Opera Books
A
BOOK OF OPERAS
THEIR
HISTORIES, THEIR PLOTS
AND THEIR MUSIC
BY
HENRY EDWARD KREHBIEL
CHAPTER XIV
“PARSIFAL”
A
LAD, hotfoot in pursuit of a wild swan which one of his
arrows has pierced, finds himself in a forest glade on the side of a
mountain. There he meets a body of knights and esquires in
attendance on a king who is suffering from a wound. The knights are a
body of men whose mission it is to succor suffering innocence wherever
they may find it. They dwell in a magnificent castle on the summit of
the mountain, within whose walls they assemble every day to contemplate
and adore a miraculous vessel from which they obtain both physical and
spiritual sustenance. In order to enjoy the benefits which flow from
this talisman, they are required to preserve their bodies in ascetic
purity. Their king has fallen from this estate and been grievously
wounded in an encounter with a magician, who, having failed in his
ambition to enter the order of knighthood, had built a castle over
against that of the king, where, by practice of the black art and with
the help of sirens and a sorceress, he seeks the ruin of the pure and
celestial soldiery. In his hands is a lance which once belonged to the
knights, but which he had wrested from their king and with which he had
given the dolorous stroke from which the king is suffering.
The healing of the king can be wrought only by a touch of the lance
which struck the wound; and this lance can be regained only by one able
to withstand the sensual temptations with which the evil-minded sorcerer
has surrounded himself in his magical castle. An oracle, that had spoken
from a vision, which one day shone about the talisman, had said that
this deliverer fool, an innocent simpleton, pity had made knowing:—
For this hero king and knights are waiting and longing, since
neither lotions nor baths nor ointments can bring relief, though they be
of the rarest potency and brought from all the ends of the earth. The
lad who thus finds himself in this worshipful but woful company is
himself of noble and knightly lineage. This we learn from the recital of
his history, but also from the bright, incisive, militant, chivalresque
music associated with him:—
But he has been reared in a wilderness, far from courts and the
institutions of chivalry and in ignorance of the world lying beyond his
forest boundaries. His father died before he was born, and his mother
withheld from him all knowledge of knighthood, hoping thus to keep him
for herself. One day, however, he saw a cavalcade of horsemen in
brilliant trappings. The spectacle stirred the chivalric spirit
slumbering within him; he deserted his mother, followed after the
knights, and set out in quest of adventure. The mother died:—
In the domain whither his quarry had led the lad, all animals were
held sacred. A knight (Gurnemanz) rebukes him for his misdeed in
shooting the swan, and rue leads him to break his bow and arrows. From a
strange creature (Kundry), —
in the service of the knights, he learns of the death of his mother, who
had perished for love of him and grief over his desertion. He is
questioned about himself, but is singularly ignorant of everything, even
of his own name. Hoping that the lad may prove to be the guileless fool
to whom knowledge was to come through pity, the knight escorts him to
the temple, which is the sanctuary of the talisman whose adoration is
the daily occupation of the brotherhood. They walk out of the forest and
find themselves in a rocky defile of the mountain. A natural gateway
opens in the face of a cliff, through which they pass, and are lost to
sight for a space. Then they are seen ascending a sloping passage, and
little by little the rocks lose their ruggedness and begin to take on
rude architectural contours. They are walking to music which, while
merely suggesting their progress and the changing natural scene in the
main, ever and anon breaks into an expression of the most poignant and
lacerating suffering and lamentation:—
Soon the pealing of bells is heard:—
and the tones blend synchronously and harmonously with the music of
their march:—
At last they arrive in a mighty Byzantine hail, which loses itself
upward in a lofty, vaulted dome, from which light streams downward and
illumines the interior. Under the dome, within a colonnade, are two
tables, each a segment of a circle. Into the hall there come in
procession knights wearing red j mantles on which the image of a white
dove is embroidered. They chant a pious hymn as they take their places
at the refectory tables:—
The king, whom the lad had seen in the glade, is borne in on a
litter, before him a veiled shrine containing the mystical cup which is
the object of the ceremonious worship. It is the duty of the king to
unveil the talisman and hold it up to the adoration of the knights. He
is conveyed to a raised couch and the shrine is placed before him. His
sufferings of mind and body are so poignant that he would liever die
than perform his office; but the voice of his father (Titurel),
who had built the sanctuary, established the order of knighthood, and
now lives on in his grave sustained by the sight of the talisman,
admonishes the king of his duty. At length he consents to perform the
function imposed upon him by his office. He raises himself painfully
upon his couch. The attendants remove the covering from the shrine and
disclose an antique crystal vessel which they reverently place before
the lamentable king. Boys’ voices come wafted down from the highest
height of the dome, singing a formula of consecration: “Take ye my body,
take my blood in token of our love”:—
A dazzling ray of light flashes down from above and falls into the
cup, which now glows with a reddish purple lustre and sheds a soft
radiance around. The knights have sunk upon their knees. The king lifts
the luminous chalice, moves it gently from side to side, and thus
blesses the bread and wine provided for the refection of the knights.
Meanwhile, celestial voices proclaim the words of the oracle to musical
strains that are pregnant with mysterious suggestion.
Another choir sturdily, firmly, ecstatically hymns the power of
faith:—
and, at the end, an impressive antiphon, starting with the knights,
ascends higher and higher, and, calling in gradually the voices of
invisible singers in the middle height, becomes metamorphosed into an
angelic canticle as it takes its flight to the summit. It is the voice
of aspiration, the musical symbol of the talisman which directs the
thoughts and desires of its worshippers ever upward:—
The lad disappoints his guide. He understands nothing of the solemn
happenings which he has witnessed, nor does he ask their meaning, though
his own heart had been lacerated with pain at sight of the king’s
sufferings. He is driven from the sanctuary with contumely.
He wanders forth in quest of further adventures and enters the
magical garden surrounding the castle of the sorcerer. A number of
knights who are sent against him he puts to rout. Now the magician
summons lovely women, clad in the habiliments of flowers, to seduce him
with their charms:—
They sing and play about him with winsome wheedlings and
cajoleries, with insinuating blandishments and dainty flatteries, with
pretty petulancies and delectable quarrellings:—
But they fail of their purpose, as does also an unwilling siren
whom the magician invokes with powerful conjurations. It is Kundry,
who is half Magdalen, half wicked sorceress, a messenger in the
service of the pious knights, and as such hideous of aspect; a tool in
the hands of the magician, and as such supernaturally beautiful. It was
to her charms that the suffering king had yielded. To win the youth she
tells him the story of his mother’s death and gives to him her last
message and — a kiss! At the touch of her impure lips a flood of
passion, hitherto unfelt, pours through the veins of the lad, and in its
surge comes understanding of the suffering and woe which he had
witnessed in the castle on the mountain. Also a sense of his own
remissness. Compassionate pity brings enlightenment; and he thrusts
back the woman who is seeking to destroy him. Finding that the wiles of
his tool have availed him naught, the wicked magician himself appears to
give battle, for he, too, knows the oracle and fears the coming of the
king’s deliverer and the loss of the weapon which he hopes will yet
enable him to achieve the mystical talisman. He hurls the lance at the
youth, but it remains suspended in midair. The lad seizes it, makes the
sign of the cross, speaks some words of exorcism, and garden, castle,
damsels — all the works of enchantment disappear.
Now the young hero is conscious of a mission. He must find again
the abode of the knights and their ailing king, and bring to them
surcease of suffering. After long and grievous wanderings he is again
directed to the castle. Grief and despair have overwhelmed the knights,
whose king, unable longer to endure the torture in which he has lived,
has definitively refused to perform his holy office. In consequence, his
father, no longer the recipient of supernatural sustenance, has died,
and the king longs to follow him. The hero touches the wound in the side
of the king with the sacred spear, ends his dolors, and is hailed as
king in his place. The temptress, who has followed him as a penitent,
freed from a curse which had rested upon her for ages, goes to a
blissful and eternal rest.
*
* *
Such
is the story of Wagner’s “Parsifal.” It is the purpose of this book to
help the musical layman who loves lyric drama to enjoyment. Criticism
might do this, but a purpose of simple exposition has already been
proclaimed, and shall be adhered to lest some reader think that he is
being led too far afield. In this case the exposition shall take the
form of a marshalling of the elements of the story in two aspects —
religious and legendary. Careful readers of English literature will have
had no difficulty in recognizing in it a story of the quest of the Holy
Grail. Tennyson will have taught them that the hero is that
Sir Percivale
Whom Arthur and his knighthood called the Pure;
that the talismanic vessel is
the cup itself from which our Lord
Drank at the last sad supper with His own;
that the lance which struck and healed the grievous wound in the side of
the king is the spear with which the side of the Christ was pierced on
Calvary. It is also obvious that the king, whose name is Amfortas,
that is, “the powerless one,” is a symbol of humanity suffering from
the wounds of slavery to desire; that the heroic act of Parsifal,
as Wagner calls him, which brings release to the king and his knights,
is renunciation of desire, prompted by pity, compassion,
fellow-suffering; and that this gentle emotion it was that had inspired
knowledge simultaneously of a great need and a means of deliverance. The
ethical idea of the drama, as I set forth in a book entitled “Studies in
the Wagnerian Drama” many years ago, is that it is the enlightenment
which comes through pity which brings salvation. The allusion is to the
redemption of mankind by the sufferings and compassionate death of
Christ; and that stupendous tragedy is the prefiguration of the mimic
drama which Wagner has constructed. The spectacle to which he invites
us, and with which he hoped to impress us and move us to an acceptance
of the lesson underlying his play, is the adoration of the Holy Grail,
cast in the form of a mimicry of the Last Supper, bedizened with some of
the glittering pageantry of mediaeval knighthood and romance.
In the minds of many persons it is a profanation to make a stage
spectacle out of religious things; and it has been urged that “Parsifal”
is not only religious but specifically Christian; not only Christian but
filled with parodies of elements which are partly liturgical, partly
Biblical. In narrating the incidents of the play I have purposely
avoided all allusions to the things which have been matters of
controversy. It is possible to look upon “Parsifal” as a sort of
glorified fairy tale, and to this end I purpose to subject its elements
to inquiry, and shall therefore go a bit more into detail. Throughout
the play Parsifal is referred to as a redeemer, and in the third
act scenes in which he plays as the central figure are borrowed from the
life of Christ. Kundry, the sorceress, who attempts his
destruction at one time and is in the service of the knights of the
Grail at another, anoints his feet and dries them with her hair, as the
Magdalen did the feet of Christ in the house of Simon the Pharisee.
Parsifal baptizes Kundry and admonishes her to believe in the
Redeemer:—
Die Taufe nimm
Und glaub’ an den Erlöser!
Kundry weeps. Unto the woman who was a sinner and wept at
His feet Christ said : “Thy sins are forgiven…. Thy faith hath saved
thee. Go in peace.” At the elevation of the grail by Parsifal
after the healing of Amfortas a dove descends from the dome and
hovers over the new king’s head. What saith the Scripture? “And Jesus,
when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water; and lo, the
heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending
like a dove, and lighting upon him.” (St. Matthew iii. 16.) It would be
idle to argue that these things are not Biblical, though the reported
allusions to Parsifal as a redeemer do not of necessity belong in
the category. We shall see presently that the drama is permeated with
Buddhism, and there were a multitude of redeemers and saviours in India
besides the Buddha.
Let us look at the liturgical elements. The Holy Grail is a
chalice. It is brought into the temple in solemn procession in a veiled
shrine and deposited on a table. Thus, also, the chalice, within its
pall, is brought in at the sacrament of the mass and placed on the altar
before the celebrant. In the drama boys’ voices sing in the invisible
heights:—
Nehmet hin mein Blut
Um unserer Liebe willen!
Nehmet hin meinem Leib
Auf dass ihr mein gedenkt!
Is there a purposed resemblance here to the words of consecration
in the mass? Accipite, et manducate ex hoc omnes. Hoc est enim Corpus
meum. Accipite, et bibite ex eo omnes. Hic est enim Calix sanguinis mei!
In a moment made wonderfully impressive by Wagner’s music, while
Amfortas bends over the grail and the knights are on their knees, a
ray of light illumines the cup and it glows red. Amfortas lifts
it high, gently sways it from side to side, and blesses the bread and
wine which youthful servitors have placed beside each knight on the
table. In the book of the play, as the hall gradually grows light the
cups before the knights appear filled with red wine, and beside each
lies a small loaf of bread. Now the celestial choristers sing: “The wine
and bread of the Last Supper, once the Lord of the Grail, through pity’s
love-power, changed into the blood which he shed, into the body which he
offered. To-day the Redeemer whom ye laud changes the blood and body of
the sacrificial offering into the wine poured out for you, and the bread
that you eat !“ And the knights respond antiphonally: “Take of the
bread; bravely change it anew into strength and power. Faithful unto
death, staunch in effort to do the works of the Lord. Take of the blood;
change it anew to life’s fiery flood. Gladly in communion, faithful as
brothers, to fight with blessed courage.” Are these words, or are they
not, a paraphrase of those which in the canon of the mass follow the
first and second ablutions of the celebrant : Quod ore sumpsimus
Domine, etc., and : Corpus tuum, Domine, etc.? He would be
but little critical who would deny it.
Nevertheless, it does not necessarily follow that Wagner wished
only to parody the eucharistic rite. He wanted to create a ceremonial
which should be beautiful, solemn, and moving; which should be an
appropriate accompaniment to the adoration of a mystical relic; which
should, in a large sense, be neither Catholic, Protestant, nor
Buddhistic; which should symbolize a conception of atonement older than
Christianity, older than Buddhism, older than all records of the human
imagination. Of this more anon. As was his custom, Wagner drew from
whatever source seemed to him good and fruitful; and though he doubtless
thought himself at liberty to receive suggestions from the Roman
Catholic ritual, as well as the German Lutheran, it is even possible
that he had also before his mind scenes from Christian Masonry. This
possibility was once suggested by Mr. F. C. Burnand, who took the idea
from the last scene of the first act only, and does not seem to have
known how many connections the Grail legend had with mediaeval
Freemasonry or Templarism. There are more elements associated with the
old Knights Templars and their rites in Wagner’s drama than I am able to
discuss. To do so I should have to be an initiate and have more space at
my disposal than I have here. I can only make a few suggestions : In the
old Welsh tale of Peredur, which is a tale of the quest of a magical
talisman, the substitute for the grail is a dish containing a bloody
head. That head in time, as the legend passed through the imaginations
of poets and romances, became the head of John the Baptist, and there
was a belief in the Middle Ages that the Knights Templars worshipped a
bloody head. The head of John the Baptist enters dimly into Wagner’s
drama in the conceit that Kundry is a reincarnation of Herodias,
who is doomed to make atonement, not for having danced the head off the
prophet’s shoulders, but for having reviled Christ as he was staggering
up Calvary under the load of the cross. But this is pursuing
speculations into regions that are shadowy and vague. Let it suffice for
this branch of our study that Mr. Burnand has given expression to the
theory that the scene of the adoration of the grail and the Love Feast
may also have a relationship with the ceremony of installation in the
Masonic orders of chivalry, in which a cup of brotherly love is
presented to the Grand Commander, who drinks and asks the Sir Knights to
pledge him in the cup ‘‘in commemoration of the Last Supper of our Grand
Heavenly Captain, with his twelve disciples, whom he commanded thus to
remember him.” Here, says Mr. Burnand, there is no pretence to
sacrifice. Participation in the wine is a symbol of a particular and
peculiarly close intercommunion of brotherhood.
To get the least offence from “Parsifal” it ought to be accepted in
the spirit of the time in which Christian symbolism was grafted on the
old tales of the quest of a talisman which lie at the bottom of it. The
time was the last quarter of the twelfth century and the first quarter
of the thirteenth. It is the period of the third and fourth crusades.
Relic worship was at its height. Less than a hundred years before (in
1101) the Genoese crusaders had brought back from the Holy Land as a
part of the spoils of Caesarea, which they were helpful in capturing
under Baldwin, a three-cornered dish, which was said to be the veritable
dish used at the Last Supper of Christ and his Apostles. The belief that
it was cut out of a solid emerald drew Bonaparte’s attention to it, and
he carried it away to Paris in 1806 and had it examined. It proved to be
nothing but glass, and he graciously gave it back to Genoa in 1814.
There it still reposes in the Church of St. John, but it is no longer an
object of worship, though it might fairly excite a feeling of
veneration. For 372 years Nuremberg possessed what the devout believed
to be the lance of Longinus, with which the side of Christ was opened.
The relic, like most objects of its kind (the holy coat, for instance),
had a rival which, after inspiring victory at the siege of Antioch,
found its way to Paris with the most sacred relics, for which Louis IX
built the lovely Sainte Chapelle; now it is in the basilica of the
Vatican, at Rome. The Nuremberg relic, however, enjoyed the advantage of
historical priority. It is doubly interesting, or rather was so, because
it was one of Wagner’s historical characters who added it to the
imperial treasure of the Holy Roman Empire. This was none other than
Henry the Fowler, the king who is righteous in judgment and tuneful of
speech in the opera “Lohengrin.” Henry, so runs the story, wrested the
lance from the Burgundian king, Rudolph III, some time about A.D. 929.
After many vicissitudes the relic was given for safe keeping to the
imperial city of Nuremberg, in 1424, by the Emperor Sigismund. It was
placed in a casket, which was fastened with heavy chains to the walls of
the Spitalkirche. There it remained until 1796. One may read about the
ceremonies attending its annual exposition, along with other relics, in
the old history of Nuremberg, by Wagenseil, which was the source of
Wagner’s knowledge of the mastersingers. The disruption of the Holy
Roman Empire caused a scattering of the jewels and relics in the
imperial treasury, and the present whereabouts of this sacred lance is
unknown. The casket and chains, however, are preserved in the Germanic
Museum at Nuremberg to this day, and there have been seen, doubtless, by
many who are reading these lines.
There is nothing in “Parsifal,” neither personage nor incident nor
thing, no principle of conduct, which did not live in legendary tales
and philosophical systems long before Christianity existed as a
universal religion. The hero in his first estate was born, bred, went
out in search of adventure, rescued the suffering, and righted wrong,
just as Krishna, Perseus, Theseus, Œdipus, Romulus, Remus, Siegfried,
and Wolf -Dietrich did before him. He is an Aryan legendary and mythical
hero-type that has existed for ages. The talismanic cup and spear are
equally ancient; they have figured in legend from time immemorial. The
incidents of their quest, the agonies wrought by their sight, their
mission as inviters of sympathetic interest, and the failure of a hero
to achieve a work of succor because of failure to show pity, are all
elements in Keltic Quester and Quest stories, which antedate
Christianity. Kundry, the loathly damsel and siren, has her
prototypes in classic fable and romantic tale. Read the old English
ballad of “The Marriage of Sir Gawain.” So has the magic castle of
Klingsor, surrounded by its beautiful garden. It is all the things
which I enumerated in the chapter devoted to “Tannhäuser.” It is also
the Underworld, where prevails the law of taboo — “Thou must,” or “Thou
shalt not;” whither Psyche went on her errand for Venus and came back
scot-free; where Peritheus and Theseus remained grown to a rocky seat
till Hercules came to release them with mighty wrench and a loss of
their bodily integrity. The sacred lance which shines red with blood
after it has by its touch healed the wound of Amfortas is the
bleeding spear which was a symbol of righteous vengeance unperformed in
the old Bardic day of Britain; it became the lance of Longinus which
pierced the side of Christ when Christian symbolism was applied to the
ancient Arthurian legends; and you may read in Malory’s “Morte d’Arthur”
how a dolorous stroke dealt with it by Balin opened a wound in the side
of King Pellam from which he suffered many years, till Galahad healed
him in the quest of the Sangreal by touching the wound with the blood
which flowed from the spear.
These are the folklore elements in Wagner’s “Parsifal.” It is plain
that- they might have been wrought into a drama substantially like that
which was the poet-composer’s last gift to art without loss of either
dignity or beauty. Then his drama would have been like a glorified fairy
play, imposing and of gracious loveliness, and there would have been
nothing to quarrel about. But Wagner was a philosopher of a sort, and a
sincere believer in the idea that the theatre might be made to occupy
the same place in the modern world that it did in the classic. It was to
replace the Church and teach by direct preachments as well as allegory
the philosophical notions which he thought essential to the salvation of
humanity. For the chief of these he went to that system of philosophy
which rests on the idea that the world is to be redeemed by negation of
the will to live, the conquering of all desire — that the highest
happiness is the achievement of nirvana, nothingness. This conception
finds its highest expression in the quietism and indifferentism of the
old Brahmanic religion (if such it can be called), in which holiness was
to be obtained by speculative contemplation, which seems to me the
quintessence of selfishness. In the reformed Brahmanism called Buddhism,
there appeared along with the old principle of self-erasure a
compassionate sympathy for others. Asceticism was not put aside, but
regulated and ordered, wrought into a communal system. It was purged of
some of its selfishness by appreciation of the loveliness of
compassionate love as exemplified in the life of Çakya-Muni and those
labors which made him one of the many redeemers and saviours of which
Hindu literature is full. Something of this was evidently in the mind of
Wagner as long ago as 1857, when, working on “Tristan und Isolde,” he
for a while harbored the idea of bringing Parzival (as he would have
called him then) into the presence of the dying Tristan to
comfort him with a sermon on the happiness of renunciation. Long before
Wagner had sketched a tragedy entitled “Jesus of Nazareth,” the hero of
which was to be a human philosopher who preached the saving grace of
love and sought to redeem his time and people from the domination of
conventional law, the offspring of selfishness. His philosophy was
socialism imbued by love. Before Wagner finished “Tristan und Isolde” he
had outlined a Hindu play in which hero and heroine were to accept the
doctrines of the Buddha, take the vow of chastity, renounce the union
toward which love impelled them, and enter into the holy community.
Blending these two schemes, Wagner created “Parsifal.” For this drama he
could draw the principle of compassionate pity and fellow-suffering from
the stories of both Çakya-Muni and Jesus of Nazareth. But for the sake
of a spectacle, I think, he accepted the Christian doctrine of the
Atonement with all its mystical elements; for they alone put the
necessary symbolical significance into the principal apparatus of the
play — the Holy Grail and the Sacred Lance.[1]
Footnotes:
- “Parsifal” was performed for the first time at the Wagner Festival Theatre in Bayreuth on July 28, 1882. The prescription that it should belong exclusively to Bayreuth was respected till December 24, 1903, when Heinrich Conried, taking advantage of the circumstance that there was no copyright on the stage representation of the work in America, brought it out with sensational success at the Metropolitan Opera-house in New York. The principal artists concerned in this and subsequent perform-ances were Milka Ternina (Kundry), Alois Burgstaller (Paraifal), Anton Van Rooy (Amfortas), Robert Blass (Gurnemanz), Otto Görlitz (Klingsor) and Louise Homer (a voice).
Last updated October 22, 2006