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Wagner
wishes to use Christian myth and Christian history to correct their errors.
Thus Cosima records: ‘Much about church and state; he says, “For me
Christianity has not yet arrived, and I am like the early Christians, awaiting
Christ’s return.” – But in the search for ideality, he adds, things look
different!’ (15 July 1879) Not only religion, not only Christianity, but even
theology might be aufgehoben. Hegel –
the philosophy of history – might yet vanquish Feuerbach, or at least render
him less one-sided in his apparent atheism. Wagner, whilst lauding in 1851 (Opera
and Drama) the ‘ability of Christian myth to enthral our minds’ via its
depiction of ‘transfiguration through
death,’ had also condemned it for having distorted and denied the
anthropomorphism of Germanic myth and having constructed instead a new
theology. Rendered incapable of necessary regeneration, myth – like political
and artistic unity – had ‘fragmented into its individual, self-contained,
component parts … its dramatic nucleus broken down into a plethora of unrelated
deeds.' Now Christian myth and Christian theology, even if of questionable
orthodoxy, might help renew that initial unity. If the Ring, despite its incidental Teutonism, had pointed the way, then Parsifal would recognise the necessity
of religion in general and of Christianity in particular for any
post-Incarnation society. Christ is reintroduced to a community that has
abandoned Him. Whilst discussing the issue of Hermann Levi as conductor of Parsifal, Cosima told her husband: ‘the
community into which the Israelite would be accepted has itself abandoned
Christ, whereas previously blood was shed and everything sacrificed on his
behalf’. Wagner responded that he had certainly remained true to Christ. ‘“The
trouble is,” he exclaims, “that all great personalities reveal themselves to us
in time and space, and are thus subject to change.”’ (19 January 1881) Hegel
and history once again intervene, even when the Schopenhauerian language of
time and space is invoked.
This conflict is re-dramatised in the dialectical opposition in Parsifal between the characteristic,
indeed almost normative, chromaticism and diatonicism of Tristan and Die
Meistersinger respectively. It is noteworthy that the most ‘advanced’ music
is given to Klingsor, Amfortas, and Kundry, not to Parsifal, just as it had
been to Alberich and Hagen. This diatonic-chromatic opposition takes concrete
form in the opposition of the two worlds of Monsalvat and Klingsor’s realm. It
is heightened by the incursions of the latter into the former, notably the
agonising chromaticism of Amfortas’s wound and Kundry’s kiss, which renders
Parsifal able to sympathise with Amfortas’s agony. As William Kinderman points
out (‘Wagner’s Parsifal: musical form and the drama of redemption,’ in The
Journal of Musicology, 4 (1985)),‘Kundry’s kiss serves … as the point of
connection between the heavenly, diatonic realm of the Grail and the
diabolical, chromatic realm of Klingsor; from her kiss comes the “pollution of
the sanctuary,” reflected in the chromatic contamination of the third bar of
the Communion theme.’Yet this ‘pollution’ is enabling too, in a very real sense
a felix culpa, for without it
redemption could never occur. Grace needs it, as well as vice versa.
And so, when reconciliation, the ultimate driving force of Hegel’s philosophy,
comes, it is, despite some appearances, dialectical. Kinderman observes:
The arrival of this final tonic chord
of A-flat major thus provides the simultaneous resolution of the Grail and
Communion motives, standing in place of the dissonance that had represented a
primary source of musical tension from the very beginning of the work, four
hours earlier. In these closing bars, both motives are subsumed into the final
subdominant cadence, completing and perfecting the musical form as an audible
symbol for the utopia of redemption.
Perhaps,
however, it remains but a utopia; it can hardly be the end of the story. We
cannot be any more sure of the outcome than at the end of Götterdämmerung. Such a plagal cadence was closely associated,
especially during the historicising nineteenth century, with the great
tradition of sacred music. The music, in a sense, is intoning ‘Amen!’ to the
words’ ‘Redemption to the Redeemer!’ This is not to suggest that Wagner is
straightforwardly assenting to the dogmas upon which that sacred tradition is
based. He remains for that both too much a Young Hegelian, adamant upon the
time-bound nature of supposedly eternal truths, and too much a Schopenhauerian,
with a metaphysical though not æsthetic bent of atheism. Rather, Wagner is
daring to subsume the truths of that tradition into the world of musical drama;
he portrays the ‘truest’ elements of Christian mythical tradition on stage and
in the orchestra, and thereby contributes to their development. He subsumes the
truths, partial though nevertheless real, into a greater, post-Hegelian search
for systematic truth: a vain attempt perhaps, yet an impulse to renewal.
(To read more of the essay on Parsifal from which the above is excerpted, click here.)
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