Negotiating Religion and Art: Wagner, Petrarch, Dante

In the mid-fifties of the last century, when I was twelve years old, my mother took me to the Wagner festival in Bayreuth. This was to be my reward for an unexpectedly good year at school. Because of my somewhat eccentric passion for heroes, fairy tales and music, my parents thought that Wagner might be worth a try; especially because one of my older cousins was employed at the festival. Tickets were relatively easy to come by for him. I had set my heart on The Flying Dutchman, but we ended up with Parsifal. That was all right though, for everything was mystical, solemn and beautiful.

When, after the long first act, the curtain went down, I did what I had learned to do during my earlier visits to the opera. Full of dauntless youthful spontaneity, I applauded. I applauded most vehemently. When I think of it, what followed was one of the more embarrassing moments of my life. Apart from mine, not a single pair of hands was clapping; everyone remained in rapt silence. Only a gentleman seated in front of me turned around hissing, "Stop it. One doesn't applaud Parsifal." Unfortunately, my mother felt obliged to provide moral support and encouraged me to keep on clapping—which I did, until my applause died away in the ringing silence of the Bayreuth Wagner sanctuary.

Until this day, I remember how on my way out, during the interval, I felt a thousand eyes upon me. What had I done? A young fool (if not necessarily an innocent one), I simply had not grasped that the site of the performance, as well as its nature—a festival play for the consecration of the stage (ein Bühnenweihfestspiel) at Bayreuth—decidedly demanded the theater be regarded as a place of worship, the performance be considered as a ritual, and the paying audience behave as becomes devout believers.

Much later, when studying the literature of the fin de siècle professionally, I began to understand that the reasons for my juvenile art trauma went deeper than the ruthlessness with which Bayreuth stubbornly upholds its traditions, ever since Cosima's reign and in the face of all attempts at reform. To me, it seems that Wagner's¹ Bühnenweihfestspiel (the attendance of which Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's future minister of propaganda, extolled as the attendance of—and I quote—"a four-hour divine service")² represents an extreme form of aestheticism.

Prompted by the religious connotations of its medieval subject matter, the story of the Holy Grail, this aestheticism presents art as a surrogate for the sacred, which the positivist disenchantment of the world has divested of its relevance. Wagner did not want his opera to be staged anywhere but at the Festspielhaus,³ and the Bayreuth Parsifal is a perfect realization of the concept of art as religion at a time when institutionalized religions have all but lost their original authority.⁴

As is common in symbolist art of the fin de siècle,⁵ Parsifal evokes a wealth of meanings, all of them with religious connotations, but evades semantic closure. In that way, the performance itself is meant to become a ritual: in staging the aesthetic, Parsifal lays claim to the presence of the religious. The more the work moves towards an all-encompassing auto-referentiality, the more reasonable this claim appears. The term with which Wagner chose to designate the new genre is an initial indication of this: Bühnenweihfestspiel, which, among other things, means a play for the consecration of the stage. Wagner himself authorized this reading in his article Das Bühnenweihfestspiel in Bayreuth 1882, where he noted: "so glaubte ich das mystisch bedeutsame Liebesmahl meiner Gralsritter dem heutigen Opernpublikum nicht anders vorführen zu dürfen, als wenn ich das Bühnenfestspielhaus dießmal zur Darstellung eines solchen erhabenen Vorganges besonders geweiht mir dachte."⁶

The consecration in question refers to the festival stage, which the artist himself had created for his own work. In any case, the notorious ending of Parsifal underscores what is implied in the term...