Author : Jos Hermans
Germany 1945, Stunde Null. On Lake Constance, Richard Wagner's grandson, traumatized by the war and its aftermath, resides. He immerses himself in the psychoanalytic works of Siegmund Freud, Alfred Adler and Gustav Jung. He absorbs the work of Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso, Henry Moore and Piet Mondrian. He reads the Greek classics and the writings of theater theorists Adolphe Appia and Gordon Craig. Arriving at the turning point of his life, he emerges from an unconscious to a conscious revolutionary. As such, Wieland Wagner steps into his grandfather's legacy at the 1951 reopening of the Bayreuth Festival.
With Parsifal, he takes the plunge into cold waters. The barrenness of the stage is total, the emphasis is on the inner action and is the result of 6 years of introspective turmoil within himself and Wagner's work. Gone is the pungent German chauvinism, gone is the nationalistic snobbery, gone is the romantic naturalism and its suspicious sentimentality, gone is the pseudo-religious symbolism, gone are the odious references that piled up for years in Wagner's work. Underlying all this is a deep psychological and artistic need. Finally, tearing down Bayreuth's moldy tradition is a way of purging himself and Bayreuth of its own past.
With his reinterpretation of Parsifal, Wieland Wagner surpasses in many ways the artistic result that the work had experienced at its premiere under the composer's direction in 1882. What Richard Wagner, as a child of his time, had been incapable of realizing on stage but had only managed to put into his music, what Adolphe Appia had subsequently dreamed of in his theoretical writings, was realized here for the first time for many eyewitnesses. Started as a bolt from the blue, Wieland Wagner's radically innovative Parsifal interpretation would endure for a quarter of a century. It instantly made him one of the most important directors and theater reformers of the twentieth century.
It began with doubts about whether the performances he had experienced in his youth in Bayreuth had adequately reflected the spiritual dimension of Wagner's work. After all, Wagner's early works do not tolerate historical naturalism, and Parsifal, Tristan and The Ring are much more than illustrated operatic fairy tales. He wanted to move radically away from the Bayreuth of the time, and that really didn't have much to do with Parsifal itself. After all, Parsifal had always been a thorn in the side of those in power, not only of the Church but also of the Third Reich. In Parsifal, depth psychology plays a major role, providing the human explanation of the action and characterizing the individuals. If the characters are correctly described, then the rest will automatically fall into place, Wieland Wagner believed. Even music, he believed, was intrinsically intertwined with depth psychology. What is the purpose of depth psychology? To interpret, to clarify, to sort out. The music of Parsifal follows the same path.
People have sometimes spoken disparagingly of Parsifal as an work of age, supposedly revealing the waning inspiration of the old master. The truth is that Wagner became a constructor in Parsifal. In fact, the entire work is derived from the first theme and very strongly structured. It is clear, constructed, layered music, the music of a creator who did not wish to dwell on his past achievements. Parsifal is Wagner's natural path, away from the highly romantic to a clarity that in its structures shows great affinity with modern music. Wagner the hyper-romantic becomes in Parsifal the tone poet of the new. Not coincidentally, Debussy was very attached to the score.
Parsifal is the typical mother-bound man, as Wagner himself was. He follows the knights into the forest and leaves his mother to become a man while wandering. It is precisely this bondage that Kundry uses in the second act to seduce Parsifal. By understanding Amfortas' suffering, Parsifal becomes a man and is able to resist Kundry. Amfortas' suffering arises from his unnatural chastity. Amfortas perishes from a misunderstood mission, to maintain absolute chastity in the realm of the Grail, a mission imposed on him by Titurel. Things were once different, and Gurnemanz tells of earlier times when everything was different and more natural. He himself remained just about the only normal human being in the entire realm of the Grail. What Amfortas went to war against, the realm of Klingsor, is the realm of absolute unchastity, which is as unnatural as absolute chastity. Between these two worlds, Kundry, in all her tornness, is for a long time the sole mediator.
Parsifal becomes worldly wise, however, and once he becomes a man he will unite these two worlds, dissolve their unnaturalness by bringing back together the spear (phallus) and the grail (mother's chalice). In such psychoanalytic terms, Parsifal was conceived by Wieland Wagner and put on stage as a drama of symbols and archetypes. In a letter to Hans Knappertsbusch, he wrote that the staging was strictly speaking nothing more than the expression of Parsifal's psychic condition. In the 1951 program book, he clarified this using a diagram entitled "Parsifal's cross: a psychological diagram.
In the field of tension between the poles Mother-Heiland, Klingsor-Titurel (or the archetypes Swan-Dove, Spear-Chalice) Parsifal's psychic-intellectual growth process takes place according to a perfectly mirrored arc, the turning point being Kundry's kiss, which is at the same time mystical center, climax, nadir and crisis of his road to salvation.
On the vertical axis (to be read from bottom to top) we find all stages of this growth process of the human salvation bringer Parsifal, beginning with the letting go of the child from the maternal primordial ground (symbol: the Swan) and ending with the unification of the original all-unity God-Man through the hero who has come to wisdom (symbol: the Dove). Decisive for the awakening of Parsifal is the meeting with Amfortas on the one hand and with Kundry on the other. He lives through the fate of both -the tragic tornness in the eternal human conflict between spirit and sexual drive- and therefore grows to understand his true predestination (the Amfortas fate on the right, the Kundry fate on the left of the axis). Each point along the lower part of the vertical axis, corresponds to a point on the upper part in perfect symmetry e.g. "Meets the shining knights and flees from his mother" with "Experiences the knights' despair and enters into the maternal community of the Grail"; "Retreats before the flower maidens" with "Retreats before Kundry". The absolute similarities between the fate of Kundry and Amfortas as between the 'white' magic of Titurel and the 'black' magic of his antagonist Klingsor thus arise automatically. Outside the scheme is Gurnemanz who, as Grail teacher and evangelist, fulfills his mission on the other side of the agony of the struggling souls.
From its inception, Parsifal has often been misunderstood. The Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick felt that the piece was full of "illogical and psychological inconsistencies and false religious-philosophical pretensions." Claude Debussy found "objectionable conceptions" in it but could not praise the score enough. Friedrich Nietzsche, who never heard nor saw the work, saw Parsifal with its "unnatural sermon for chastity" as the emanation of the "hatred against life." Igor Stravinsky, who was bored to tears in Bayreuth, called Parsifal an "unconscious imitation of an ecclesiastical rite." Even Wagner scholar Ernest Newman entrenched himself in an awkward, ridiculing pose when he opined in 1914 that the "mental world in Parsifal is out of date." 37 years later, as a reporter for the Sunday Times, he will praise Wieland Wagner's Parsifal "as one of the four most moving spiritual experiences" of his life. The criticism of Parsifal that persists to this day can mainly be traced back to Nietzsche in seeing Parsifal as a reactionary creation in which eroticism in the Christian sense is considered a sin. As if Richard Wagner, seized by old-age piety, wanted to portray the eroticism that plays such a major role in his entire oeuvre and in his private life in an unfavorable light.
That is difficult to reconcile with the observation that the 65-year-old composer of Parsifal stuffed Judith Gauthier's perfumed handkerchiefs in his underwear as soon as he took to the keyboard. It provided him with the "intimate communion" with his secret muse that he needed while composing. Parsifal is intended as therapy against life's most powerful drive, the sexual drive, which unbalances many people, today perhaps more than ever. Eroticism as a sin is not an idea of Wagner but of Titurel, "the pious hero." It is precisely one of the merits of Wieland Wagner to have cleared up this persistent misunderstanding. Would not Parsifal's critics of the first hour have fared the same way as Ernest Newman, had they been shown Wieland Wagner's illuminating 1951 interpretation? Was this production, as Lucy Beckett believes, perhaps the most satisfying solution the work will ever receive?
Forty years later, in Hamburg, the American Robert Wilson will take on the secularization and abstraction of Parsifal. He will omit depth psychology entirely, but his ritualistic direction of movement, his preference for naked spaces, his obsession with light and color will demonstrate a great kinship with the work of Richard Wagner's most gifted grandson.