Parsifal: The Problem Restated

By the time Richard Wagner got to work on Parsifal, his last opera, the conditions of his life had changed utterly from what they had been when he’d started work on The Nibelung’s Ring. A composer of romantic operas who’d set out to make some point in his libretto as inescapable as possible couldn’t have come up with a more drastic set of differences. He began composing The Ring as a political exile living in poverty in Switzerland, over his head in debt, married to a high-strung soprano who wasn’t especially thrilled at his antics, and who thought he was wasting time that should have gone into earning a decent living on a fantastically grandiose four-opera cycle that had next to no hope of ever being performed.

He began composing Parsifal, by contrast, as the world’s most famous opera composer and one of its most celebrated cultural figures, living in extravagant comfort in Bavaria, having all his bills covered without a quibble by that nation’s mad king, surrounded by an adoring crowd of fans and acolytes, with a wife who both adored him and knew how to manage his vagaries, and with his very own opera house in Bayreuth fully stocked with musicians, singers, and stage hands who were as passionate about his art as he was. It was the kind of stunning reversal of fortune that you can’t even dream of getting away with if you write fiction. Only real life can manage anything that absurd.

Of course Wagner was also a different person by the time he began work on Parsifal. Mind you, he was just as arrogant, self-centered, and nastily paranoid as he’d been all those years before, but he’d had a good many of his more overinflated notions about politics and the future knocked out of him by events. He’d also had the opportunity to read (and get bowled over by) Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, which gave him a constructive way to think about his own failures and, as we’ll see, an antidote to a certain number of his own worst character traits. The mere fact that Wagner was never really able to use the antidote on himself doesn’t change the fact that he did manage to recognize it, and to glimpse at least a few of his own epic failures as a human being in the mirror that Schopenhauer held up for him.

Yet the basic problem that framed The Nibelung’s Ring still remained, as pressing as ever. What was more, the conclusions to which he’d been driven in the course of composing The Twilight of the Gods brought that problem to an even sharper edge than it had ever had in those earlier days of his career, when he thought there was a simple solution to the world’s problems.

Let us grant, as Wagner did, that commodification, the process of flattening out all values so they can be expressed in terms of money, degrades everything authentically human and creates a society in which only the worst of our capacities can flourish. Let us further grant, as Wagner did after his great intellectual crisis, that revolution offers no hope of changing this, since the rebels can be counted on to sell out the moment they get within reach of significant power and wealth, and so the curse of the Ring will remain in place until society itself crumples beneath it.

Given all these things, is there any hope at all? Can anything be done to defeat, or even partly counter, the terrible burden that Wagner symbolized by Alberich’s magic ring? Since Wagner was that nearly unique phenomenon, a serious intellectual who worked out problems by composing operas, Parsifal was his way of trying to answer that question.

It’s probably worth saying in so many words that in approaching Parsifal in these terms I’m interpreting Wagner’s last opera in a way that, to my knowledge, hasn’t been explored by others. The political and economic dimensions of The Nibelung’s Ring are practically old hat at this point, not least because George Bernard Shaw discussed them at such length in the scintillating prose of The Perfect Wagnerite.  I have yet to see, however, any discussion of Parsifal as the sequel to The Ring in the Wagnerian literature I have read, nor any exploration of Parsifal as a response to the same issues that Wagner wrestled with in The Ring. That surprises me, not least because Wagner stocked Parsifal with a set of signposts pointing straight to that conclusion, but there it is. It’s entirely possible that I may be as wrong as wrong can be in seeing Parsifal in these terms. Still, this is what the opera appears to me to be saying.

Let’s start, then, by summarizing the situation Wagner has drawn up for his version of the Grail legend. The backstory to the opera begins in a castle in the mountains, where an order of celibate knights guards the Holy Grail, the cup Christ used in the Last Supper. Amfortas, the king of the Grail kingdom, rules the knights and performs the mystic ceremony that gives the knights and the kingdom their power. The magic of the ceremony also preserves Amfortas’s father Titurel, who built the castle and founded the kingdom, in a kind of half-living condition: his voice is heard from the darkness when the knights gather for the rite, but he himself is never seen.

Yet all is far from well in the Grail kingdom. Long ago, when Titurel was king, a young man named Klingsor became a novice in the order of knights. Unable to control his sexual cravings in less drastic ways, he castrated himself, and for this act he was cast out of the Grail order. Filled with anger, he fled to the heathen lands to the south and there discovered that his self-castration gave him access to strange realms of evil magic. Thus he became a powerful sorcerer, built a castle of his own as an imitation and rival of the Grail castle, and lured the Grail knights one at a time, trapping and degrading them, to make them his servants.

When Amfortas became king, putting an end to Klingsor’s machinations was at the top of his to-do list. The new king took one of the two great treasures of the Grail kingdom, the holy spear that pierced the side of Christ, and rode south to confront Klingsor in his lair. Beneath the walls of the sorcerer’s magic castle, however, Amfortas was seduced by a woman of frightful beauty; the spear slipped from his hand; Klingsor, hiding nearby, seized the spear, stabbed Amfortas in the side with it, and vanished within the castle. The holy spear remains in Klingsor’s possession as the opera begins.

Amfortas was brought back to the Grail castle by his knights, but the wound inflicted by the spear never healed. The knights sought all through the land for some cure for the wound, but nothing they brought back gave more than temporary relief. The same was true of the remedies brought back from further afield by a strange woman named Kundry, dark-skinned and dressed in ragged garments, who lives near the Grail castle and helps the knights from time to time. What makes the wound especially problematic is that it causes Amfortas nearly unendurable agony whenever he plays his part in the ceremony of the Grail. His only source of comfort is a riddling oracle from the Grail itself that someday a pure fool, made wise by compassion, will arrive to heal him of the wound.

This is the backstory as the curtain rises. In those productions that haven’t done something stupid with the story, at least, the audience sees a forest glade at dawn. In the distance is the castle of the Grail and the mountains rising behind it. In the glade sleeps Gurnemanz, a veteran Grail knight, and a group of squires under his authority. As the sun rises, Gurnemanz wakes, rouses the squires, and sets them to work preparing a bath for Amfortas, in an attempt to relieve some of his pain. Kundry puts in an appearance; so does Amfortas; and then, unexpectedly, so does a stranger from outside the Grail kingdom, a foolish young man so clueless that he doesn’t even know his own name. He is the son of a widow; he was raised in the forest far away, who left home after meeting knights on the road and has wandered since then.

We can leave things there for the moment, because what has already been covered provides more than enough material to make the point I have in mind.

Notice, first of all, that the two great magical objects in this opera are identical to two of the three that play a central role in The Ring. The Holy Grail, we already know from Wagner’s essay “Die Wibelungen,” is yet another expression of the mythological motif of the Treasure Hard to Attain, the same motif that gives Alberich’s ring and the hoard of the Nibelungs their symbolic meaning. The spear is equally central to both narratives; any of my readers who have a background in the relevant traditions know already that Norse and Christian mythology share the same mythic image of a self-sacrificed god suspended in the air and pierced by a spear. Wagner and his contemporaries were well aware of this parallelism as well.

The sword alone has dropped out of the story, but then that weapon was the centerpiece of Wotan’s scheme and has no place in Parsifal. To translate that detail into the political and economic language Wagner used, revolution is not an option in play this time around; he had already seen where that leads and had no interest in tracing the same futile path again.

Notice also the remarkably close parallels between the ostensible villains of the two stories. Those parallels didn’t exist in the older Grail legends; Klingsor is absent from all but one of them, and in his one appearance, as Clinschor in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, he is a minor character in the backstory of one of the protagonist’s adventures. Wagner took that brief reference and transformed it into a character closely attuned to the equivalent figure in The Ring.

Like Alberich, to begin with, Klingsor has renounced love in order to gain power. Like Alberich, he didn’t intend this to begin with—his original motive was to serve the Grail, as Alberich’s original motive was to love the Rhinemaidens—but in both cases, their failure and frustration drove them to an irrevocable deed which gained them evil powers at a terrible price. Both the dwarf and the sorcerer are well aware of what their respective choices have cost them; Alberich’s furious dialogue with Wotan in Scene 4 of The Rhinegold and Klingsor’s furious monologue after his mockery by Kundry early in Act 2 of Parsifal express that point with equal power.

The spear is the crucial symbol here, and it’s not accidental that in Parsifal it is in the hands of the villain. Attentive listeners to The Ring will recall that Wotan at one point referred to himself as Licht-Alberich. This means “the king of the light-elves” as contrasted to Schwarz-Alberich, “king of the dark-elves;” the opposition between the lios-alfar and the svart-alfar, the light and dark elves, is a theme in the old Germanic mythology Wagner used as a resource. At the same time, of course, Wotan is also equating himself with Alberich, and for good reason. Like Alberich, Wotan was perfectly willing to renounce love in order to win power; unlike Alberich, he wasn’t honest enough to stick to the bargain he’d made, and most of the catastrophic failure of his schemes in The Ring came from that attempt to have his cake and eat it too.

The identical contrast yields one of the primary plot dynamics in Parsifal. In that opera Klingsor makes his renunciation of love in a disastrously wrong but irrevocable manner, while Amfortas sets out to do it the right way but lacks the strength of will to stick with it; that’s why he falls victim to Klingsor’s trap with its sexual bait. Like Alberich and Wotan, both of them therefore fail, and the world of the opera remains trapped in the consequences of their failure until that world is disrupted by a force from outside the pattern thse paired failures have established.

That force is not the ideal of liberty. Of all the realizations that Wagner had to grapple with in his work, that one must have cost him the most discomfort. All through The Valykrie and Siegfried, Brunnhilde represented the dream of liberty that was so important to Wagner’s own youthful ideology, the hope of the world in his time. The Twilight of the Gods marked his first challenge to that ideal of his youth, but it was a halfhearted challenge, blunted by his own sense that Brunnhilde was the real heroine of the opera cycle, and her passionate, bitter, and ultimately triumphant trajectory was therefore the theme that needed to be placed front and center at the conclusion of the entire Ring.

In Parsifal he was under no such constraint. Kundry is a character in the older Grail legends, but her role in those earlier stories has almost nothing in common with what Wagner made of her. In the tales of Chrétien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and their rivals, Cundrie is the ugliest and wisest woman in the world, and her role is consistently helpful: she alone knows everything that is going on, and provides guidance to the Grail seeker at the crucial moments of the story. In Wagner’s hands, by contrast, she becomes a tremendously ambivalent figure, and one with direct connections to the character list of The Ring. He equated her with Gundryggia, one of the Valkyries in ancient sources, and made the point even more inescapable by giving her the same capacity to ride at a furious pace over land and sky.

The implication is as inescapable as it is frightful. In symbolic terms, Kundry is Brunnhilde. Stripped of the glamor cast over it by the political Romanticism of Wagner’s youth, the ideal of liberty is simply one more treacherous lure in the hands of those who have renounced love for power. No help can be found there.

Instead, the force from outside that can resolve the frozen conflict between the Grail kingdom and its distorted reflection in Klingsor’s magic mirror is another parallel with The Ring. The apparently nameless and foolish youth who blunders into the Grail kingdom is almost cut from the same cloth as Siegfried—almost, but not quite. In a sense, he is Siegfried as he might have been, given a slightly different upbringing. As a result of that difference, he fails at first where Siegfried triumphed, and triumphs in the end where Siegfried failed.

The parallels are as hard to miss as the contrasts. Like Siegfried, Parsifal—for that is his name, as Kundry alone knows—was born to a widow after the death of his father and raised in the forest, ignorant of all human customs. Like Siegfried, Parsifal begins his great quest out of a simple desire for companionship. Unlike Siegfried, however, he is not raised by a greedy dwarf whose sole interest in him is as a tool to separate a dragon from his wealth; instead, he is raised by a devoted mother, and her death takes place only after he sets out on his journeys. Siegfried’s utterly loveless childhood sets him up for his betrayal of Brunnhilde; Parsifal’s wholly different childhood prepares him instead for his redemption of Kundry.

Nor is Fafner the dragon anywhere in the picture by the time Parsifal begins his adventures. The world is a different place, in several senses, by that point in the tale: we have passed from the Pagan Dark Ages to the Christian Middle Ages, but there is also a literary sense in which the world of Parsifal is what comes after the world of The Ring. If I were writing the story of Parsifal as the fifth volume in a science-fantasy series with the Ring cycle as the first four volumes—a project that I’ve considered rather more than once—I would make Parsifal the posthumous son of Siegfried by Gutrune, who fled into the forest after the catastrophe of The Twilight of the Gods, found a home in the abandoned smithy that once sheltered Mime and Siegfried, and raised her only child there, with scattered jewels left over from the dead dragon’s hoard as his first playthings. So precise a narrative chronology wasn’t necessary to Wagner’s vision, of course; the symbolic echoes he wove into Parsifal were enough by themselves to make his point.

Symbolic echoes there are in plenty. Siegfried, when he leaves his childhood home, goes to three places, one after the other. First is Fafner’s den, where he slays the dragon, converses with a forest bird, and carries away the treasure at the heart of the story. Second is the hill where Brunnhilde waits, where he braves the fire, falls helplessly in love with the Valkyrie, and embraces her and his doom. Third is the palace of the Gibichungs, where his destiny is fulfilled.

Parsifal, for his part, goes first to the Grail castle, where he shoots a swan dead, converses with the Grail knights, and witnesses but has no other contact with the treasure at the heart of the story. Next, he goes to Klingsor’s castle, where Kundry waits for him; there he braves the guardians, resists Kundry’s seductive wiles, and escapes his doom by refusing to embrace her. Third is the Grail castle again, where his destiny—a very different destiny from Siegfried’s!—is fulfilled.

The differences between these two trajectories are just as deliberate as the parallels. To make sense of them, however, we’ll have to circle back to the philosophical and political issues Wagner dealt with, and try to make sense of his answer to the great conundrum of his time and ours.