts the reproach and supposes he deserves worse than death. He recognizes his father was the pure one, not he, and blames himself for his father's death. Amfortas' growing self-awareness, in contradistinction to Parsifal, exacerbates his torment and the paralysis of his community. Amfortas had earlier been able to exercise a power which he then felt unworthy of. His denial of the Grail, withheld the grace of holy blood, both life- giving and life-renewing. His failure to mediate this practice of consumption is commensurate with a penalty of death, which affords him a measure of redemption. Wagner explicitly articulates this sacrament as one of blood, as well as the calculus that equalizes redemption with penalty of death. The language of blood is striking and contemporary, awash with concerns of disease, transmission, contagion and even racialization of the post-Darwinian world. Wagner's Christian imaginary is highly spiritual in the search for transcendence, but overridingly materialist in that the ritual is unvarnished, as blood, as nourishment. Foreshadowing the anti-Marxian revision socialism and community-thinking that will gradually coalesce into fascism, the notion of capital here as the all defining measure of value is exchanged for that of blood. 99

In his concluding scenes, Wagner makes an unequivocal case for blood and the nature of Amfortas' diseased body. His death is not only necessary for spiritual redemption, but also to be rid the threat of contagion and contamination. For one with corrupted blood, the only way to be rid of poison is to be buried far off and in the ground, to be removeed from human community. The suggestion is that Amfortas' corruption carries multiple meanings, the deepest of which is contamination via sexual relations with an impure foreigner: so his superior blood-line has been diseased. While Klingsor left an open wound on the body surface with the sacred spear, corruption inside Amfortas' body is deeper than any such surface wound. A sexually transmitted disease would be blood-borne, and an open wound would be a vector of transmission for the whole community. Wagner makes clear that the corruption is biological as well as epidemiological. What Kundry transmitted to Amfortas was her blood, which as a foreigner and a heathen is ipso facto a vector of corruption. Amfortas very last stanza after tearing apart his garments states, "here flows my blood-which poisons me." Amfortas commands the knights to "plunge in your swords, in deep - up to the hilt." Wagner thus uses the closing moments of the music drama to heighten the stakes of conflict and crisis. Drawing out the masochistic, dying strains of Amfortas, underlines the status of Parsifal as a late work, as the last work of a composer facing the end. As a king ailing on his deathbed, transference between Wagner at the end of his life and Amfortas raises the stakes of the question of legacy. Weakness of the will and body on the verge of death leaves one in rare limbo, suspended between an awareness of a coming end and the agony of its slow 100

arrival. The musical atmosphere of the whole work, ethereal and otherworldly, also conveys this sense of hovering on the cusp of the next world. Wagner both complicates and energizes the traditional narrative device of the aged, crazed leader, delirious and bent on self-destruction. Evidence is this final exhortation for to the knights to take up arms to pursue his end. The sense of accumulated guilt rising to the fore is palpable, combined with an urge to dig in the heels to the very last. Amfortas' intransigent dare to the knights heightens the drama of paralysis. Only Parsifal with sacred weapons can end this stalemate. Only that which caused the wound can be that which heals, namely, the sacred spear. Wagner places the homeopathic formula in the mouth of his redeemer: "only the spear that smote you can heal your wound." As if the healing begins with the words themselves, Wagner instructs Amfortas' features to "light up in holy ecstasy." Parsifal points the spear to the wound, making Amfortas whole again and ready for absolution. Parsifal, as an outsider, messianic figure, with no royal lineage, can be legitimized only by the miracle of transcendent power. This quasi-coup is unmistakably the seizure of power by an outsider. His leadership is inspired and charismatic, validated by returning the sacred spear, much like a crusader bringing back relics to ailing shrines at home, musically accompanied by an obligatory trumpet fanfare. Representations of crusaders seem to confer nobility of death like little else. Tombs for the "unknown soldier" throughout Europe as late as the First World War continued to include a "crusader's sword."

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Parsifal's assumption of the throne is miraculous; he brandishes the sacred sphere, takes hold of the Grail, and falls to his knees as a sacred light fills the space. He is the new redeemer come to redeem the old, tainted Redeemer, as the knights assembled sing out in hushed tones, "our redeemer redeemed." No more shall the Grail be concealed, Parsifal promises, and vows that the holy community should live energized and blessed, renewed and purged of sin. In a recapitulation of the miraculous divine beam of light that descended in the first act, it comes down once again, along with the white dove symbolizing the Holy Spirit. Parsifal raises the Grail, as Gumemanz and Amfortas fall worshipfully to their knees, while Kundry slowly sinks lifeless to the ground. The audience hears the Grail motif once again, in the quietest tones yet, lullaby-like as if the whole story is being put to bed.

Parsifal finally ends with an orchestra that gently fades away in its final moments to put the Grail knight choir acapella center stage. They chant again, "redeemed is the redeemer," words that have become iconic as shorthand for Parsifal. Critics of perceived excesses of this final work, such as Nietzsche, would lampoon and caricature this line, preferring to reshape it as "redemption from the redeemer," calling for the release of audiences from Wagner's hypnotic and overpowering grip. This concluding emblematic statement exudes unintended self-irony further highlighting a problem of self-referentiality and transference within Wagner's oeuvre. In the end, it is Wagner himself, not Parsifal, who functions as master-priest of reconsecration by staging the Parsifal as a music-drama and as a cultural project for the resacralization of art as a path to holy community. 102

The climactic action of the work, Kundry's collapse on stage, as specified in Wagner's directions, is more controversial still. When read closely, it seems as if Kundry is so overwhelmed by the power of the reinvested Grail that it proves too much for her and she is overcome. Perhaps this newly baptized Kundry finally achieves redemption in the form of release through death, the same fate wished for by Amfortas. The word death is not specified in Wagner's text. One might also interpret that the reconsecration of the Grail community, an objective she strove mightily to prevent, banishes her once and for all and can no longer tolerate her presence, not even on the periphery, or as baptized, or in any form. This message would be grim indeed, that a foreign Semitic and female outsider, who poses threats and promises of seduction, however transformed or rehabilitated, remains too great a peril to allow into the orbit of the sacred community and must thus be purged. Her removal is thus a critical final stage necessary in the reconsecreation of purified community. This specified act of demise carries a note of angeron the part of Parsifal, the knights and by extension the audience- left hauntingly unresolved at the end of the work. Kundry's demise at the end serves the urge to retaliate and strike back, thereby preserving an instinct for retribution among the Grail community. Entirely absent here is the love ideal writ large or pacifism or core human potentiality, or even ahimsa, the central feature of the Tolstoy-Gandhi-King axis of revitalized Christianity opposite to Wagner's project of art-resacralization. As a modem sacred ritual in the form of a musical stage drama Parsifal ends with a climactic sacrifice, ominous indeed, as it was sacrificial logic that was to underlie the multiple genocides of the twentieth century, 103

at least three of which had significant German involvement (Hereo/Nama, Armenian, Holocaust). (Premeried right before the start of World War One, Parsifal's conclusion prefigures that foundational work of art music in the twentieth century, Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring also to culminate in the sacrifice of the main female character.) Kundry's demise amounts to a sacrifice of the monstrous double, the soeur ennemie, whose destruction binds the community ever more strongly together. Even her late-stage baptism poses no contradiction to this. It is precisely when she becomes an outsider-insider, a foreigner who is drawn into the community, that her sacrifice even more aptly serves as a familiar projection field for the sins and shortcomings of the in-group. Wagner's neo-Christian revisionism ultimately takes a more aggressive tack, arguably vitiating the theological underpinnings of the Gospel tale. It is not the redeemer himself who serves as sacrifice, but rather a stigmatized outsider. Though cloaked in a sacred aura, the demise of Kundry, and even that of Amfortas may not ultimately constitute the willing sacrifice of beneficent vessels, but rather the forced removal of the infected that threaten the purity of the whole. The fact of the demise of these two characters, the corrupted insider and the corrupting outsider-insider, indicates Wagner's surrender to and validation of what Martin Luther King deemed the "strike back tendency." This desire validates retribution that prevails over hope and love for the potentiality of the outsider in one's midst. The concluding musical passages of Parsifal are descending arpeggiated chords with harp, then flute, then high register choral singing. This musical climax is repeated 104

and fades off into one long homogenous sustain, a musical message that the Grail community has been cleansed and renewed for posterity. At the very end, these sustained, hypnotic sounds bring us close to what might today be associated with drone-like, ambient new age music for meditation, fitting for an other-worldly message of healing that is at once ceremonial, psychological and physiological. What we hear is a musical wash, too amorphous for either harmony or counterpoint. When paired with the use of lighting effects and religious symbolism, this conclusion is positively overwhelming and transporting with hypnotic, dream-like power. The parting words of Parsifal reemphasize the need for both renewal and purging. This call for a great awakening is always unavoidable for any new religious movement. Parsifal's generational drama is a perennial struggle, a recurring theme grafted onto a deeply culturally encoded exclusive community explained throughout in biopolitical terms. Wagner's interlaced narratives, of shrine cleansing and intergenerational crisis, are a profound indictment of current threats and an exhortation to the future to assume the reins against danger ongoing. Wagner earns a place at the center of a latenineteenth century continuum-with Theosophy at one extreme and Tolstoy's Kingdom of God at the other-of sacralizing revisions and rebuttals to liberal minded secularization. We find in Wagner that which embraces elements of cultic institutionalization as well as a vibrant imagination of theatricality rooted in performance. Parsifal was meant not just as another musico-dramatic creation but was designed for an annual, ritualistic performance to be 105

held in the cult-like exclusive domain of Wagner's proprietary Bayreuth theater. Parsifal was meant to be the culmination of this yearly festival. A close reading of his label, Biihnenweihfestspiel ("festival play for the consecration of the stage"), reveals Parsifal to be the festival within the Bayreuth festival. And it is festival that serves the revitalization of the cultural order via a reenacting of its conception, a shared myth of origin. With Parsifal, Wagner provides an medieval, crusader origin story for his envisioned new community. Within Wagner's oeuvre Parsifal provides a needed backstory for his earlier effort at sacred myth making in Lohengrin. Seen in this light, the transference between author and creation is not only between Wagner and Amfortas, but also between Wagner and Parsifal, with Wagner serving as the redeemer and renewer for modem art and music as one who fashions the ultimate in public, communal performance experience. The final moments of Parsifal reaffirm that other defining quality of festival, the renewal of health and abundance, as in the end, only healthy, explicitly denoted as pure of blood, members of the Grail community are left alive on stage, enlivened anew in their ritual meal to do further battle as consecrated by the Grail.

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Conclusion Parsifal, Wagner's final music drama is a text that

provides a singular canvas on which listeners may grapple with fundamental ambiguities in conventional conceptual demarcations surrounding community formation, art and the sacred, gender roles and questions of difference at large. What distinguishes Parsifal from other entries in the canon of modem European art-music are the bold, even radical claims of this work about itself which project it onto a level of the sacred without equivalent before or since. Parsifal sought to produce an atmosphere of solemnity and even meditative captivation in its audience, to literally consecrate the stage. Wagner pursued and enacted an aesthetic of transcendence, one that haphazardly fused together concepts of philosophy, politics, religion and history often in tension if not contradiction. While the political valences rightly remain controversial and occasion vigorous debate, the setting is a monumental bout of medievalist escapism, an invented tradition of late Romanticism sent into overdrive. Formally and technologically a great innovator, Wagner stretched the boundaries of modem theater and performance beyond what had been previously conceivable to transport audiences into hypnotic phantasmagoria. The dominance of ceremony over drama breaks even with his own conventions and innovations and submits the work to a discipline held only tenuously together. In the bricolage rush of varying themes, ideas and archetypes, one finds intimations of the fragmentary, even cubistic nature of much of modem art, as well as the political cataclysms that served as their inspiration and inducement.

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The panoply of categories and symbols introduced revolve around a series of dualisms, which tend to a domain of both rigidity and distortion: magic/faith, redemption/ curse, purification/pollution, sexual desire/renunciation, ceremony/drama, suffering/release, phobia/infection. Yet the creative tension between these opposites infuses all of the characters and emits a power that Wagner can barely keep under control; it is as if he allows the work to have an unconscious that dialectically permeates the narrative, maintaining an electric charge throughout. It is this complexity that elevates Parsifal beyond a dogmatic or onedimensional religious or political screed. I hope to have at least marginally succeeded in avoiding the prime extremes and pitfalls of writing on Wagner, namely, treating this output uncritically as the fount of a sacred new age theology or, conversely, as a pernicious document of hate. Contradictions and inconsistencies lie just below the surface and remain part and parcel of the story as a whole. Parsifal is a work of art of and for consecration that actually dramatizes a crisis in consecration itself. The audience is suspended throughout in a state of tension and limbo as to whether ritual consecration can occur again. And just when it does the audience is bid abruptly adieu; there is precious little beatified lingering in the state of restored wholeness. Underneath this religious overlay, the substance of crisis is a much more familiar generational conflict, a war of fathers and sons about filial piety, expectations, and the anxieties attendant to the transmission of legacies and their continuity. Even the awkward and mysterious outsider-cum-messiah undergoes a wholly familiar progression of assuming egomastery, a wholly pedestrian bildungsroman (a story of spiritual education and maturation).

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as a work of the stage straddles aforementioned classical elements, reimagined religious ceremony and proto-modemist theater. Yet what is innovative and most relevant in the thematic materials is also that which is most disturbing about the legacy of European modernity: that administration of bodies and disease, known as biopolitics. For Wagner renders the purification of an altar in the modem terms of the contagion of the body and the preservation of purified identity. In this respect, Parsifal embodies a problematic dimension of the displacement of religious energies, namely the conversion of spiritual terms of purity into those physical and material. Purification of blood becomes the modem analogue for spiritual salvation, as well as an ultimate matrix of all value. Yet his vision of healing fuses spiritual, mental and even medical forms and addresses meaningfully shortcomings of the Enlightenment, rationalist project. Parsifal

Wagner's legacy cannot be disentangled from his grafting of purity and pollution onto physical bodies; this foreshadows forms of stigmatization which would prove so fateful in the years after his death. Parsifal actively attempts to model how reenchantment might be possible, through a dismemberment of boundary lines between religious and musical theater. Yet his ultimate reliance and dependency on ideas of sacrifice, renunciation and expulsion offers a cautionary lesson on why both traditionally orthodox and culturally informal prohibitons against the representation of the sacred carry social validity and continually meet with approval from multiple, even normally opposing, comers of the political world. It may well be salutary for the audience to pause and reflect whether the pseudo-religious is employed as just another special effect to heighten the 109

experience of aesthetic, hypnotic intoxication. Is this the manipulatve appropriation of the sacred in the service of the power of the stage? We have explored Wagner as Amfortas and even Wagner as Parsifal, and as a parting thought we might do well to consider Wagner as Klingsor, the magician who conjurs a realm of illusion, one who makes transgressive incisions for the power of his art, one which ultimately rests upon a cosmetic and specious layer of illusion.

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Adam Sacks

Dr. Adam Sacks received his Ph.D. from Brown University.