The Liturgy of Parsifal

WILLIAM BLISSETT The Liturgy ofParsifal I In 1876 Richard Wagner conquered the world. A small hyperactive man, a political exile for many years from his native Saxony, plagued by domestic troubles and hopeless debts, he had been rescued at the nadir of his fortunes by the young king of Bavaria and put on the road that led to his producing, in his own specially designed theatre, his own immense poetic drama, The Ring of the Nibelung, set to his own music, before an audience drawn from the whole of Europe and the civilized world, induding the German emperor prodaimed six years before at Versailles and now taking precedence over all other potentates at the festival of the triumph of German art. Few artists have ever so boldly stamped their name on the pages of world history. Wagner's ambitions were Napoleonic, and he achieved them all. often taking great strategic risks - as when for some years at the height of his powers he composed no music at all while he worked out to his own satisfaction the problems of music in relation to drama and of the role of art in history, or when, having reached an impasse in the composition of Siegfried, he broke off in mid-scene, almost in mid-phrase, and wrote Tristan and Die Meistersinger (either of them a life-work for an ordinary man) before returning to complete what might have been left an enormous fragment. After the staging of the Ring he had, no, not just one thing left to do: he must do a thousand things to ensure the continuation of the festival; but he had one further conquest to make. He had entered world history; he must enter sacred history. For the cultural elite to come to Bayreuth as vassals and be enthralled was much; for them to come as pilgrims and be redeemed was much more. In 1882 the second Bayreuth Festival took place, presenting sixteen performances of the newly completed Biihnenweihfestspiel ('stageconsecrating festival drama'), Parsifal, a sacred work, a crowning work, a last work - for, as everyone feared, the Meister was to die early the following year. What earnest expectations must the audiences have brought to it, what determination to be uplifted, what readiness to relate the new revelation to whatever they severally held to be secure truth about God and man. The new sacred festival was catholic in the basic sense of providing spiritual sustenance for the maximum number and variety of those UNIVERSI1Y OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME XLIX, NUMBER 2 , WINTER 1979/80 0042-°247/80/0100-0117$01.5% © UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS 118 WILLIAM BLISSETT assisting at its rites. Even journalists whose holy book was the social register could tell over the names of the more august pilgrims. Bayreuth early became, and remained until the Great War, part of the social season: being near the great spas and taking place in the latter part of the summer, it was part of the slimming not the fattening season. Most commentators, however, were more serious than this, and they had something to be serious about, for Parsifal is inescapably sacred, or profane: something like a baptism and something like a eucharist, the Grail rite, take place on the stage, and if this is not 'redeeming: it is sacrilegious. 'What the Wagnerian Parsifal has done to justify this distasteful identification with the Saviour, I leave to others to say; I also leave to them the decision as to whether the spirit of true Christianity is furthered by such spectacles: Hanslick, of course, the Viennese critic, Wagner's enemy, whom he had lampooned as the pettifogging Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger; and the charge is insincerity. The heavier charge, of sincerity , is made by Nietzsche: 'Richard Wagner, apparently most triumphant , but in truth a decaying and despairing decadent, suddenly sank down, helpless and broken, before the Christian cross.' 1 A description of Parsifal as a stage-consecrating festival drama immediately invites prejudice - for or against the whole notion of a consecrated stage on which sacred dramatic rites are performed, for or against this artist (or any artist) as a hierophant. For the most part, between the extremes represented by Hanslick and...