Parsifal's Promise or Parsifal's Reality? On the Politics of Voice Exchange in Wagner's Grail Operas
Both Parsifal and Lohengrin are operas about futurity: hope that prayers will be answered, promise that redemption will bring about a new day. Yet paradoxically, the two works also share an investment in reversing futurity: time turned into space, modernity exchanged for medieval regalia. These external similarities between Wagner’s “grail operas” are more than mere family resemblances, however, for this hesitant nexus of hope and despair, of progress and stultification, is perhaps at its strongest in the movement between the two works. Parsifal comes to its autumnal close so that Parsifal’s son may attend to his heroic duties, just as Lohengrin bows its head as an opera to make way for its prophetic older sibling, the music drama. Fueling this circular movement between the two works is the catalyst of self-realization, the promise—and the cost—of finding one’s voice, of fulfilling prophecy. This, then, is an essay about coming into one’s own within the ambivalent and closed economy of Wagnerian myth. Our starting point is the beginning of the third act in Parsifal, as Parsifal the character—now the “Black Knight”—shares with Gurnemanz what he has learned about his place within Parsifal the story: “Und ich,” he cries, “ich bin’s, der all dies Elend schuf” [And I, I am the one who caused all this misery]. The “misery” is Titurel’s death, and it represents the sorry state into which Montsalvat has fallen since Parsifal’s initial failure to recognize his redemptive potential. The bad news initially threatens to overwhelm Parsifal, but it ultimately serves to strengthen his resolve. “Ich bin’s”: I am the one I myself heard prophesied. Although this hard-won realization carries embarrassingly little dramatic suspense—Wagner made the “pure fool’s” identity painstakingly obvious in act 1—it serves as a decisive linchpin in the opera’s dénouement: Parsifal exchanges his old mien for a new one, and now armed with both spear and the knowledge of his role within a preordained narrative, he is able to heal Amfortas, baptize Kundry, and proclaim healed all the ills that have befallen Montsalvat. I begin with this moment in Parsifal not because it is unfamiliar, or because its mechanics demand detailed exegesis, but precisely because there is something so familiar about it. Indeed, we have heard Parsifal’s words before in other of Wagner’s works, and so, too, have we witnessed similar scenes of self-realization. Senta, at the turning point of her ballad, switches from narration to apostrophe to
Unmasking Wagner's Grail: Homoeroticism, Androgyny, and Anxiety in Parsifal
Most readings of Wagner’s final music drama Parsifal seek to illumine a clandestine presentation of Wagner’s racist doctrine or make sense of a less-shrouded but still ambiguous panegyric to Christianity. However, little scholarly material addresses Wagner’s provocative account of sensuality and homoeroticism in this Buhnenweihfestspiel [Stage Consecration Festival Play]. This thesis explores desire and homosexuality within the drama and considers how and why Wagner masks these themes through the opaque mythos of religion, race, and community. Parsifal was partly informed by Wagner’s own complex neuroses: his sexual anxieties and scandals, amalgam of German philosophies, and confusion concerning Germanness. As filtered through his own belief system, Wagner’s Parsifal ambivalently presents homoeroticism, wavering between an idealized pure love and a destructive, even unnatural, force of desire. I was initially inspired by Laurence Dreyfus’s work Wagner and the Erotic Impulse, which struck me as a fresh exegesis of Wagner’s oeuvre, embracing the overt sexual nature of his dramatic text, music, and philosophical writings. Carolyn Abbate’s Unsung Voices and Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s Wagner Androgyne provide methodologies for narration and androgyny from which I draw. Wagner demonstrates homoerotic sensibilities through both heroic and villainous characters, within an exotic medieval Spain (and a Zauberschlos), and through opposing sonic worlds of communal diatonicism and chromatic sensuality. Exploring this work from a perspective energized by recent musicological gender studies and musico-textual semiotics and relations, my reading of Parsifal is thus primarily corrective. Wagner’s final music drama offers a manifestation of love and sensuality with all the contradictions and fears of Wagner’s experiences and imagination.
Richard Wagner: Theory and Theatre
I. The Artist and his Public II. Opera - Spoken Theatre - Musical Drama III. Wagner's Dramatic Poetry