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
Music Drama and the End of History
This essay is about Parsifal. It is about Amfortas's wound, the efforts to close it, and the meaning of the claim that it has finally been closed. That closure involves also the closure of music drama, the redemption of Wagnerian form now raised to the level of pure ideology. The essay's three-part argument involves the identification of three claims of cultural resolution and their internal contradictions. These claims I
The Angel's Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera
Reading a book is also kind of better solution when you have no enough money or time to get your own adventure. This is one of the reasons we show the the angels cry beyond the pleasure principle in opera as your friend in spending the time. For more representative collections, this book not only offers it's strategically book resource. It can be a good friend, really good friend with much knowledge.