Program booklet »Parsifal« by Wiener Staatsoper GmbH

R I C H A R D WAG N E R

PARSIFAL

CONTENTS

SYNOPSIS P.

TO KNOWINGLY LET HAPPEN PHILIPPE JORDAN P.

THE IDEA OF FREEDOM KIRILL SEREBRENNIKOV P.

PARSIFAL – AN INTRODUCTION MELANIE WALD-FUHRMANN

THE POSSIBILITY OF LAMENTATION IN JOY EGON VOSS P.

THE DRAMA OF THE SUFFERING CHRIST ULRIKE KIENZLE P.

IMPRINT

R I C H A R D WAG N E R

PARSIFAL BÜHNENWEIHFESTSPIEL in three acts

ORCHESTRA

3 flutes (3rd doubling piccolo) 3 oboes / cor anglais 3 clarinets / bass clarinet 3 bassoons / contrabassoon 4 horns / 3 trumpets 3 trombones / bass trombone timpani / bells / 2 harps violin I / violin II viola / cello / double bass 6 trumpets 6 trombones / drum

STAGE ORCHESTRA

AUTOGRAPH

Richard-Wagner-National-Archiv Bayreuth WORLD PREMIÈRE 26 JULY 1882 Festspielhaus Bayreuth PREMIÈRE AT THE HOUSE ON THE RING 14 JAN 1914 Vienna Court Opera DURATION

INCL. 2 INTERMISSIONS

PA R SIFA L

SYNOPSIS told by Kirill Serebrennikov

The mature Parsifal relives his youth in his memories. By narrating his story, time becomes space for him, where he meets his earlier self: he was a nameless inmate in Monsalvat, a detention center for criminals.

ACT 1 The prisoner Amfortas lives in constant rebellion against the inhuman conditions of the prison. Among the inmates he enjoys high respect because of his uncompromising stance. Driven by inner voices that compel him, in the name of his father Titurel, to “unveil the Holy Grail”, he inflicts wounds upon his own body. Kundry, a journalist with special permission to photograph within the detention center, acts as an intermediary for the inmates, exchanging goods and news from the outside world. Amfortas also receives medicines provided through her. Gurnemanz is the gray eminence in the brotherhood of prisoners. He explains that Amfortas’s traumatisation was caused by one of Klingsor’s female agents. A prophecy promises the victim however that he will be redeemed by a “pure simpleton.” Gurnemanz keeps the memory of this legend alive in the brotherhood. The nameless kills the “white swan,” a fellow prisoner, and thereby infringes on Gurnemanz’s monopoly on violence. Kundry tells the nameless man about the death of his mother, which he reacts to with increasing aggression. Gurnemanz is intrigued by the wild boy and promises him his rise upwards within the prison hierarchy. But the drama of Amfortas’ painful suffering and the dream of a cherished Holy Communion chalice, the “Grail” that appears as the symbol of freedom for the prisoners, remains for him completely incomprehensible.

Previous pages: NIKOLAY SIDORENKO as YOUNG PARSIFAL KS JONAS KAUFMANN as PARSIFAL

SYNOPSIS

ACT 2 Kundry works in the editorial departments of a magazine published by Klingsor. He and Kundry were once in a relationship. Klingsor has used Kundry’s dependence to get Amfortas arrested. Now Kundry should make the nameless young criminal, whose photos she is currently editing, also dependent on his power and his money. After his release, the nameless arrives at the editorial office for a photo shooting. As he is trying to get away from the female stylists, photographers and editors, Kundry calls him by the name Parsifal – a name that his mother once used to call him. More and more he falls under Kundry’s spell, conjuring up the memory of the possessive love from his single mother. After he left her, she allegedly died of a broken heart. Parsifal is filled with feelings of guilt and regret. Kundry offers him as consolation “a mother’s last blessed farewell, the first kiss of love.” In her arms, the wound of desire breaks open in Parsifal. At the same time, he understands that he is being manipulated like Amfortas and could also be taken advantage of. He pushes the “corrupting” Kundry away from him. In vain, Kundry attempts to employ all of her powers of seduction. As a last resort, she threatens him with violence: but Parsifal is more willing to die rather than to love her.

SYNOPSIS

ACT 3 Many years have passed. The prison has been decommissioned, but many former inmates still work and live within its walls. Only Gurnemanz still dreams of the promised “pure simpleton.” After awakening, he notices the aged Kundry within a group of old women. Then an unknown man arrives. Kundry recognises him first: it is Parsifal. As Parsifal becomes aware that he has again entered the place from his youth, he feels it almost like a homecoming. What he has experienced in his life up until then was the wrong path, full of “hardships, conflicts, and struggles.” Gurnemanz realises that Parsifal could be the longed-for redeemer who could give back to the fallen world a faith in a possible future. In an improvised ritual, he has the women wash Parsifal’s feet and anoints him the King of the Holy Grail. Parsifal is reconciled with Kundry. In view of the urn with his father Titurel’s remains, Amfortas accuses himself of patricide, and rages against himself and his companions. He is then redeemed of his suffering. Parsifal shows the way to freedom.

GEORG ZEPPENFELD as GURNEMANZ

PHILIPPE JORDAN

TO KNOWINGLY LET HAPPEN A SCORE OF RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT If we think of Tristan und Isolde as the Big Bang, Parsifal represents a sublimation, a form of perfection of this revolutionary innovation. Not least because Wagner created in his last piece of music theatre the essence of all his achievements and sources of inspiration. It is impressive how much of the mythology and characters of his previous creations for the stage is reflected in the characters in Parsifal, the compressed form the themes and aspects Wagner regularly ran through are brought together again here – mother fixation, redemption by the woman, erotic-sinful world versus pure-religious world, unattainable holy divine domain etc. But even in formal respects, many things had already been anticipated years earlier. The third act of Tannhäuser for example acts in its dramaturgical and musical structure like an anticipation of a miniature edition of Parsifal’s act 3, and many sequences in the Pilgrim’s Chorus and

the choruses of the Knights of the Grail are virtually identical. The central works in which Wagner found his innermost self, Tristan und Isolde and Meistersinger von Nürnberg, seem to have merged in a synthesis in Parsifal. The Tristan chromaticism as an expression of sensuality, the perfumes and alluring poisons are present in the Klingsor and Kundry atmosphere as well as in Amfortas’s world of suffering, we meet the Meistersinger diatonic inspired by the Baroque (and particularly Johann Sebastian Bach) again openly in the chorales of the Grail knights. Even so, Parsifal is more than the sum of these individual parts. It is more a summing-up, a retrospective on life typical for a late work of a great master, in which everything appears in much more refined and distilled form, blazing a so much more effective trail into the future, for composers such as Debussy, Humperdinck, Strauss, Mahler and even Schönberg.

TO KNOWINGLY LET HAPPEN

As for Bach, I’m firmly convinced that Wagner started looking intensively at his compositions very early on. Possibly the very theatrical Passions belong to Wagner’s first dramatic impressions, which never left him thereafter. Phrases like “Good rest I found here and sweet repose” in Die Walküre sound like the title of a cantata written by Picander, and the double choruses in Parsifal and passages reminiscent of turba choruses like “Uncover the Grail! Perform your office!” as well as the clear relationship between Gurnemanz’s recitative passages and the Evangelists reveal the deep fascination which a St Matthew Passion must have had for Wagner. Bach’s direct transition from the Gloria in 3/8 to the much calmer 4/4 of the “Et in terra pax” in the B-minor Mass was undoubtedly the godfather for the transition from the march to the entry into the Grail temple. Bach’s liking for deriving a new idea from a melody and making it autonomous (something which became standard later in jazz improvisation) is repeatedly reflected in Wagner. Incidentally, just as Wagner must have got to know the works of Bach while very young, he must also have known the “ Dresden Amen”, originally created by Johann Gottlieb Naumann for the liturgy of the mass, and soon very popular, which was known to have been adopted by numerous composers of the Romantic period. Wagner already quoted the melody in his Das Liebesverbot, ultimately forging it into an essential motif in Parsifal and incorporating it in the score so skilfully that most members of the audience came to believe in a paradoxical and anachronistic way that they recognised Wagner’s Grail motif in Naumann’s original.

Currently, many would possibly talk of plagiarism in such cases, but one aspect of Wagner’s genius – and that of many other prominent composers – was to make something unmistakably their very own. (This naturally also applies to influences from grand opéra.) But what is there in Parsifal that blazes a trail for the future? First, overcoming the music drama. Wagner has further advanced the invisible inner drama, he was interested in capturing in sound the emotional life of the characters. A great deal will deliberately only be described in the orchestra and expressed by the orchestra, there is an overall decrease in the length of the libretto, a few choice words will have the greatest possible impact, the mono logue principle dominates, redundancies are avoided, voices are treated more instrumentally and rhythmically divided by pauses and syncopation, sometimes extended towards sprechgesang. In addition, Wagner explores the limits of the tonal system to the utmost, both in Parsifal’s wanderings in the prelude to act 3 and even earlier in Kundry’s central kiss in act 2. In my view there are two decisive chords in Wagner’s oeuvre. Until Siegfried he used the diminished sixth chord regularly as the expression of maximum dissonance, later he extended this to the Tristan chord and created a new world of sound which he explored even more intensively in Parsifal than in Tristan und Isolde. Harmony became pure psychological expression. Ultimately, Wagner is heading in Parsifal towards absolute music, the performance is intended as a festival to dedicate the house, as religion as art at a higher level, designed

TO KNOWINGLY LET HAPPEN

to lead to collection, reinforcement, and exploration of the audience. Admittedly, the idea of the festival to dedicate the house is inseparably linked to the peculiarities of the Bayreuth Festival Theatre. The auditorium and the piece match ideally – for example, nowhere else will the prelude develop its very specific aura, nowhere else will be able to achieve the effect of indirect sound seeming to come from another world so optimally. This is why any conductor who wants to perform Parsifal at another theatre knows the place this work was created for. Even if it is impossible to transfer everything one-to-one, the interpreter will only achieve the purpose and effect of the precisely balanced, fine mix of instruments, the proto-Impressionist orchestration as a whole, and the immensely subtle colours of the score associated with this if they are familiar with the unique acoustic of the Festival Theatre. The same goes for the dramaturgy of the tempi. How quickly too slow erodes, and too fast loses the depth of detail can be best experienced in both directions in and through Bayreuth. My first contact with Parsifal was as a child through the eponymous film by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, in which my father acted as conductor and also performed as Amfortas. Intensive work

on the score, which I regularly delved into, followed from my teen years. The fact that I premièred this very complex work later in my time as musical director of Graz Opera without having previously conducted anything by Wagner but Der fliegende Holländer I would describe in retrospect as daring, and I would not recommend it as an approach to young colleagues. In any case, it has come with me since in many performances on all sorts of stages, and the more often I was able to perform it, the clearer it became to me that Parsifal, like Pelléas et Mélisande is one of those works which a conductor cannot control to the finest detail in performance. They must know and embrace everything said above, must work with the other performers on the libretto and dynamic, should set decisive stimuli at key points, reveal the deeper sense of certain harmonies and musical contexts to the audience. (For example, when Wagner in act 2 has the orchestra play his most erotic chord for Kundry’s “love’s first kiss”, this is naturally deliberate, and requires an interpretative decision.) But ultimately the conductor cannot only lead in Parsifal, they must allow a lot to simply happen to do the work justice with its mighty dimensions.

KS ELĪNA GARANČA as KUNDRY

KIRILL SEREBRENNIKOV

THE IDEA OF FREEDOM At the end of his career, Wagner takes a look back over his entire artistic creation in a “festival to dedicate the house.” Amfortas is an “enhanced Tristan”, Wagner’s Siegfried figure is subsumed in Parsifal, Kundry is a reincarnation of Erda, Brünnhilde and Venus all together, Klingsor unites features of Alberich and Wotan, Hagen and Beckmesser. Wagner invokes the musical aura of these figures and takes them to a last refinement and sublimation. This opera, created in the second half of the 19th century, is unusual in many ways, inviting us to think about our lives. I am a Buddhist and believe in something absolute. However, the absolute is not always – or perhaps more accurately, almost never – to be found where one generally assumes and imag ines, and definitely not in theological arguments and disputes. These always just end up with building pyres for heretics – and in a way Wagner’s religious and philosophical theories have acted at least as starters for other pyres. I developed my concept for the staging from Wagner’s compositional and dramaturgic perspective for recollection in Parsifal. A grown man of my age remembers the young man, almost still

a lad, that he once was. Wagner’s music arises for us from the inner arc of the protagonist and is in the context of an attempted staging. I show the first two acts of the opera in the rear mirror of memory for this person. Parsifal is caught up or overwhelmed in his memories, sometimes he gets lost in them. He discovers things that have been repressed. He tries to control his memory and – like all of us – to gloss over experiences involving pain and shame. And we all know moments in our life where we would like to have behaved very differently than we did. After the gap in time separating the first two acts from the third, we have reached the present or recent past of our narrator. In all three acts there is what I see as a ritual or even mystic encounter between the past and present Parsifal. They are looking in each other’s eyes, strangers or suddenly getting very close again to the one they once were or that they will sometime be. It is important for me to emphasise that I’ve created a poetic space for recollection in which there can be contradictions – just as in our recollections – and where different levels overlap or

THE IDEA OF FREEDOM

can cross-fade. Naturally, every memory has gaps and blanks. The boundaries of actual experience and imagination are fluid – for all the cinematographic reality my production works with. Parsifal’s recollection starts when he was still new in prison and very brutally murdered a fellow prisoner. Wagner himself has Gurnemanz describe Parsifal’s killing of the swan as “murder.” The swan didn’t do anything to Parsifal, he presumably shot it for the sheer pleasure of it. “I can hit anything that flies!” he brags. In any case, Parsifal enters the piece with the murder of a innocent being whose blood he arbitrarily spills. The dead swan at the beginning of the piece corresponds to the hovering dove which appears at the end. For us, the dead swan opens its eyes again at this point and seems to return to life, smiling – a great sign of hope. The knights of the Grail, as Wagner shows them at the start of the piece, have clearly lost part of their faith, presumably even the most important and decisive part. The Grail, as I understand it, is the idea of freedom generally – and this is why it conflicts with the brotherhood of the Grail community. The knights are trapped in their dogmatic struggle against everything worldly. They are going through the world in blinders, giving them an increasingly distorted and constricted perception. The prison in my staging is a metaphor for a limited, shrunken world which they have locked themselves in, and where everything else happens just as it should do. And naturally a life behind prison walls is one of the possible readings which my staging offers for the phrase “Here, time becomes space.” The events in this opera are dystopic. The characters have lost all faith, all

love, all hope. We see how people try to create a new eclectic religion from the wreckage, clichés, fragments, and splinters of former religious certainties. They do this both in the prison world of the two outdoor acts where Gurnemanz tattoos symbols of faith on the prisoners’ skin and in Klingsor’s sorcerous castle, where they are commercialised as fashionable accessories and fetishes. This indirectly makes a theme of Wagner’s own mythical bricolage. We mustn’t reduce Parsifal as a work of art to its presumed “message.” We can’t use the theatre as a bullhorn for an ethic of compassion which has proved historically open to compromise. However, we can show how contradictory and discontinuous the process of spiritual exploration is. This means that the first law for telling a story also applies here. Don’t think back from the presumed happy ending, but explore every scenic moment, open to the result. The eminence grise of the prisoners is Gurnemanz. Like all the other characters in the piece, he is a very complex person. Not least, he is a skilful moderator, who exercises authority and influence not directly but out of the second row. Given Amfortas’s failure, who in our performance always inflicts on him self the wound he is labouring over, Gurnemanz is looking for a new king. By the end of act 1, he is already trying to win over the young Parsifal, but the two only get together in act 3 under entirely different auspices. I see Amfortas as Klingsor’s brother. I indicate this blood relationship by having very similar costumes for the two. We don’t know the details that led to Amfortas’s imprisonment. His brother Klingsor, a “fallen angel”, has certainly framed him for something.

THE IDEA OF FREEDOM

He’s a media mogul who makes people dependent on him – the consumers of his marketing strategies just as much as the employees he exploits. Kundry is another of his victims. She brought Amfortas behind bars on his orders and despite a passionate love for him. This is what draws her repeatedly to the prison. She loves Amfortas and wants to really help him. Klingsor leads a ruthless life of luxury, but everything has its price. He overestimates his power, and at the end Kundry decides to destroy him rather than Parsifal. At the end of act 2, she accordingly destroys his mastery of illusion and fair seemingly based on manipulation and abuse of power. In telling Kundry’s story I’m in conflict with Wagner. It’s a patriarchal pose of the 19th century which uses the term “service” to define the role of woman in the piece. For Wagner, Kundry as the only woman in the piece (except for the flower maidens) must try to become part of this male world. In other words, she has to assimilate – and we know that Wagner pressured the Jewish conductor of the world première to convert

to Christianity. This is the destructive and shameful converse of Parsifal’s “Be baptised and believe in your redeemer!” I wish that Kundry would resist, and not give up at the end but cling to hope. Any naïve image would coarsen the subtle association of meanings in Wagner’s score. Look at the staging in conventional performances of the miracle of the spear hanging in the air. Attempts like these to illustrate the miracles re alised musically in Wagner’s score result in the opposite of the desired magical effects. I accordingly neither will nor can illustrate Wagner’s Parsifal one-to-one, although all Wagner’s symbols are present in our staging – the chalice, the spear, the cross, “the Saviour’s angelic messengers” and so on. But I believe that the actual meta physics happens in real life. When filming material for our Parsifal around Moscow last December, we discovered a concrete ruin. It was incredibly cold, and at the same time the sunlight shone in through the holes in the destroyed walls. A magical and surreal moment in its beauty. As an artist I discover God in this beauty.

NIKOLAY SIDORENKO as YOUNG PARSIFAL KS ELĪNA GARANČA as KUNDRY

M E L A N I E WA L D -F U H R M A N N

PARSIFAL – AN INTRODUCTION THE DEVELOPMENT The tales about the Grail, the figure of Parsifal and also an interest in the historical figure of Christ occupied Wagner for almost his entire artistic life. From the first contact with the material to completion of the score, Parsifal took about 40 years. After Wagner became familiar with the life and work of Wolfram von Eschenbach in 1842 in the course of his ideas for Tannhäuser and Lohengrin and so also got to know his Parsifal figure, he deepened this knowledge during his summer stay in Marienbad in 1845. In connection with another mediaeval epic, Tristan und Isolde, Wagner’s interest in the figure of Parsifal then reached the stage of initial concepts. In 1854 he outlined for the start of act 3 of Tristan an encounter between Parsifal, wandering in search of the Grail, and the weakened Tristan, but he then rejected this. The relocation to asylum in Zurich is associated with an experience of nature which became a seed of inspiration for Parsifal in the form of the “Good Friday magic” music, and according to Wagner in his autobiography Mein Leben led directly to a prose outline (which has not been preserved)

for a three-act drama. During the completion of Tristan there were several letters to Mathilde Wesendonck containing concrete ideas, groups of characters and conceptual details (October 1858 to April 1860). The “salvation of the world through compassion”, the dual nature of Kundry, the problem and similarity to Tristan of Amfortas’s suffering, the essence and relationship between Grail and Spear, the structure in the form of “three primary situations with drastic content” are already present in their final form, which varies decisively from Wolfram’s original. This phase can accordingly be seen as the actual period of Parsifal’s conception. The Parsifal project got decisive external encouragement from the patronage of Ludwig II. The first detailed prose draft of Parsifal (still using Wolfram’s spelling of Parzival) was made for Ludwig II at the end of August 1865, which would only differ from the performed version in some omitted dialogue and explanations. Wagner made a close study of the essence and ritual of the mass and the transmission of the Grail saga.

PARSIFAL – AN INTRODUCTION

The years after the world première of the Ring des Nibelungen in the summer of 1876 were then devoted exclusively to work on Parsifal, in accordance with a schedule already documented in 1864. This is when Wagner decided on “Parsifal” as the form of the name. The libretto took four weeks, and was published by Schott in 1877. In contrast to the Ring, alliteration is largely avoided, and important lines are emphasised by end rhymes. The lines are uneven in length, promoting the “musical prose.” Composition was slow but steady. Entries in Cosima’s diaries document the creative process in greater detail than any other of Wagner’s works. The draft composition was completed on 26 April, 1879. Instrumentation took up the months from August 1879 to January 1882. Also in 1882 a piano reduction arranged by Joseph Rubinstein, a commentary on the leitmotifs by Hans von Wolzogen and a commentary on the piece by Otto Eichberg appeared, to prepare for the world première and to popularise and capitalise on it. Although the Good Friday music proved to be just one of many steps in the development, and not even the first, we still have to take seriously the emphasis which Wagner placed on the experience in Mein Leben (and largely invented). Clearly, he was concerned with such a myth of the work’s creation to highlight the Christian aspect of the “last and holiest of my works” (letter to Ludwig II dated 28 September 1880) and the central nature of the Compassion and Salvation themes and to recur to the interweaving of life and work. Something else which is not un usual for Wagner is the accompaniment

of a composition by an aesthetic work, in this case the 1880 essay Religion und Kunst (“Religion and Art”) and the subsequent “Regeneration writings.”

DRAMATURGY The enormously compressed story, the close links between inner processes and physical action and the formal rigour make Parsifal Wagner’s most stringent dramatic work. The three acts display a mirror symmetry. Act 3 repeats the action of act 1 and resolves its conflicts. Act 2 presents an archetypal contrast with these in setting, dramatis personae and music. While rituals play a part in the stage action in almost all Wagner’s dramatic creations, this aspect takes on a previously unknown intensity in Parsifal and represents an inner fusion of form and content – to this extent the two outdoor acts lead to the presentation of a ritual, communion, and the work as a whole was conceived as a religious consecration or mystery play. The action takes place in a mountainous area of the character of the Pyrenees, which acts as a border dividing the pure Christian (“Gothic”) world from the fallen and heathenish (“Arabian”) world. The Grail castle lies on the northern slope, Klingsor’s sorcerer’s castle on the southern slope. Sacred and ensorcelled territories abut. In this way, Wagner transfers the ethical dichotomy to a geographical situation of suggestive dialectic. The personal constellation is also complicated and suggestive. Amfortas and Parsifal each reflect Christ in a certain way, Amfortas in his suffering and Parsifal in his purity and act of redemption. The experience of seduction by Kun-

M E L A N I E WA L D -F U H R M A N N

dry also links them closely, as losing and regaining the spear, as failed and new Grail king, they are diametrically opposed. At the same time, Amfortas is the exact opposite of Christ in his sinfulness – he suffers for his own guilt. What is divided here between two characters meets in the complex figure of Kundry. Depending on whether she is in the Grail world or world of sorcery, she resembles Mary Magdalene after or before her conversion and also has diabolical aspects (as a seducer) and characteristics of the Wandering Jew, Klingsor also has two sides, the longing for the purity of the Grail and the unmanageable drive.

MUSIC Wagner essentially retains the musical techniques and forms of expression developed at the latest since Rheingold and Tristan, but compresses them and adapts them to the presentation in a way that evokes labels like “late style” or “new reflective tone.” The vocal line is closely aligned with the rhythm of speech, primarily declamatory and dialoguing. Flexible, changing tempi characterise narrative and action passages, while commentary and introspection are more tightly assembled. The role of Kundry is without parallel in Wagner’s work. Short, clipped phrases, awkward leaps in pitch and abrupt changes of register give her a positively Expressionistic style. There are no ensembles, instead the chorus is rehabilitated in the extended chorus scenes. Periodical numbers which are more closed in formal harmonic terms are restricted to the ritual and attempted seduction by the flower maidens and Kundry.

As with his other music dramas, Wagner also chooses a specific and often shaded tonal colour for Parsifal. This is done primarily through refined registration and mixed sounds. The contrast between the acts is also emphasised by specific tonal colours and symbolically used instruments. After the high, shimmering spheres of the Grail world, act 2 emerges from pulsing sounds of the low strings, contrabassoon, low horn and bass clarinet. The harmony is equally differentiated. Although Parsifal is one of the very few Wagner works to follow a tonal arc from A flat major through B minor/D major back to A flat, harmonically stable passages are rare within the acts. The focus of the steady harmonic low is on relationships of thirds between the chords and dominant – admittedly mostly unresolved – chords, which as the case might be are woven into fields of extended or even largely suspended tonality. The need for resolution of almost all the key figures is directly perceptible sensuously through the unresolved chords. The contribution of the music to the drama through the interaction of the orchestra with words and stage continues in the leitmotifs. Commentary motifs function as omniscient narrators, supplementing the specific knowledge of the characters and putting this into relationship. The web of motifs that Wagner spins through the score is very dense. He achieves a new diversity in the introduction and enhanced significance of the motifs. Stage music is used for exposition through entrance or naming (Grail motif as the morning call of the horns on stage), quotation (prophecy of the Fool) or tonal depiction of action not visible on stage

PARSIFAL – AN INTRODUCTION

(Kundry’s first entrance). Object motifs are reduced to Grail and Spear, with motifs linked with individuals (often several for each individual), emotional states and particularly religious ideas. Symphonic techniques such as derivation of motifs and relationships are used to explore the depths of the action. In this way the fatal relationship between Amfortas and Kundry is made sensuously apparent musically long before the revelation in the libretto. The opening Communion motif acts as a generating principle from which the Grail (opening turn) and Spear motifs (closing turn) can be derived, as well as the pain motif which runs through the drama. The three preludes have a particu larly important function. These state the main motifs – anticipating the later exposition in the stage action – and provide symphonic motivic structures which are integrated into the action of the following act and furnished with text. Wagner ensures largely intuitive comprehension of his motifs once again by rich quotation from the wealth of topoi in European music. The Communion theme, with its syncopated and apparently free rhythm, range, melodic line and unison, is reminiscent of the sound of the chorale. The sound of brass in the Grail and Parsifal motif stands for the disposition of power, while the leaps, dottings and exuberant rhythms of the latter motif present untroubled naïveté. In addition, the motifs are also extremely flexibly handled to carry out the inner and outer transformations. The Parsifal theme in particular is repeatedly transformed in line with the process of the hero’s growing maturity until it finally sounds regal.

ART, RELIGION AND SALVATION The decisive controversies over the appropriate understanding of this work still turn on the actual significance of the religious aspect, the authenticity of the Christian characteristics, which are more than simply referred to, the admiration of sexual asceticism, and the function as a festival to dedicate the house. It was only in the second half of the 20th century that criticism turned to aspects of the implicit gender roles and the latent antisemitism – both of these particularly with regard to the figure of Kundry and Wagner’s behaviour towards the Jewish conductor of his world première, Hermann Levi, who he several times urged to convert – the adulation of a charismatic redeeming leadership and the elitist “master caste” (Hartmut Zelinsky) of the Grail community. In Parsifal, Wagner comes back once again to the question of the redemption which runs throughout his work, but acquires new perspectives through its replication. First, it is not a woman offering her life to redeem a single man, but a man not only surviving but raised to kingship who himself redeems a woman, a man, a whole community and the Saviour present in the sanctuary of the Grail. The underlying structure of guilt is the sexual drive. This defines both Klingsor and Amfortas and Kundry. She has also made herself guilty by taking pleasure in the suffering of others, which is diametrically opposed to compassion. It is only Parsifal’s rejection of egotism, his transformation of lust into compassion and insight that can redeem from this entangle-

PARSIFAL – AN INTRODUCTION

ment, where redemption is purification and healing (Grail world, Amfortas) on the one hand and release from immortality (Kundry) on the other hand. Like almost all concepts of church and religious reform before him, Wagner distinguishes between the authentic message of Christ and the structures and dogmas of the official church. As an artist, he sees his task not as church reform, but as transferring the philosophical core of the Christian religion to art, “One could say that when religion has become artificial, it is the task of art to rescue the core of religion by

using the mythical symbols, which religion wants us to believe in literally, as just symbols, to make the deep truth that is hidden in them evident through ideal presentation.” The heir of religion is accordingly art, and with regard to Christianity specifically it is music, as Wagner was already convinced before 1880 “that music reveals the inmost essence of the Christian religion with incomparable exactness [...] As a pure form, we may regard music as a world-redeeming birth of the divine doctrine of the vanity of the world of appearances.”

Next pages: SCENE

R I C H A R D WAG N E R , T H E E V E N I N G B E F O R E THE WORLD PREMIÈRE OF PARSIFAL

IN MANY OF MY WRITINGS I HAVE REPEATEDLY SAID WHERE OUR ART COMES FROM: IT COMES FROM THE PORTABLE STAGE, FROM SHAKESPEARE’S THEATRE.

EGON VOSS

THE POSSIBILITY OF LAMENTATION IN JOY AN OUTLINE CHARACTERISATION OF THE MUSIC OF PARSIFAL While Parsifal is undeniably Richard Wagner’s last work, written at the end of a life that lasted almost seventy years, it would be wrong to assume that it has the characteristics of a late style, for example slimmed-down aesthetic or refined simplicity. Adorno’s claim, for example, that the number of musical motifs is “smaller than in other works of the mature period” is an exaggeration, if not false. First, the unique way that Wagner used motifs does not allow any unique definition of what we can call a motif and what not. Second, a glance at the motif tables that were so popular earlier in piano scores and textbooks shows that avid motif hunters did not find fewer motifs in Parsifal than in Die Meistersinger or Tristan. The restrained aspect of the Parsifal music, which looks like mellow simplicity, and its suggestion of uncomfortable sparseness over long passages of Wagnerian lushness are deceptive. The music of Parsifal is one of exquisitely refined sensuality, and is anything but simple, as evinced not only in its external structure but equally (if not even more strongly) in its inner content, its

character and expressiveness, meaning and significance. If we describe Wagner’s art as one of ambivalence and ambiguity, then Parsifal is its ultimate manifestation. Here, everything seems connected to everything else, its “magic of association” (Thomas Mann) is taken to an extreme, tipping over into enigma with a level of complexity which is indecipherable – which then makes it capable of countless resolutions. Consider just the enigmatic general pauses which, although they also have structural meaning, do not feed into it. The motivic relationships between Kundry’s music and the music of heartbreak have led Kurt Overhoff to suggest that heartbreak is an incarnation of Kundry. And what does it mean when Titurel’s coffin is opened in act 3 and we hear the rapidly descending figure from the Kundry motif? The list of examples can be extended at will. The external appearance of dissociation is always connected, often with a sense of paradox, in accordance with Wagner’s expression developed specifically for the music of Parsifal of the “possibility of lamentation in joy.”

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The most remarkable feature of the music of Parsifal is its musical dramaturgy, which departs from tradition (or, more cautiously, from convention), and whose most important characteristic is a different relationship with time. This is most evident in the movement of the music, which is slow and conveys slowness. Adorno quite rightly notes that the music in Parsifal avoids for the most part the “moment of gathering pace” otherwise so characteristic of Wagner. However, it not only avoids the energetic and spirited momentum and the associated broad dynamic arc – as if the untroubled motion that seems to lie at the heart of music is taboo – but mostly blocks even simple continuation of the flow, as if the music is repeatedly coming to a halt or never leaves the state of immobility. There are many ways in which it does this. Particularly striking are the numerous pauses which restrain or interrupt the movement. This applies particularly to full-bar general pauses at points where they are theatrically unexpected (for example, Amfortas’s first entrance after “Without leave?”), giving the impression that the music has to repeatedly stop and think. In any case, the long pauses are not moments of mere silence, which Wagner – as Titurel’s address to Amfortas in act 1 clearly shows – is much more likely to include in the composition. The impression of suspended movement is also conveyed by fermatas which excessively extend notes and sounds, an impression which is mostly given by the fact that many notes and sounds are lengthy in any case. A similar effect is given by the repeated tendency to override or at least disguise the metre through syncopated notation. The best example is

the start of the prelude with the unison Communion motif. It would be completely wrong to play the syncopations as written, as this would lead to a tempo which could be expressed in delimited metric units. This is not what is intended. Here again, it is a question of communicating a different and less rationally comprehensible form of time and movement, of overriding time as we usually experience it. A third key technique leading in this direction are soundscapes, with self-contained or even looping sounds, such as the music to Amfortas’s “glorious morning”, and ostinati such as the Bells motif and its treatment. The constantly steady movement ultimately overlays the movement itself, giving rise to a paradox of moving stillness or motionless movement. The rhythmic processes countering the flow of time and “gathering pace” are joined by the harmonic ones. The impression of the music advancing or even gathering pace is aroused – particularly in Wagner – by a harmony which generates tensions which the listener expects to be resolved. In Parsifal this causality or dramatic consistency which emphasises the sequential nature of events is frequently transformed into a neutral parallelism. Wagner achieves this effect primarily by avoiding dominant connections which seem to advance logically and dynamically in the sense of traditional cadences and modulations. Instead of these, he prefers subdominant sequences. They characterise motifs like the Grail and Faith motifs, motivic sequences – see the final chorus – and closing phrases. Frequently, distant keys are juxtaposed without warning or transition, or modulations are

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replaced by abrupt shifts, as in the transformation music in act 1. In act 3 in particular, there are series of triads in root position, giving an archaic feel which tends in the same direction. The unconnected parallel chords create an impression of space, in an analogy with Gurnemanz’s famous words,“Here, time becomes space!” Parsifal, as the music shows, is not a traditional linear narration of a story, however much the libretto seems to give this impression, at least superficially. Consider, however, that the dramatis personae are all outside customary human temporality. Mortality, as manifested in death, appears as the exception, a deviation from the norm. Kundry, the female lead, and above all the thorn in the flesh of the Grail world, is a being who has explicitly lived for thousands of years in different forms, resembling each other in not being identical, and outside time and place. Causality and discursivity apply to a very limited extent, if at all. The composer is interested by the non-rational or even irrational aspects of the story, and he makes the music their advocate. The slow progression of the Parsifal music has always tempted musicians to adopt particularly slow tempi for their performances, as if one requires the other. It must be admitted that there are more slow tempo marks in Parsifal than in Wagner’s other works. The subtitle of the work seems to provide an irrefutable justification of slower tempi. In any case, people saw the festival to dedicate the theatre primarily as a drama committed to and dominated by dedication and saw dedication – based on the undeniable similarity of the action in acts 1 and 3 to Christian and sacred liturgy – as a naturally religious, mystical and

elevated phenomenon, which required a ceremonial nature in performance. While this view has become traditional, it conflicts with Wagner’s own understanding. Wagner himself had a relatively prosaic view of deduction, at least as shown in his 1882 essay “Das Bühnenweihfestspiel in Bayreuth” (The festival to dedicate the house in Bayreuth), a retrospective of the 1882 festival with the first Parsifal performances. In this, dedication is identical with the enthusiasm inspiring and uniting the performing musicians, singers and actors and the entire ensemble of collaborators in the artistic work. Dedication here describes the unique spirit of the performances, whose special nature Wagner saw as remote from the usual opera house and its activity, and indeed from the everyday world and life generally. This is what Wagner means by the “Weihe der Weltentrückung” (dedication of retreat from the world) he writes about in his essay. In any case, there can be no doubt that dedication as described in Wagner’s essay has nothing religious, mystical and elevated, liturgical and ceremonial or the like about it. Slow tempi are accordingly not required to achieve dedication as understood in these terms. Wagner’s essay also provides information (even if only indirect) about the tempi as he saw them. The maxim for singing was “sustaining long melodic lines without interruption”, by singing in a single breath – “unification of the entire phrase by sustained breathing”, as Wagner put it. Given such ideas, particularly slow tempi are impossible. Otherwise, Wagner was frequently unsatisfied with the tempi chosen for the first performances

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in 1882, as Cosima Wagner’s diaries show. They seemed to him above all “drawn out.” This is also confirmed by the notes taking by several assistants and collaborators during the 1882 rehearsals. There are repeated demands in these not to drag things out. Wagner’s rehearsal notes, which have been available since 1970 in the Richard Wagner Complete Edition and are accordingly accessible to anyone, also show that many instructions in Wagner’s score which look like a tempo mark should be understood more as an indication of the character than the tempo, and performed accordingly. For example, Wagner wanted the mark “broad” to be understood more as its expression than its tempo. Various instructions which seem imprecise and easily caught up in the wake of the traditional slow Parsifal tempi, take on a clearer aspect if you take the trouble to see them in context of the other markings and instructions – in other words, in the context which generally give meaning to the tempi, In context, the frequent marking “moderately” for example is by no means a call for a slow tempo, as it is all too often misunderstood, but as a medium tempo in the sense of allegretto. The slow nature of the Parsifal music accordingly has little or nothing to do with slow tempi, but – to describe it paradoxically – the slow nature of the Parsifal music is more concealed than revealed through slow tempi, as the slow tempi merely convey a superficial ceremonial nature, which is not intended, and obstruct the experience of the change in musical time in Parsifal, which is what is really involved. If we consider the history of the development of Wagner’s Parsifal, we

might conjecture that Wagner conceived and developed the music for the piece from the music of the flower maidens. On 9 February 1876, almost a year before starting work on Parsifal, Wagner noted – totally independent of Parsifal and without any text – the melody and setting of the subsequent “Come! Pretty boy!” which he assigned a week later (16 February, 1876) – and this seems particularly remarkable – to Parsifal and the flower maidens. The fact that this music really planted the seed is clear firstly from the key of A flat major, the key not only of the work as a whole, that it opens and closes in, but also the key of the Grail world, and the three central Grail motifs, Grail, Communion and Faith. But this is not all. The “Come! Pretty boy!” also contains the rising progression of seconds, from the fifth to the octave in parallel sixths from the Dresden Amen, which is constitutive for the Grail motif. In this connection there is an indication of what else “Come! Pretty boy!” leads to, namely that the Grail and Klingsor worlds, opposite poles in their subject and text, are very close allied musically – not to say identical. The flower maidens’ scene begins in the orchestra with the rising triad with a following sixth, as if starting a variation of the Communion motif. In particular, it is followed by a sequence from the third, as in the Communion motif, which also starts from A flat and then from C Subsequently, the melody descending from A flat to E flat of the first solo flower is a variation on the Faith motif. And the “Why do you complain?” is derived from the first orchestral interlude in the chorus “To the Last Supper” from act 1.

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In this connection it is also relevant that the chord which is the basis for Kundry’s motif – which can be seen essentially as a minor triad with a major sixth, mostly in the bass – appears in numerous turns relating to the Grail world, the assumed intact world of salvation. The reference to Lohengrin alone, expressed in the unmistakable quotation of the Swan motif, leads our thoughts to the Grail’s A major. It seems that in Parsifal A major, the secret, concealed Grail key, is almost nervously avoided throughout the whole piece, and only explicitly appears once, directly before Gurnemanz reveals the Grail’s prophecy of the salvation of Amfortas, the prophecy of the Fool. In the context of this idea, A flat major, the Grail key in Parsifal as a muted, darkened derivation from A major, is an indication that the world of the Grail in Parsifal is not so pure and spotless as it is in Lohengrin, and – particularly remarkable – to all appearances never will be again. The darkening of the sound is one of the crucial characteristics of the music of Parsifal. Pure high-lying violin tone, as we know it from Lohengrin as the other Grail opera and would expect it here, is limited to a few brief passages, like distant memories of the older piece. In the Good Friday spell, the high-lying violin cantilena, which otherwise is reduced before it can fully sound, is broken off (act 3, bar 742). The instrumentation is dominated by mixed sounds involving mostly instruments in the mid to lower range. This is clearly evident from the requirement for an alto oboe instead of the usual cor anglais, an instrument which has greater sonority and – in particular – a darker sound (but is otherwise not used these days).

The comparatively frequent use of a solo bassoon, which Wagner otherwise did not particularly favour as a solo instrument, also shows the preference for darker sounds. However, the prime example of a darker sound is the instrumentation of the Parsifal motif on his entry in act 3, when the trumpet and trombones play pianissimo with the horns. The darkening also applies to the ranges and keys used. The inclination to the flat keys is unmistakable – keys, which at least in the 19th century had a darker colour associated with them, more night than day. Whether flat keys are objectively darker is irrelevant – it is, however, clear that there was a firm belief in the 19th century that the character of the key required music in flat keys to be played differently to music in sharp keys. The accidentals are an instruction for playing, a sign of character. The darker trend continues in the harmony, in the preference noted earlier for subdominant links, the tendency towards harmonic secondary steps, particularly in the minor, and the use of archaic chord progressions. The prime example of these is the sequence of pure triads in “Is this the effect of the holy day?” in act 3 (bar 151), which subsequently recurs several times, and is incidentally a minimally changed quote from the beginning of Palestrina’s Stabat mater (which appeared in print in Richard Wagner’s arrangement in the summer of 1878). The principle of darkening, of leaving in the dark or immersing in the dark goes along with the described tendency to ambivalence and ambiguity. For example, in the orchestral bars after Parsifal’s “The last path to deliverance escapes me!” in act 3 there are two hidden quotes from other Wagner

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operas. First, there is a reference in the clarinet to the Venus melody “come, beloved, see yonder grotto” (bars 448 et seq.) from Tannhäuser and then the Tristan chord and its resolution appear three times in succession, once actually in the same key and range as in Tristan und Isolde (bars 456, 458, 460). This does not fit what’s happening on the stage at the time – Kundry is fetching water for the unconscious Parsifal – but who is willing to determine exactly what it means otherwise? All that is certain is that the relationship between Parsifal and Kundry is still coloured even in act 3 by eroticism or the desire for it. It also seems unclear why Amfortas’s Suffering motif – the descending bass figure that first appears in act 1 at “It is time to expect the king” – remains unchanged to the end of the opera. The augmented triad which characterises this motif and is its most strik-

ing feature (G-B-D sharp on the second and third beats) is a harsh dissonance, at least for 19th century taste, and as such a logical expression of Amfortas’s suffering. As the libretto tells the story, however, the suffering ends with Parsifal’s admission to the Grail and the contact of the spear with the wound. Even so, the Amfortas motif maintains its dissonance, even where the libretto says, “Be whole, absolved and healed!” The general sense here would surely be that the dissonance would be resolved, and the motif modified to match the events on the stage. The music in Parsifal often seems to cast doubt on the libretto, which seems so definite and direct, so decided and unambiguous in its solutions and answers. Wagner as the composer contradicts Wagner the librettist, and – very much the modern author – is content to pose questions, presumably because he is no longer certain of the answers.

Next page: LUDOVIC TÉZIER as AMFORTAS

R I C H A R D WAG N E R

The Grail is the crystal chalice from which the Saviour once drank at the Last Supper and passed to His disciples to drink from. Joseph of Arimathea used it to catch the blood which flowed from the spear wound in the Saviour’s side on the cross. It was mysteriously hidden from the sinful world as the Holiest of Holies for a long time. Finally, when in the roughest and most hostile time and under pressure from the pagans, Christianity’s holy need was greatest, the desire for the miraculously fortifying sanctuary mentioned in old tales drove fervent heroes seized with the desire for holy love to seek the vessel in which the Saviour’s blood (sangue réale – which became San Greal – Sanct Gral – the Holy Grail), living and divinely reviving, had been preserved for a humanity in need of healing.

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THE DRAMA OF THE SUFFERING CHRIST THE SACRED MUSIC OF PARSIFAL God, Wagner wrote in the Bayreuther Blätter for 1880, does not live in heaven but “in the depths of the human heart”, as the German mystics had “illuminatingly” discovered. But because this god had been driven out of the modern world, “he left us music to remember him by.” This is why the drama of the suffering Christ is expressed in music. “You cannot paint Christ”, Wagner told Cosima on 22 October 1882, and he refers explicitly to Parsifal, “but you can portray him in music.” Accordingly, we should seek the drama of Christ less in the text of the festival to dedicate the theatre, and more in the music. The sacred music of Parsifal builds on ancient traditions in church music and combines these with the achievements of modern music – distinct, psychologically motivated leitmotif technique, the expanded richness of tone of the large orchestra, the harmonic expressiveness of the Tristan style. The traces of Christian sacred music are evident everywhere, for example the

“Dresden Amen”, echoed in the parallel sixths of the Grail motif. The polyphonic rendering of the Faith motif recalls the church music traditions of the Baroque. The choruses of the knights of the Grail in act 1 draw on stylistic elements of Palestrina’s classical vocal polyphony. These references to sacred music of the past mirror the original meaning of the word “religio”, as reverence for some sacred event in the past. They are used to celebrate religion as a cult and a ritual. By contrast, modern stylistic tools are used to illustrate the inner conflicts of the dramatis personae. It is no accident that the most progressive music is reserved for the conflicted and tormented individuals – Kundry, Amfortas and Klingsor.

THE COMMUNION THEME The drama of the suffering Christ is present on both stylistic levels. There are essentially three musical themes representing Christ in the festival,

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the Communion theme, the Saviour’s Lament and the Good Friday motif. The Communion theme which begins the work is associated later with the Words of Institution during the Grail liturgy: “Take this my body, take this my blood, for the sake of our love.” It has the nature of a quote – this is Christ himself speaking. In an explanation for Ludwig II, Wagner summarised this first theme as “love”, meaning the three theological virtues (faith, love, hope) which seemed to him to be the essence of Christianity. The Communion theme accordingly incorporated the core of the Christian religion as Wagner understood it, and stands for Christ as the founder of a religion of loving compassion. The theme has a complex structure (see example 1). It consists of four sections which are organically connected. The rising triad at the start (1) is a simple and universal ancient element of major-minor tonal music. Even in the 18th century, the key of A flat major was already regarded as the key of the mystical, but also of the strange and fantastical. This is due to the peculiarities of historical tuning, in which A flat minor sounded particularly alien. This tradition persisted into the late 19th century.

A flat major is also the key of the love duet in Tristan und Isolde, and as such is engraved in Wagner’s memory as a mystical key. The subsequent melodic rise to the sixth (F) gives the opening motif a sensitive feel and hints at the relative key of F minor. However, the second section (2) emphasises the seventh (G) and makes it the dominant of C minor, giving it an expressive, dark sound. This part of the Communion theme splits off later and becomes an expression of the Passion of Christ. Hans von Wolzogen, the first interpreter of the leitmotifs accordingly described it in his Thematic Guide (1882) as a Pain motif. The harmony then returns to A flat major. The following sequence, the tetrachord of the Saviour’s Lament from A flat to D flat, usually together with the following final phrase, takes on autonomous significance related to the spear (3). The theme ends in a syncopated downward movement with an accent on B flat, the second note in A flat major, and closes by floating onto C, the third (4). The first six bars of Parsifal accordingly include the message of the religion of voluntary suffering and compassion, in compressed form.

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This seed subsequently develops into a broad network of musical relationships The Communion theme is the centre of the Parsifal score not only semantically, but also musically. Many leitmotifs relate to this theme or are derived from it by fragmentation, variation and contrast. The semantics of the leitmotifs in Parsifal is intricate and ambiguous. Combination and interweaving form endless connections of meanings. In his last music drama, Wagner develops a positively cabbalistic process of combining melodic elements so that ultimately everything seems connected with everything else. The result is an endless structure of semantic relationships, giving the work an enigmatic, secretive, hermetical air. The music of Parsifal is difficult to decipher. It shares a secret, but without revealing it. The numinous aura of the Communion theme comes from the interaction between various musical peculiarities: its unison character which raises it from the mystic darkness of silence, the evocation of the sacred Gregorian chants, which appear here bathed in the expressive tonality of the late 19th century, the syncopation which conceals the rhythm, and the instrumentation which softens the colours of the woodwind with the soft sound of the strings. The theme also develops an “aura” of rising and falling A flat major figurations in multiple rhythmic divisions which open the tonal space upwards and downwards and contrast the subjective expression of the Words of Institution with an athematic and transcendental moment. The melody of the Communion theme is dissolved in pure sound.

THE SAVIOUR’S LAMENT In the last part of the prelude, following the exposition of the Grail and Faith motifs, the Communion theme is transformed. It is rendered in a musical language reminiscent of passages in Tristan und Isolde, with a sensitive chromatic harmony and a surging sequential presentation. With this, Wagner bridges the metaphysical level of religion and the secular level of the dramatic conflicts. He integrates Christ, as expressed in the Communion theme, directly into the story. The first exposition of the Communion theme shows us Christ as God showing a mystery. The second exposition shows us Christ as a man who suffers.. Right at the beginning of the last part of the prelude, separated by a fermata from the preceding musical events, we hear a tremolo on F in the low strings below the act 1 prelude’s A flat pedal point that links the middle section with the following one. Above this is the subject head of the Communion theme, this time intoned by only the woodwinds (act 1, bar 79). Example 2: adding the sixth (F) to the tonic A flat darkens the key to F minor. However, this time the theme is not continued to its conclusion, but ends abruptly after the Pain motif, which is repeated after a brief quaver break with a shift to D flat rising to F flat, which clashes with the dissonant sustained G flat major chord. This process is repeated several times in new harmonic stages (a minor third apart). String tremoli and timpani accents in the pianissimo emphasise the expressive, agonising character of the music. Finally, the Communion theme continues with the Spear motif

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(act 1, bar 95). But this also fragments into polyphonic sequences. These techniques are used to deconstruct the Communion motif, breaking it down into its component parts. This sequencing technique in varying harmonic analysis is a typical feature of the Tristan style and transports the quintessential unapproachability of the original form of the Last Supper theme into the subjective sphere of the individual expression of pain and suffering. The destination of this development is a motif which Hans von Wolzogen – after a later point in the libretto in Parsifal’s discovery scene – has described as the Saviour’s Lament (example 2). The Spear motif initially gets a new continuation, which is similar with its syncopated offset and downwards progression to the original end of the Communion motif. The new variant is an anticipation of the Compassion motif which becomes important for Parsifal (first as a description of Parsifal’s reaction to Gurnemanz’s relation of his killing of the swan, cf. act 1, bar 878 et seq.). The tension from the repetition of this model is resolved in a liberating turn figure with strong expressive force (act 1, bar 98). This is strikingly instrumented with violins and six or nine woodwinds (there are three flutes). This characteristic turn figure follows a syncopated descending movement with heavy sus-

pensions (act 1, bar 101) and a timpani accent. In the course of the drama, this small timpani motif characterises repeatedly Christ’s Passion, for example in Kundry’s recall of Christ (act 2; bars 1179 et seq.) and Gurnemanz’s Good Friday address (act 3, bar 705). The subordinate voices create a dense, poly phonic sonority. The Saviour’s Lament accordingly emerges as a derivation (from the Spear motif ) and variation (the Compassion motif is a variation of the closing phrase of the Communion theme). The characteristic turn figure at this point gives it the expression of eloquent complaint, the individual expression of a subject on the lines of an instrumental recitative. The turn figure in the Parsifal score with its paucity of ornaments is not a moment of playful decoration but rather one of enhanced expression. Here, Wagner is echoing the past. Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach himself recommended the use of the musical turn to enhance the expressive character, particularly to imitate speech in the recitative passages of free fantasy, which mostly show the character of the lament and the direct expression of feeling. This is how Schumann and Weber still used it. Wagner himself used this stylistic technique in Rienzi and, looking ahead, Gustav Mahler would use it in his Ninth Symphony. In Wagner’s commentary on the prelude to Parsifal, he writes about the

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last part: “there once more, from the shudders of solitude sounds the lament of loving compassion: the fear, the sacred agony on the Mount of Olives, the divine suffering of Golgotha […]” The beginning and end of the prelude may be regarded as representing two different aspects of the Christian drama of salvation: the instigation of the Eucharist, and with it the foundation of the Christian religion, bathed in the mystical darkness of the metaphysical, and the representation of a compassionate, self-sacrificing redeemer. This connection is made even clearer subsequently. At the climax of the ceremony when the Grail is uncovered, the Saviour’s Lament sounds with the soft turn directly after the moment when “the blinding ray of light [shines] from above on the crystal chalice” making the blood in it glow (act 1, bars 1470-1478). Here, the Saviour’s Lament develops directly from the Communion theme with its mystical aura. The two aspects of Christ and the two compositional techniques – sacred, and subjective-psychological – are interwoven at this point: Christ is the founder of the religion and a suffering man at the same time.

lationship with the first motivic complex from the prelude is directly apparent, but its character is completely changed.

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1. The theme does not develop gradually here from the Spear motif but is prepared by an emphatic octave leap. It is followed immediately on a sharp fortissimo accent by a downward chromatic motion (starting on C sharp major or D flat major). This partly proceeds in parallel thirds and is instrumented with shrill woodwind and horns. The syncopated rhythm opposes the metre and brings the forward momentum of the preceding sections to a half. Hans von Wolzogen describes this motivic form as the “sounds of pain.” They take on an independent significance in the further course of the drama, and stand in for the Saviour’s Lament in dramatic situations which do not permit a full exposition. Here, however, in accordance with the scream and the Lament, the sounds of pain do not end in the soft turn of the prelude. Instead, after an E sharp crotchet, the motif continues with a rising third followed by descending whole notes and then syncopated semitones which die away.

In the Transformation music of the first act, we hear a very different version of the Saviour’s Lament. The polyphonic and labyrinthine interweaving of voices which characterise the path to the Grail Temple as an initiation route is suddenly shattered by an instrumental scream of volcanic expressiveness (act 1, bar 1123). Once again, several motivic levels are overlaid (example 3). The re

2. Against the syncopated background of the sounds of pain motif, a strikingly instrumented motif sounds in the middle register with timpani, trombones, and celli (and some woodwind) which, with its energetic jump of a fourth and subsequent downward triplet motion can be seen as a variation of the Amfortas motif.

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3. The third motivic element is a jagged figure in the strings which begins with a tirata and after two tritonus leaps (B flat - F flat and D flat to G in act 1, bar 1123) and a fifth is concluded with a descending motif which is reminiscent of a Pain figure and its subsequent descent of a minor third and rising second resembles the Compassion motif (this is not shown in the piano reduction). 4. The repetition of the motif described above (from act 1, bar 1125) sets the melodic line from the prelude in polyrhythmic confrontations with the other independent voice.

The dramatic outburst is followed by a soft string variation whose rising turn figure recalls the turn figure in the prelude (act 1, bars 1131/1132, marked as section 4 in the example). The Saviour’s Lament is then repeated in its dramatically expressive form (starting in D minor and F minor, act 1 bars 1134 et seq. and 1137 et seq.) until the musical tension is resolved and the sound of the Grail bells announces the arrival in the temple. Harmonically, the Saviour’s Lament, as it is shown here, resembles the Baroque sequence of descending fifths. However, its chromatic augmentation with secondary tones gives it a

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specifically modern and alienated aural character. The result is a paradoxical combination of the archaic and modern. Similarly, the motivic structures are archaic in their employment of the Baroque topoi of weeping and lament (in the descending thirds of the sounds of pain) and the tirata and tritone leaps which are reminiscent of the topoi of Baroque opera, but modern in the polyrhythms

of the motivic layers and the expressive force of the instrumental scream. This gives the Christ drama which Wagner is portraying in Parsifal a suggestive musical nature. Wagner’s characterisation that “in Parsifal everything is abrupt, the Saviour on the cross, it is all bloody” clearly relates to this theme, which takes on central importance in the further course of the work.

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The exposition of the Saviour’s Lament is repeated twice instrumentally. It appears semantically in the choral passages of the young boys singing from the middle level of the dome: “as once his blood was painfully shed for the sinful world” and “my blood shall now be shed with a joyful heart for the redeeming hero.” (Act 1, bars 1205 et seq., example 4) New melodic material then follows. Wagner connects the Saviour’s Lament with a text referring to the Passion and emphasising the knights of the Grail as Christ’s followers. The motivic material of the Saviour’s Lament is varied here in a lucid threepart phrase with a sparse accompaniment of strings and bass clarinet harking back to the sacred topoi of Palestrina’s style. The theme that Wagner presented in the prelude as a noble lament and in the Transformation music as a dramatic outburst now appears in an atmosphere of sanctity and prophecy. Strangely contrary to the atmosphere of the sacred in classical vocal polyphony is the sensitive and expressive harmony of this chorus (with the half-diminished seventh chord, a variant of the Tristan chord) whose chromaticism contrasts sharply with the diatonicism of the preceding chorus.

THE LAMENT OF AMFORTAS As a priestly figure who celebrates the Grail ceremony and updates the Eu charist in the form of a ritual repetition, Amfortas is the representative of Christ and is mystically identified with him. This does not change even when Amfortas betrays this role through his “original sin.” Christ and Amfortas remain

inextricably linked, and it is no accident that Amfortas is wounded by the same weapon and at the same place as Christ. This is why Amfortas suffers not only physically (from the pain of the wound) but spiritually (from the awareness of his guilt). As an additional dimension, Amfortas also experiences the suffering of Christ through his betrayal of the religion of compassion. What Amfortas perceives as a “punishment” of the “offended Redeemer” is really the divine lament over the “desecrated sanctuary.” These complex psychological processes, the confabulation of the Christ drama with the drama of the fallen Grail king, become manifest in act 2, in Parsifal’s recognition scene. By contrast, in Amfortas’s great lament it is the music which establishes these connections. This is why the complex of motifs in the Saviour’s Lament in this scene is so important. The suffering god speaks in this. The Saviour’s Lament is the semantic centre and at the same time the formal framework which holds together the heterogeneous sections of the monologue. Amfortas’s first reaction to Titurel’s demand to reveal the Grail is introduced by a surging outburst of the Saviour’s Lament, which largely matches the exposition in the Transformation music. The following words, “Woe! Woe is me for the pain” (act 1, bar 1259) still leave the reference to Christ unexpressed. This has led to a situation where many motif tables describe this motif not as the Saviour’s Lament but (relating it to Amfortas) as the “Torment of sin” motif. This is certainly not wrong, considering that Amfortas’s sufferings consist primarily in a sense of having failed Christ. However, it diminishes the meta

ULRIKE KIENZLE

physical dimension of Parsifal by a decisive aspect. If we look more closely at Amfortas’s great scene, we can see that the Saviour’s Lament only appears at points which also show the reference to Christ in the libretto. “O punishment! Punishment without equal of – alas! – the offended Redeemer!” (act 1, bar 1316 et seq.) Amfortas sees the “punishment” that he spoke of at the start of his lament, the compulsion to a repeatedly renewed experience of Christ’s Passion at the moment of revealing the Grail as the consequence of a “punishment” of the “offended Redeemer.” It is accordingly only logical that this passage in its dramatic impulse corresponds to the first outburst in bar 1259, like both the “sounds of woe” in bar 1259 and the reversed Amfortas motif, and “explains” this with one important exception – instead of the jagged figure (3), we hear the Kundry motif twice. This makes a further semantic level clear, the link between Amfortas’s failure in not resisting Kundry’s seduction, and Kundry’s mockery in the face of Christ’s Passion. Christ can be “offended” in two ways – by Kundry who mocked him, and by Amfortas who as Christ’s representative has yielded to her, the mocker. From Amfortas’s perspective Christ appears here as the punishing, judging god – an aspect which was otherwise alien to Wagner. “Repenting, in the depths of my soul I long for union with Him” (act 1, bars 1335 et seq.) In the midst of his sufferings, Amfortas longs for Christ’s nearness, his “holy

greeting.” He knows that his sufferings will only end through reconciliation with Christ. Here, the Saviour’s Lament motif appears from Amfortas’s perspective in a fragmentary shattered variant, stuttering and broken up by pauses. These are figures which are familiar from the Baroque tradition of the “doctrine of affections.” The effects of hesitation, delaying, fear are described as “sigh” figures. But the motif here ends in the Grail sixths, which are a sign of hope of an encounter with Christ. It is the forgiving god here, not the punishing one. Racked by repentance, the Grail king approaches him as a petitioner. “ […] which wounded the Saviour, a wound from which He wept tears of blood for man‘s disgrace“ (act 1, bar 1369). The parallel nature of Amfortas’s wound and Christ’s is emphasised by the intonation of the reversed Amfortas motif (2). The Protest figure is missing (3), and instead in the second period (bar 1372) we hear the painfully dissonant subject hear (“sounds of pain”) with its descending parallel thirds strongly accentuated. The topos of weeping and lamenting which this expresses relates to the “tears of blood” that flow from Christ’s wounds. With its characteristic blood-and-wounds mysticism, the text of this passage clearly refers to the tradition of Pietism in the 18th century. The oratorio texts of Johann Sebastian Bach (such as the tenor aria “Erwäge, wie sein blutgefärbter Rücken in allen Stücken dem Himmel gleiche geht” – Consider how his bloodstained back in every aspect is like heaven – from the St John Passion) are still dominated

THE DRAMA OF THE SUFFERING CHRIST

by the sensuality of contemplation of Christ’s wounds. For Amfortas, by contrast, meditation on the physical sufferings of Christ is not directly linked with the certainty of salvation, but rather with confrontation with his own sins. “ Have mercy upon me! Take back my inheritance, close my wound” (act 1, bars 1393 et seq.) This is the climax and conclusion of Amfortas’s great scene, an inmost plea for compassion and forgiveness, directed to Christ as the “All-merciful one.” As in the prelude, the Saviour’s Lament grows from the Spear motif here, but at the same time the low strings play first the Kundry motif and then the Amfortas motif in a variant whose rhythmic variation and rapidly descending demisemiquaver figuration is close to the Kundry motif. The “sounds of pain” form the middle section, bracketed by the “Spear” motif. The following “sighing” figures (act 1, bar 1399) also correspond to the variants from the prelude (act 1 bar 101), but the liberating turn figure is missing. Instead, after a harmonically open cadence there is the command “By compassion made wise, the pure fool; wait for him, whom I ap-

point”, which is also Christ’s answer to the despairing appeal by Amfortas. — Between these sections are declamatory passages unconnected to motifs or passages in which we hear the Grail and Communion motifs and the Kundry and even Klingsor motifs (act 1, bar 1360 et seq.). The fivefold penetrating intonation of the Saviour’s Lament in Amfortas’s scene (counting the “woe” exclamations at the start) marks the inner dramaturgy of the great monologue. Amfortas’s sufferings are intertwined with the suffering of the betrayed Christ. From Amfortas’s perspective this sequence is pain (“Woe!”), “punishment”, “repentance”, remorse at his own perverted identity with Christ, cry for “mercy.” From Christ’s perspective, the sequence is the pain of the “offended Redeemer” at Amfortas’s fall, the “bloody tears” and “compassion’s holy desire” faced with man’s “disgrace”, the announcement of salvation through the pure fool. The Saviour’s Lament motif accordingly accentuate a metaphysical event – the risk to Christ’s saving act from the failure of the Grail king.

IMPRINT R IC H A R D WAGN E R

PARSIFAL SEASON 2023/24 PREMIÈRE OF THE PRODUCTION 11 APRIL 2021 Publisher WIENER STAATSOPER GMBH, Opernring 2, 1010 Wien Director DR. BOGDAN ROŠČIĆ Music Director PHILIPPE JORDAN Administrative Director DR. PETRA BOHUSLAV General Editor SERGIO MORABITO Design & concept EXEX Layout & typesetting MIWA MEUSBURGER Image concept MARTIN CONRADS, BERLIN (Cover) All performance fotos by MICHAEL PÖHN Printed by PRINT ALLIANCE HAV PRODUKTIONS GMBH, BAD VÖSLAU TEXT REFERENCES Sergio Morabito: SYNOPSIS – told by Kirill Serebrennikov (translation by Steven Scheschareg) – Philippe Jordan: TO KNOWINGLY LET HAPPEN – Kirill Serebrennikov: THE IDEA OF FREEDOM– Ulrike Kienzle: THE DRAMA OF THE SUFFERING CHRIST Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann: PARSIFAL – AN INTRODUCTION, in: Laurenz Lütteken, Inga Mai Groote, Michael Mayer (Publ.): Wagner-Handbuch, Kassel 2012, p. 392–398 – Egon Voss: THE POSSIBILITY OF LAMENTATION IN JOY, in: E. Voss.: Wagner und kein Ende. Betrachtungen und Studien, Zürich and Mainz 1996, p. 222–233. IMAGE REFERENCE (COVER) Michael Pöhn / Wiener Staatsoper GmbH. ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS – except of the synopsis – by Andrew Smith. Reproduction only with approval of Wiener Staatsoper GmbH / Dramaturgy. Holders of rights who were unavailable regarding retrospect compensation are requested to make contact.

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