Building a Library
With unshakeable resolve, Michael Tanner sets out in his noble quest to find the finest recordings of Wagner’s final operatic masterpiece
Michael Tanner explores Wagner’s opera Parsifal
The work
Parsifal is Richard Wagner’s last musicdrama, composed from 1877-82 and performed at Bayreuth for the first time in July 1882, around six months before the composer’s death. But right from the 1840s when, in his 30s, Wagner read the medieval knight and poet Wolfram von Eschenbach’s epic Parzival, he was sure it would be his final opera.
Wagner was increasingly interested in medieval sagas, and applied himself like a hyper-motivated PHD student to studying them, making or breaking connections among them and brooding on what musical form he might give them, having extracted the dramatic content that interested him. He was especially fascinated by the Holy Grail and by the Spear that pierced Christ’s side at the Crucifixion, but also by pagan elements. To fire his imagination, Wagner always needed a confused collection of stories and names, which he then brought into relation with the ideas about humanity and culture that he garnered from his extravagantly wide reading in philosophy and religion.
Between the first sparks of inspiration for Parsifal and the final outcome, though, he was to be seen composing Lohengrin, running an opera house, taking part in a revolution that resulted in 12 years of exile, and planning an opera which became the four dramas of the Ring cycle. Those plans, in their turn, got interrupted by Wagner’s need to write Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger. So by the time he returned to what he always called ‘my work of farewell’, for which he had jotted down various ideas, he had plenty of material, both dramatic and conceptual, to work with.
By 1876 Wagner had six musicdramas composed, in which his abiding preoccupations – Love: Is it redemptive or destructive?; Is it possible not to be corrupted by Power?; What is the place of Art in a community? – were dealt with, mainly with rather depressing answers,
Music of transcendent beauty accompanies the narration of Gurnemanz, the old knight
though the music and action were stupendous. Now he envisaged a small community – the Knights of the Holy
Grail – which had the task of guarding the Grail (the cup in which Christ’s blood was caught while he hung on the Cross) and the
Spear. Amfortas, leader of the Knights of the Grail, had gone off to fight the heathen (before the opera’s action begins), but was seduced by Kundry (the drama’s only woman) and lost the Spear to her master Klingsor, who was immune to her charms because he had castrated himself in order to stop feeling lust.
The plot of Parsifal is all about getting the Spear back to heal the wound that it had inflicted on Amfortas, and so returning the community to its task and its stability. How to achieve that? Only by the incursion of a wholly ignorant person whose only knowledge comes through
Pity – a Pure Fool. All this we learn in the first hour of the drama, in which music of transcendent penetration and beauty accompanies the narration of Gurnemanz, the old knight who has seen it all and tells it to his ignorant juniors.
Wagner realised that to bring all this to life he must write music unlike any he or anyone else had written before – spare but harmonically and orchestrally audacious. Gurnemanz’s narration is hypnotically compelling as no other music is. It comes to an abrupt end, however, when a wounded swan drops onto the scene, shot by a youth who doesn’t even know his own name. Gurnemanz hopes it may be the Pure Fool, but at the Grail ceremony that Parsifal – the youth – has been invited to witness, he is merely bewildered, and Gurnemanz sends him away.
The rest of Parsifal consists of Kundry’s failed attempt to seduce Parsifal, and his final bringing the Spear back and healing Amfortas as he himself becomes the leader of the Knights. Big questions remain, but the music of Act III is of an order that prohibits our asking them, at least until some time after the work is over. Debussy, who was no fan of Wagner’s, wrote ‘Parsifal is one of the loveliest monuments of sound ever raised to the serene glory of music.’