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
Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival
The operatic festival Richard Wagner founded in 1876 is the oldest and most famous in the world. It is also the most controversial, for it became the cultural showcase of the Third Reich. In this prize-winning and generously-illustrated book - the first to provide a frank and fully rounded history of Bayreuth - Frederic Spotts describes the festival's performances and productions, the Wagner family who have run it, its debasement into 'Hitler's court theatre', and its postwar liberation from its chauvinistic, anti-Semitic past. Provocative and compelling, the book will fascinate all Wagner enthusiasts as well as those interested in European cultural and intellectual history since 1876. 'A vast body of historic data - musical, personal, political, and generally artistic - presented in smooth, witty prose ... Spotts tells in absorbing detail the complex story of the relationship between the Third Reich and Bayreuth ... As reliable a guide to Bayreuth as we shall ever have.' Michael Tanner, 'The New York Times Book Review' 'Bayreuth is not just a spiritual and political history of the Festival but a sustained attempt to explain the place, uniquely emblematic, that it holds, and has always held, in German cultural life.' Richard Law, 'Opera' 'A readable, authoritative account of the Wagner festival that is compelling and chilling, sketching the cult's evolution and surveying its achievements ... Definitive.' Edward Rothstein, 'The New York Times' 'Spotts knows his Wagner as well as any professional musician ... he writes illuminatingly about the political as well as the musical context of the Bayreuth phenomenon.' David Mellor, 'The Daily Telegraph' 'Music history, cultural comment, and such issues as the family's embrace of Nazism are all deftly combined.' 'Time' Winner of the Royal Philharmonic Society Award for the best music book of 1994. Frederic Spotts is an Associate of the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, and a former member of the American Foreign Service.
Shoeless Joe: Fantasy and the Humor of Fellow-Feeling
In his essay on Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Thomas Carlyle writes of a humor that manifests itself in smile rather than laughter. "Richter is a man of mirth," says Carlyle, whose humor is "capricious . . . quaint . . . [and] heartfelt" (15). The three adjectives represent for Carlyle the essence of what he terms "true humor" because they suggest Richter's enormous respect for humanity. "True humor," he goes on to say, "springs not more from the head than from the heart; it is not contempt, its essence is love; it issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper" (17). These smiles are not Hobbesian smirks of superiority1 but genuine signs of compassion for, sympathy toward, and empathy with the object of the humor. Carlyle further provides a direct link between humor and both pathos and nobility; the link is the smile of the caring man. For Carlyle, this smile is one of "fellow-feeling":