The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Richard Wagner · Ein Bühnenweihfestspiel, a stage festival play of consecration, in three acts · words and music by Wagner, to his own poem in German · six principal roles, flower maidens, squires and knights, choruses of knights, youths, boys and flower maidens, and an orchestra written for the covered pit at Bayreuth · about four to four and three quarter hours of music in performance
Mode
Bühnenweihfestspiel, a stage festival play of consecration; music drama in three acts, continuous, in which ceremony is staged in real time
Mythos
The Grail: a wounded king who can neither die nor heal, a broken rite, a fool who does not know his name, the spear that wounded and alone can heal, a garden of illusion, the land in flower on Good Friday
Phase
Three acts, the outer two mirrored as landscape, transformation and ceremony, the middle act their antithesis; A flat major at the Prelude’s opening and at the close
Presentation
Concert music; a music drama in three acts setting Wagner’s own German poem, with choruses of knights, youths, boys and flower maidens, for an orchestra written for the covered pit
Register
From an unaccompanied theme rising out of silence and a rite sung down from the dome to Klingsor’s chromaticism, a cry at a kiss and a meadow in flower
Scale
A fool, a king, a woman under a curse and a brotherhood; one wound, one spear, two ceremonies; about four to four and three quarter hours
Governing Proposition
A youth who does not know his own name watches the rite of the Grail without understanding it, and learns what it meant only when a woman’s kiss makes him feel in his own body the wound of the king who keeps it; he refuses her, wins back the spear, and returns on a Good Friday to close the wound and restore the rite. The wager of the work is that knowledge of another’s suffering comes only by suffering it, and that a rite seen twice, once dumbly and once with understanding, can be made into that knowledge in music.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The work begins out of silence with one line. The Prelude opens on the Communion theme alone, unharmonised, in A flat major, rising out of silence, and only then is it answered in harmony, by divided strings and winds so blended that the sound seems to have no single source. Then comes the Grail’s motif, the Dresden Amen, a rising cadence of sixth chords. Wagner called the work “Ein Bühnenweihfestspiel”
“A stage festival play of consecration”, and the Prelude is its first consecration: before anyone appears, the work has stated its sacrament, in the key in which it will end.
The first act opens in a forest by a lake near Monsalvat, in the domain of the Grail. The king, Amfortas, is carried to his bath: he bears a wound that will not close, and he can neither die of it nor be healed. The old knight Gurnemanz tells the squires how it came about: of Titurel, Amfortas’s father and the first of the Grail’s guardians, of Klingsor, of the spear that was lost and that made the wound, and of the prophecy. An oracle has promised a healer: “Durch Mitleid wissend”
“Knowing through compassion”, a fool. The narration is long, and much of it is told to listeners who in part know it already. It is the one place in the act where the drama waits on its own exposition.
Then a swan falls, shot over the lake, and the youth who shot it is brought in. He does not know his own name. He knows his mother, Herzeleide, and Kundry, who in this act serves the brotherhood, tells him that she is dead. Gurnemanz wonders whether this is the one the oracle promised, and leads him toward the hall. As they walk, Gurnemanz tells him that here time becomes space. It is the work’s statement of its own method. Everything that follows is slow because the slowness is what is meant.
Movement II
The first transformation is music for a walk. The forest moves past while Parsifal and Gurnemanz stand, the orchestra swelling with low brass and bells until the scene has become the hall of the Grail. No action happens in it; the change of place is the event. Wagner wrote it for a theatre with a covered pit, where the orchestra is heard and not seen, and the sound that rises out of it is blended past the point at which single instruments can be named. The audience is carried, as Parsifal is, from the open landscape into the rite.
The ceremony is built in levels. The knights sing at the floor of the hall, youths at middle height, and boys in the dome, so that the music descends on the brotherhood from above; an alto voice sings from above. Titurel and Amfortas, father and son, are both bound to the rite. Amfortas, the king, refuses it, and his lament is pain at full force: the keeper of the sacrament is the one man it cannot heal. The rite and its failure are staged together, in real time, at a length beyond what the plot needs.
Parsifal watches all of it and understands nothing. He stands through the lament and the ceremony without a word, and the act ends with him no wiser than he came. This is the work’s first account of the rite, and it is meant to be incomplete. Whatever the audience understands, the youth on stage does not, and the music has given him no way in. The act has set up a question the drama will answer only by asking it again: the same landscape, the same transformation and the same hall, two acts later, when the one who watches has learned what he was looking at.
Movement III
The second act is the first act’s antithesis. Its first scene is Klingsor’s tower, its second his magic garden, and there is no landscape that is what it seems, no transformation and no ceremony. The harmony changes with the place. The Grail’s music is diatonic and modal; Klingsor’s realm is saturated chromaticism, and in the course of the act the harmony comes near the edge of tonality. Klingsor himself, self-castrated and resentful, is resentment given a voice: the spear is in his keeping, and the wound it made is his weapon against the Grail.
The flower maidens surround Parsifal in the garden, six solo voices and a chorus, and their music is charm, light and turning. Then Kundry comes to him, no longer the servant of the first act but a seductress. She tells him of his mother, and she tells of herself: she once saw the suffering Christ, “und lachte”
“and laughed”, and since then she has been condemned to seek redemption in the very seduction that renews her curse. She longs to weep and cannot. She offers him what she offers every man, and her kiss is meant as his fall.
At the kiss he cries out: “Amfortas! Die Wunde!”
“Amfortas! The wound!” He feels the king’s wound in his own body, and in that moment he understands the ceremony he watched in silence. The cry turns erotic music into horror. What follows is a refusal: the climax of the act is a man not yielding. Klingsor appears, and the spear, sent against Parsifal, is caught in the air above his head. The sign of the cross is made, and the castle of illusion falls and the garden withers. The knowledge of the oracle has come, and it has come by suffering.
Movement IV
The third act returns to the landscape of the first: a meadow in spring, in the Grail’s domain. The brotherhood has wasted in the interval, its rite unperformed. Kundry is found again, and she is changed; her one word in this act is “Dienen”
“To serve”. Gurnemanz tells Parsifal and the audience what has happened since they last saw the place. The narration is the act’s weaker stretch, as its counterpart was in the first act, and the work is built so that it can afford it.
Then the Good Friday music, “Karfreitagszauber”
“Good Friday spell”: an oboe over muted strings, beauty in its plainest diatonic form. The meadow is in flower after the mourning, and Kundry, who could not weep, weeps. Set beside the garden of the second act, it states the law of the whole work. Both are nature in flower; one was seduction and withered when the cross was made, the other is grace and blooms because the sinner weeps. The work shows the same thing twice, false and true, and the second showing is the one that holds.
The second transformation follows, and it is darker than the first. The walk to the hall has a funeral tread, the bells return, and the scene moves again while the figures stand. The audience has heard this music before and knows where it goes. The difference between the two transformations is the difference the drama has made: the first carried a youth who understood nothing toward a rite he could not read; the second carries one who has felt the wound toward the same rite, to perform it. Time has become space again, and this time it leads somewhere.
Movement V
The last ceremony repeats the first, and the repetition is the knowledge. The rite Amfortas refused in the first act is restored by Parsifal in the third, and the spear that made the wound is the one thing that can close it. Kundry dies without a word. The last words are “Erlösung dem Erlöser”
“Redemption to the redeemer”. The work ends on the Grail’s motif in A flat major, the key in which the Prelude began. Whether those words are piety or irony, and what Kundry’s silent death means, are still argued.
Wagner made a prose sketch of the drama in 1865, completed the poem in 1877, and composed the music from 1877 to 1882. It was first performed at the Festspielhaus, Bayreuth, on 26 July 1882, with Hermann Levi conducting. By Wagner’s wish it was reserved to Bayreuth, a sacred rite on a stage he would let no other theatre give, and the reservation held until the copyright expired at the end of 1913; the Metropolitan Opera in New York staged it without consent on 24 December 1903. From 1914 the major houses took it into their repertories, and an Easter tradition grew up in German-speaking theatres.
Nietzsche broke with Wagner, and in 1888 attacked the work in Der Fall Wagner and Nietzsche contra Wagner. Debussy admired and resisted it, and wrote Pelléas et Mélisande against it and through it. Verlaine wrote a sonnet on it, and Eliot set that sonnet’s line on the children’s voices in the dome into The Waste Land. Thomas Mann and Adorno wrote on it; since Robert Gutman in 1968 and Hartmut Zelinsky its meaning has been contested on racial grounds, and the contest is not closed. Wieland Wagner stripped the Bayreuth stage bare for it in 1951, the year Knappertsbusch recorded it there; Syberberg filmed it in 1982, and Herheim restaged it at Bayreuth in 2008. What it shows holds apart from its doctrine: that understanding of another’s pain comes only through the body, and comes late, when what was watched once is seen again.
Act III · The Twelve
Length is not charged: the slowness is the argument, and Gurnemanz says as much when he tells Parsifal that here time becomes space. The subtractive test meets resistance at every structural point: the wounded king’s bath, the swan, the first ceremony watched without understanding, the flower maidens, the kiss and the cry “Die Wunde!”, the spear caught in the air, the Good Friday meadow, the second ceremony. Each event is required by the next. It finds give in Gurnemanz: the Act I narration lays out Titurel, Klingsor, the lost spear and the prophecy at length to squires who in part know it, and Act III tells again what the interval held. The first ceremony runs beyond its dramatic need. Held below Otello’s 9.1, whose libretto was cut harder.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: knowledge of another’s suffering comes only by suffering it, and desire is the wound it seems to heal. The oracle gives the thesis, “Durch Mitleid wissend”
“Knowing through compassion”, and the work stages it rather than asserting it: at Kundry’s kiss Parsifal feels Amfortas’s wound in his own body, and understands the ceremony he watched dumbly in Act I. Kundry discloses more, a woman who laughed at the suffering Christ, condemned to seek redemption in the seduction that renews her curse, who longs to weep and cannot: a true account of compulsion. Held down three ways. The claim is Schopenhauer’s, carried as given; its sexual economy, the woman as temptation and chastity as power, is a premise more than a finding; and the ideological readings attached since the 1880s, which the text neither states nor forecloses, leave the meaning contested at its edge.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Height reaches the ceiling, and often. The Prelude, the unaccompanied Communion theme rising out of silence and answered in harmony, is the sublime of stillness. The first transformation swells into the bells and the hall, and the ceremony builds downward from the boys’ voices in the dome. Amfortas’s lament is pain at full force. In Act II Parsifal’s cry of “Amfortas!” after the kiss turns erotic music into horror. The Good Friday music is beauty in its plainest diatonic form, the meadow in flower after the mourning. The second transformation, darker and with a funeral tread, and the last ceremony, ending on the Grail’s motif in A flat, close at the summit. Held below the top by frequency: Gurnemanz’s long narrations in both outer acts are exposition, not elevation, and the flower maidens are charm.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Myth built, not evoked. Wagner took Wolfram’s Parzival and the Grail cycle and rebuilt them so that the archetypal structure is the plot: a wounded king who cannot die and cannot heal; a community wasting because its rite is broken; a fool who does not know his own name; a spear that wounded and alone can heal; a castle of illusion that falls at the sign of the cross; the land flowering on Good Friday. The wound that only its weapon can close is load-bearing, the mechanism of the last scene and not an ornament. The Christian and Buddhist strands, Kundry’s rebirths among them, are fused rather than cited. Held below the top because the particular is thin in two principals: Parsifal is by design a cipher until Act II, and Klingsor is nearer an emblem than a man. Kundry carries the particular almost alone, and carries it.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The inheritance is Wagner’s own music drama, Tristan and the Ring: continuous texture, leitmotif, the orchestra as narrator. The departures: a drama whose decisive action is a refusal, so that the climax of Act II is a man not yielding; time slowed on purpose, with ceremony staged in real time; a harmony split in two, diatonic and modal for the Grail and saturated chromaticism for Klingsor’s realm, so that harmony becomes moral geography; an orchestra written for the covered pit, its sound blended and veiled; a sacred rite on a theatre stage. The stake was real: the charge of blasphemy, Nietzsche’s break, and a work withheld from every theatre but Bayreuth. Held near the gate because the swerve continues Wagner’s own road: the harmony extends Tristan rather than overturning it, and the method is the Ring’s refined.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. What it knows is that understanding comes late, by repetition transformed. Act III repeats Act I, landscape, transformation and ceremony, and the repetition is the knowledge: the rite Amfortas refuses in Act I, Parsifal restores in Act III, and the audience that watched the first with him watches the second knowing. The middle act is the inverse world, its chromatic harmony set against the Grail’s diatonic writing, so that the form states the temptation as the sacred turned over. Recast as an oratorio, the work would lose the bodily wound and the spear in the air; as a number opera, the slowed time on which the ceremony depends. Held below the top by the narrations, where the form comes closest to a container for exposition.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Evidence, not promise, and 144 years of it. In criticism: Nietzsche’s attacks in Der Fall Wagner and Nietzsche contra Wagner (1888); Debussy’s admiration and resistance; Thomas Mann’s essays; Adorno’s Versuch über Wagner; Lucy Beckett’s Cambridge Opera Handbook (1981); Carl Dahlhaus; the racial readings of Robert Gutman (1968) and Hartmut Zelinsky, and the answers to them; Slavoj Žižek’s essays. On stage and screen: Wieland Wagner’s bare Bayreuth production of 1951, Syberberg’s film of 1982, Stefan Herheim’s Bayreuth staging of 2008. The questions stay open: whether the work is Christian, Schopenhauerian or a critique of both; what Kundry’s death means; whether its last words are piety or irony; whether the Grail community is a church or a sect. Level with the most argued works in music.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of opera and orchestral music of the 1880s and the generation after. The force is real: the work showed that harmony could carry moral topography, that a stage work could move at the pace of ritual, and that the orchestra could be one blended, veiled instrument rather than a sum of sections; its Act II chromaticism lies near the edge of tonality. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is large and diffuse. Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande defines itself against it and through it; Mahler, Strauss and the early Schoenberg drew on its sound; its Grail reached poetry through Verlaine’s sonnet, whose line on children’s voices in the dome Eliot set into The Waste Land. Discounted because much of what passed on came from Wagner as a whole and from Tristan first, and because Bayreuth kept the work rare until 1914.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Survival weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: score and poem survive complete, are performed uncut as standard, and have no rival versions. The presence is 144 years: since 1914 in the repertory of the major German and international houses, with an Easter tradition in German-speaking theatres, a recorded tradition from the 1920s, and Hans Knappertsbusch’s Bayreuth recordings of 1951 and 1962 as fixed points. It was held to one theatre for its first thirty years by the Bayreuth reservation, and its scale and casting ration it still. The surface fixed to its moment is its doctrine and its reception: the Schopenhauerian chastity, and the ideological charge attached in the 1880s and after. Neither has stopped performance, and both are argued in every production.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Command of the medium at the height of Wagner’s art. The orchestra, written for the covered pit at Bayreuth, is the most refined he made: doublings that blend timbres until no single instrument is heard, divided strings for the Prelude’s halo, the low brass and the bells of the transformations, the Good Friday oboe over muted strings. The harmonic command spans the plainest diatonic writing in his output and the densest chromaticism. Motivic transformation is complete: the Communion theme, the Grail’s motif, the Faith motif, Kundry’s falling figure and the Wound motif are turned through every state the drama needs. The cost is in the words: the poem leaves the Ring’s alliterative verse for a looser line, often exact and sometimes stilted, and Gurnemanz’s narrations are set with craft but not with necessity. Level with Otello’s 9.5; the music alone would support more.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the flower maidens’ garden and the Good Friday meadow. One law governs them. Both are nature in flower, and the law is that the same thing appears twice, false and true: seduction as a garden that withers when the cross is made, grace as a meadow that blooms because the sinner weeps. Kundry’s two states obey it, laughter and tears, seduction and service, her Act III word “Dienen”, to serve; so do the two ceremonies, and the spear that wounds and heals. The harmonic polarity is the same law in sound. The strain is doctrinal: the Christian rite and the Buddhist economy of rebirth are fused by assertion more than by action, and Kundry’s death without a word ends her line by fiat. The law governs her; the drama does not show its working at the close.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The orders held, integrated and not listed: consciousness, in Parsifal’s awakening and Kundry’s divided self; the body, in the wound that will not close and in sexual desire; the sacred, as the rite and its failure; the community, a brotherhood wasting without its sacrament; the natural order, the swan, the forest and the meadow, which bloom and die with the community; the family, briefly and with force, in Herzeleide, whose death Kundry tells to her son, and in Titurel and Amfortas as father and son; history, as a lineage of guardians. What holds the axis here is absence: the state, labour and the social world outside the castle do not appear, and the history is legend. The Ring’s range is wider; this work chose depth.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.5, then The Sublime and The Bottomless Well at 9.4. The most refined orchestra Wagner wrote, for a covered pit, with a harmonic range from plain diatonic writing to the densest chromaticism and every motif turned through the states the drama needs; elevation from the Prelude rising out of silence to the Good Friday meadow and the last ceremony; and 144 years of argument, from Nietzsche to Žižek and from Wieland Wagner’s bare stage to Herheim’s, with the meaning of the last words still open.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.4: consciousness, the body, the sacred, the community, nature and the family are held and integrated, but the state, labour and the social world outside the castle are absent, and the history is legend. Next above it, The Inevitable at 8.6, held by Gurnemanz’s narrations in both outer acts and a first ceremony longer than its need; then The Unconcealment and The Swerve at 8.7, held by a doctrine carried as given and by a swerve that continues Wagner’s own road.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.5, The Living Form at 9.3, The Inner Law at 9.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.2, The Imperishable at 9.1 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.9 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Unconcealment at 8.7 and The Swerve at 8.7 clear it by two tenths. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.6, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.4. Every summit condition is met, and the aggregate of 9.0 stands at the foot of the band.
Basis · the score and poem of Parsifal, Wagner’s Bühnenweihfestspiel in three acts, and its performance tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, libretto or recording was in hand. The work is scored as one, the music drama with Wagner’s German text as first given at Bayreuth in 1882 and as published, in its standard performing version; no production, staging, film or recording is the object, and the performance tradition is evidence for The Made, The Bottomless Well and The Imperishable only. Words and music are scored together, on Wagner’s German as he set it. German is quoted only where the desk is certain of the words, in fragments of four words or fewer; every English gloss is the desk’s own, plain and literal, and is not charged to the work, and no published translation is quoted. Gurnemanz’s line on time and space is given in paraphrase. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the place and month at which the full score was finished, the story of a Good Friday in 1857, the number of performances in 1882 and Wagner’s part in the last of them, the orchestra’s exact disposition and the instruments used for the bells, particular conductors’ tempi, the date and place of the first performance outside Bayreuth, the length of Wieland Wagner’s production in the repertory, the extent to which Klingsor’s music is derived from the Grail’s, and the figures from which Kundry was made. The running time is a range across the recorded tradition, not a measurement. The sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.