The intoxicating power of Parsifal is so intense and overwhelming it can almost trigger effects of nausea. Having first heard the work in college, it seemed to impart a hypnotic second-skin, a dopamine rush that could scarcely be avoided even if one wished. Aware of a certain spiritual bankruptcy of the “post-wisdom” boomer generation, I had already flocked to Hasidism and Transcendental Meditation to look for a way out. It only dawned on me much later, that Parsifal was a similar attempt to cast a spell on existence anew, to rekindle an experience of wonder. Having Parsifal to return to is a daily reminder that religion can always be with us in ways that at first seem deceptively like diversionary entertainment. Yet, a serious close inspection reveals that Parsifal provides no antidote at all to the exclusionary mechanisms, and temptations of purity and hate that befall humans in and outside of the search for the sacred.
There is an overabundance of competing markers for the break with religious tradition and the onset of secularization in Modern Europe. Perhaps none have captured the imagination more than Nietzsche’s proclamation of the “death of God.” I prefer to begin these reflections on art and spirituality with a lesser-known materialist redefinition of religion by the pioneering French-Jewish sociologist Emile Durkheim. Writing during the Third French Republic, perhaps the government most committed to secularization of any up until that time, Durkheim posited that the sacred was indeed quite real and that religion had and would always be everywhere accompanying human existence. At the heart of the religious experience for Durkheim was something he termed “collective effervescence.” This experience of collective thought, emotion, and conscience emerged from the social itself. The notion of the divine being was removed from the equation; if there was a God, it was society itself.
I take these notions as a starting point because confronting modern history has often meant being faced with a series of displaced forms of religious energy, of new societies as Gods each with their own form of collective effervescence. In the United States this has often taken the form of “Great Awakenings” with their succession of new religious movements such Mormonism and Christian Science. In Europe where the remnants of clerical power as a temporal force remained visceral, religious experience or “collective effervescence” more often took cultural or political expression rather than the form of new religious movements. (Indeed, for all the recent American focus on definitions of fascism, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the many European thinkers who sought to understand that phenomenon as more of a religious than a political phenomenon.)
The musical-dramatic works of the German composer Richard Wagner (who studiously avoided the label “opera”) represent a kind of pinnacle of the embrace of the notion of music and culture as a “temple of art” or substitute religion. Other than Leo Tolstoy’s “Kingdom of God” project which comprised a more literal and literary revamped Christianity, few examples exist of art that was more self-consciously and explicitly sacred in a Christian cultural vein than those of Wagner.
Perhaps most well-known of Wagner’s works would be his Ring des Niebelungen or Ring cycle which consists of three full-scale music-dramas, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung, preceded by one prologue, Das Rheingold. Filled with magical rings and swords, “dwarfs,” dragons, giants, and heroes spawned via incest, the world of Walt Disney, the Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and even Harry Potter all owe a great debt to Wagnerian influence. Wagner’s embrace of technological sleight-of-hand and special effects, submerging the orchestra in total darkness for instance, is matched by his resort to the magical world of Northern or “Norse” mythology replete with earth goddesses, trickster gods, and based around the construction of the palace of the gods at Valhalla. Prior to the Ring he had experimented with on-stage ritual. His Tannhäuser of 1845 features on-stage praises to the Lord, as well as processions of the penitent mendicants of a monastic brotherhood and this drama concludes with a final on-stage miracle of the sprouting of a garland upon a priestly staff, but it carries nowhere near the transcendental implications of the grail ceremony. In Parsifal though, Wagner depicted actual prayers on stage as well as the depictions of sacraments.
Parsifal, his final work, took art to religious heights unforeseen. Titled, Ein Buhnenweihfestspiel and banning both applause and performances anywhere else other than his proprietary theater in the Bavarian town Bayreuth, this original appellation for a work of musical theater had never before nor since been used. Each of the four elements in this name calls for elaboration. Literally translated as “festival play for the consecration of the stage,” Wagner has taken the most celebratory form of performance, a festival, and raised it to a level traditionally reserved for the religious or the cultic. A festival is a performance that occurs on a specially reserved occasion in time. A “stage consecration” denotes the engagement of a specific physical space in a given place. By thus raising the stakes so high for this last work, Wagner brought a work of art onto the level of religion or at least to a kind of ritual practice. Beyond its unique artistic form, the thematic content itself is very bound up with a religious sensibility and even a claim to rededicate and cleanse Christianity anew for the modern era.
Musically, Parsifal resembles an Oratorio, a concert work written for orchestra and solo singers, a genre almost exclusively for sacred matters, more than any opera. His emphasis is on contemplation rather than drama, with a heavy reliance on recitative, which although a form of song, approximates speech. Parsifal heavily features these two elements, recitative to provide narration and an emphasis on contemplation rather than dramatic action. Wagner’s consistent use of hymn-like choral climaxes also reflects oratorio more than traditional opera.
As a work of religious theater, Parsifal upon first glance appears as a revival of medieval passion plays as it also features themes of reconquista, oppositional or “heathen” forces as well as the conflation of Jews and Muslims. Such Passion Plays would often revolve around the attempted desecration of sacred relics by “non-believers,” who are then miraculously thwarted, redeemed and/or baptized. Though left deliberately vague, the action of Parsifal contains several references to medieval Spain which was on the front line of the clash of Muslim and Christian civilizations. The center point of the proceedings of Parsifal is the castle of the knights of the Grail, called Montsalvat, or mountain of salvation, believed to be based on the Montserrat Abbey in Catalonia. The main adversary of the work, is a “seducer type” a caricature of a woman endowed with stereotypical, even demonic, features of a sorceress named Kundry, reveals that she herself came recently from “Arabia.”
The central conceit of Parsifal is that the leader of the Grail Knights, Amfortas, is sick with a mysterious illness and thus cannot continue to oversee the ritual of the Holy Grail. The story itself thus enacts Wagner’s larger agenda, namely the pursuit of repurification and the longing for the capacity to reactivate the sacred in an institutionalized manner. To accomplish this aim, Wagner resorts to materials outside of Christian biblical tradition, the folklore of the Holy Grail and the characters of Parsifal and the Fisher King, which derive from Arthuriana.
In Parsifal, Wagner harnessed Arthurian legend in a Christian framework to create a new messiah figure. Throughout the work, Wagner reminds listeners that he really means to present an aesthetic experience on stage about the central figure in European tradition imagination, namely, Jesus Christ. Wagner identifies his hero as completing the work of the second coming. The climax of the story is Parsifal’s replacement of Amfortas and the recommencement of the Grail ceremony.
Parsfial appears to model a renewed, updated, and even more demanding higher Christian ethic which corresponds to a new redeemer who is not commensurate with the figure of Jesus of Nazareth. (The differences between Parsifal and Jesus are numerous and striking.) With Parsifal as Wagner’s last statement to the world, he signals a profound discontent, with that fundamental experience of modernity, secularization. The characters on stage all seem to share in the awareness and believe in the revivification of messianic prophecy.
Wagner has set forth an astounding, if not radical premise, namely, the post-scriptural survival of prophecy and divine vision. The fundamental shared premise of the Abrahamic faiths, though naturally they disagree on the details, is that religion is the product of divine revelation, which after it occurred, would then cease to reoccur. Enshrined in text, these divine messages then literally closed the book on any further revelation or even prophetic faculty in the future. Parsifal, by contrast, takes as its starting point, not only the notion that prophecy may continue, but that there will be in fact another redeemer figure, one different from the prophet-messiah already known of through the scriptural text.
Wagner’s reimagining of Christianity may be read as part of the project of removing the human “stain” of descent of Christianity’s founder. The attempt to historicize and transcend Jesus occurred along a spectrum of desacralization to a remystification, from philological analysis to the creation of new religions. Nietzsche represents the urge for a European emancipation from the Christain heritage itself as an undue burden of crippling moral standards that plague psychological states. The “prosthetic God '' of modern Promethean chafes at an autonomy curtailed by an ancient ethics of the Near East. Parsifal is a narrative of self-mastery but also mastery of the external environment, of discipline, subduing foes in the interest of a high functioning bureaucracy, that of the Grail knights. With Parsifal audiences are left a redeemer not as peacemaker but rather a supernatural knight-priest who can silence foes as if on a field of battle. Parsifal’s parting words at the close of the second act, “you know where you can find me,” convey a clear message both for his nemeses and the audience. He will be where he is needed to counter threats to the sacred community and he now fully knows what he is, namely a new and untainted redeemer now in complete control of his mission.
At the end of Pasrifal, the wise old hermit Gurnemanz sings an ode of purity to the “pure one,” blesses and anoints him, completing his mission as herald and forerunner of Parsifal’s messiahship. This term is entirely appropriate as the Hebrew word for messiah refers to the process of anointing by oil. The remainder of the drama is entirely devoted to ritual service, and so the audience is enveloped in a world of ceremony where actual drama is suspended, but the proceedings carry on. The characters transition from subjective agents of interaction to participants in a sacred drama who have an objective role to fulfill beyond emotions or thoughts.
Even this cursory outline of the action of Parsifal should convey that Wagner strove for a depiction of religion and invocation of spirituality far in excess of any possible parallels. In the “temple of art” Wagner exchanged literal depiction for what had once been mere suggestion. The longing for community, effervescence, and edification through art may seem greatest when traditional religion is in decline. Parsifal may therefore represent a “post-secular“ phenomenon par excellence. Several factors peculiar to the 19th Century German context help to explain about how and why Wagner emerged when he did: an overrapid quasi-traumatic experience of industrialization and dislocation; the failure of a bourgeois liberal-democratic revolution in 1848; the formation of a top-down authoritarian state in 1871 over what had been numerous independent entities; a population uniquely rent asunder by confessional divisions as the German lands were among the very few in Europe to be almost equally divided between Catholic and Protestant adherents. Nevertheless if we return to Durkheim’s reminder, religion will always be with us, in ever new emerging forms of the “God-social.”
Our concert halls, from which we are now sadly exiled, were an attempt to forge ennobling temples and provide a spiritually edifying experience available to all. A religion of everyday life for the secular and for their transpersonal development was meant to uplift and inform. We instinctively miss the kind of collective euphoria that can rise up at concerts and music making. Wagner took this to a narcissistic extreme by taking the suggested and making it explicit, by claiming one theater all for himself and crafting a work that made ritual too obvious, even aggressive. We still await a time when religions and their new substitutes might free us of personal sufferings and fixations, rather than just temporarily suspend in insidious hypnosis.
Adam J. Sacks holds an MA and PhD in history from Brown University and an MS in education from the City College of the City University of New York. Parsifal, an interpretive listening guide to Richard Wagner's last opera, Parsifal, is his first book.
