THE NEW ZEALAND OPERA SOCIETY

There is an enormous quantity of literature on Wagner - it has been claimed that it is exceeded only by writings on Christ - and writings on Parsifal are probably surpassed only by studies of Wagner's other major works - the Ring and Tristan und Isolde.

One of the books we have read recently, dealing very interestingly with Parsifal, and much else, is Nike Wagner's (one of Wieland Wagner's four children) account of the family, The Wagners - the Dramas of a Musical Dynasty.

We start by quoting her description of the Buhnenweihfestspiel, as Wagner describes Parsifal - properly translated, not as ‘sacred festival drama', but as ‘festival work to consecrate a stage' (after all, recall the Beethoven overture, Die Weihe des Hauses, celebrating (consecrate) the opening of the Josephstadt Theater).

"Parsifal is a drama of redemption. According to the religious philosopher Jacob Taubes in his Western Escatology, redemption dramas in many cultures deal with the unclean unholy intermingling of two spheres: one that is good, light and heavenly and another that is evil, dark and devilish. The intertwining of the two is the pre-condition necessary for the redemption drama to be set in motion, and their disentanglement is the end to which the drama necessarily moves.

"In Parsifal this disentanglement takes place both on the religious and sexual planes. These two levels have come into contact, which has triggered a fatal mutual dependence. On the one hand, we have the world of the Grail and of salvation, a male domain ruled by a king; on the other we have the world of evil, a female stronghold dominated by Kundry and the flower maidens.

"However, that world too is ruled by a man: the sorcerer, Klingsor. The two worlds have touched and intermingled, and wounds have been sustained as a result. Amfortas, the king of the Grail, had betrayed the Grail world's laws of chastity by letting himself be seduced by Kundry. As a result, the symbol of his sacred power, his spear, has fallen into the hands of Klingsor, who aspires to rule the Grail community. To prepare himself to seize power, Klingsor has done everything possible to enable him to obey the knightly law of chastity: he has castrated himself - yet another wound.

"Klingsor's act proves useful to him also within his own realm: freed from sexual temptation, he has nothing to fear from the seductive woman, Kundry, and this means that he can use her as his sexual assistant. His intention is that she should weaken the chaste male community by carrying sin and guilt into it, thereby speeding its collapse and preparing the ground for Klingsor. In Kundry we again encounter the duality of the world expressed through the internal dichotomy of a human being: she, in a sense, personifies the entire salvation drama. At night she is beautiful and she seduces the knights; by day, she atones for her sins by serving the Grail as an ugly woman.

"It is between these two worlds that Parsifal, a naïve young man from the forests, finds himself. He witnesses Amfortas's sufferings but does not understand them; he falls into the clutches of Klingsor and Kundry but resists sexual temptation by rejecting the seductress. And yet her kiss still has an effect, because it makes him realise the existence of sexuality, sin and guilt.

"After prolonged journeys in search of the Grail, he eventually returns to the castle carrying the spear, and becomes the king of the Grail himself. The miracle of grace occurs: the cup containing Christ's blood glows with light, Amfortas's wound closes and Kundry is allowed to die.

"The world of the Grail has triumphed over Klingsor's world and has regenerated itself. Salvation from the impure intermingling of the two worlds into the unity of the one good world has been accomplished."

This synopsis is scene-setting for Nike Wagner's examination of ideas of Jewishness, sexuality and views of good and evil that were current around the turn of the twentieth century. She illustrates the climate by reference to the propositions of Otto Weininger who wrote Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character) in 1903. He finds an analogy between the two sexes, the duality of the earthly and the spiritual, and finally, between Judaism and Christianity: the polarity of good and evil underlie them all, according to Weininger. For him, woman personifies sexuality, and sin and guilt are perpetuated through her. Man represents logic, consciousness, transcendence and all things strong and virtuous, and he survives through resisting the female temptress and expunging the feminine traits within him. Woman, however, can find salvation only through ceasing to exist. No prizes for spotting Kundry and Parsifal.

The next step is the transference of this duality to Jewishness and Aryanism. Just as all personalities contain a mixture of male and female, so all, says Weininger, share elements of the Jewish and the Aryan. These are not equal however in a moral sense: they parallel good and evil; and so, just as a man has to overcome the female element in him, so the Aryan needs to conquer the Jew in him.

Though Weininger's ideas are presented in pseudo-scholarly and philosophical terms, they are no more than dressed-up and, for us, fairly hair-raising anti-Semitism and misogynism, widespread throughout history, but adorned with scholarly respectability in the latter 19th century.

Nike however, points out that both states - hatred of Jews and of women - derive from a rejection mechanism - that one hates elements in one's self that one finds alien or disturbing, and seeks ways to drive it out. The suggestion was that Wagner found both the female and the Semitic principal in himself and sought to expunge them. Nike finds evidence in Wagner's notorious Judaism in Music for the assertion that, for Wagner, the redemption of the Jew was through baptism, and so the redemption that Parsifal offers Kundry is not only through sexual denial, but also through Christian baptism, in Act III. Nike's next step, therefore, is to suggest that, far from being seen as a Christian drama - a perception that had caused it to lose favour with Hitler and with many people in our secular times - Parsifal was an anti-Semitic tract wrapped in Christian packaging which, she presumably implies, should rightly have been approved by Hitler.

Nevertheless, in spite of the anti-Semitic and anti-feminine obsessions that imbue the work, all that is subordinated to the unequivocal Christian redemption in the end. The reign of ‘good', without female presence since Kundry has expired, has begun, under the salvation represented by the recovered Grail and spear.

Wieland Wagner admitted when he was dying that he had failed to persuade audiences that Parsifal was simply a theatrical piece, and not a religious document: audiences persisted in not applauding for example. So, Pierre Boulez referred to the ‘sickly sweet Christianity' in Parsifal, and its ‘pale ecstasy'. But Parsifal is also a sexually obsessed work - Thomas Mann called it a ‘sex opera' and hatred of sex is the basis of its religiosity. It is an abhorrence of sex that is aligned with the glosses on Christianity by the narrowest of Christian churches.

Just how well the traditional image of Parsifal, as staged religious oratorio, survives in the face of recent productions such as Christoph Schlingensief's 2004 incarnation at Bayreuth, remains to be seen.

Will the Bernd Benthaak view in Wellington illuminate these matters for the audience?