PARSIFAL

Hugh Reginald Haweis, Parsifal.


"Parsifal" is an immoral work. One cannot for a moment suppose that Wagner, who had written "Tristan" and "Siegfried," meant to preach downright immorality, or that he meant "Parsifal" to stand as anything more than the expression of a momentary mood, the mood of the exhausted, the effete man, the mood which follows the mood of "Tristan" as certainly as night follows day. Nevertheless, in so far as "Parsifal" says anything to us, in so far as it brings, in Nonconformist cant, "a message," it is immoral and vicious, just as in so far as "Siegfried" carries a message it is entirely moral, healthful, and sane. It is useless to quibble about this, seeking to explain away plain things: the truth remains that "Siegfried" is a glorification of one view of life, "Parsifal" of its direct opposite and flat contradiction; and anyone who accepts the one view must needs loathe the other as sinful. To me the "Siegfried" view of life commends itself; and I unhesitatingly assert the sinfulness of the "Parsifal" view. The two operas invite comparison; for at the outset their heroes seem to be the same man. Siegfried and Parsifal are both untaught fools; each has his understanding partly enlightened by hearing of his mother's sufferings and death (compare Wordsworth's "A deep distress hath humanised my soul"); each has his education completed by a woman's kiss. All this may seem very profound to the German mind; but to me it is crude, a somewhat too obvious allegory, partly superficial, partly untrue, a survival of windy sentimental mid-century German metaphysics, like the Wagner-Heine form of "The Flying Dutchman" story, and the Wagner form of the "Tannhäuser" story. However, I am willing to believe that Siegfried, when he kisses Brünnhilde on Hinde Fell, and Parsifal, when Kundry kisses him in Klingsor's magic garden, has each his full faculties set in action for the first time. And then? And then Siegfried, with his fund of health and vitality, sees that the world is glorious, and joyfully presses forward more vigorously than ever on the road that lies before him, never hesitating for a moment to live out his life to the full; while Parsifal, lacking health and vitality—probably his father suffered from rickets—sees that the grief and suffering of the world outweigh and outnumber its joys, and not only renounces life, but is so overcome with pity for all sufferers as to regard it as his mission to heal and console them. And having healed and consoled one, he deliberately turns from the green world, with its trees and flowers, its dawn and sunset, its winds and waters, and shuts himself in a monkery which has a back garden, a pond and some ducks. There is only one deadly sin—to deny life, as Nietzsche says: carefully to pull up all the weeds in one's garden, but to plant there neither flower nor tree—and this is what "Parsifal" glorifies and advocates.

Now, far be it from me to go hunting a moral tendency in a work of art, and to praise or blame the art as I chance to like or dislike the tendency. I am in a state of perfect preparedness to see beauty in a picture, even if the subject is to me repulsive. But in the case of a picture it is possible to say, "Yes, very pretty," and pass on. In the case of a story, a play, or a music-drama, you cannot. You are tied to your seat for one or two or three mortal hours; and however perfect may be the art with which music-drama or play or story is set before you, if the subject revolts or bores you, you soon sicken of the whole business. And in the highest kind of story, play, or music-drama, subject and treatment merge inseparably one in the other, substance and form are one; for the idea is all in all, and the complete idea cannot be perceived apart from the dress which makes it visible. Besides, in the Wagnerian music-drama, it is intended that beauty of idea and of arrangement of ideas shall be as of great importance as beauty of ornament. Wagner certainly intended "Parsifal" to be such a music-drama; and indeed the idea is only too clearly visible. The main idea of the "Ring" is so much obscured by the subsidiary ideas twined about it that very few people know that the real hero is Wotan, and the central drama Wotan's tragedy, that Siegmund and Sieglinde, Siegfried and Brünnhilde, and their loves—all the romance and loveliness that enchant us—are merely accessory. But in "Parsifal" there is nothing superfluous, no rich and lovely embroidery on the dress of the idea to divert us from the idea itself—the idea is as nearly nude as our limited senses and our modern respectability permit. And the idea being what it is, it follows that the play, after the drama once commences, is not only immoral, but also dispiriting and boring, and, to my thinking, inconsequential and pointless. The first act, the exposition, is from beginning to end magnificent: never were the lines on which a drama was to develop more gorgeously, or in more masterly fashion, set forth. Had Wagner seen that Amfortas was merely a hypochondriac, a stage Schopenhauer, imagining all manner of wounds and evils where no evils or wounds existed, had he made Parsifal a Siegfried, and sent him out into the world to learn this, and brought him back to break up the monastery, to set Amfortas and the knights to some useful labour, and to tell them that the sacred spear, like Wotan's spear, had power only to hurt those who feared it, then we might have had an adequate working-out of so noble a beginning. Instead of this, Kundry kisses Parsifal, Parsifal squeals, and we see him in a moment to be only an Amfortas who has had the luck not to stumble; and he, the poor fool who is filled with so vast a pity because he sees (what are called) good and evil in entirely wrong proportion—as, in fact, a hypochondriac sees them—he, Parsifal, this thin-blooded inheritor of rickets and an exhausted physical frame, is called the Redeemer, and becomes head of the Brotherhood of the Grail. Beside this inconsequence, all other inconsequences seem as nothing. One might ask, for instance, how, seeing that no man can save his brother's soul, Parsifal saves the soul of Amfortas? This is a fallacy that held Wagner all his life. We find it in "The Flying Dutchman"; it is avoided in "Tannhäuser"—for, thank the gods, Tannhäuser is not saved by that uninteresting young person Elizabeth; it plays a large part in the "Ring"; it is the culmination of the drama of "Parsifal." Had Wagner thought more of Goethe and less of the Frankfort creature who formulated his hypo-chondriacal nightmares, and called the result a philosophy, he might have learnt that no mentally sick man ever yet was cured save by the welling-up of a flood of emotional energy in his own soul. He might also have seen that Parsifal is as much the spirit that denies as Mephistopheles. But these points, and many others, may go as, comparatively, nothings. The first act of "Parsifal" is unsurpassable, the second is an anti-climax, and the third, excepting the repentance of Kundry, which is pathetic, and strikes one as true, a more saddening anti-climax. There is one last thing to say before passing to the music, and this is that "Parsifal" is commonly treated with respect as a Christian drama—a superior "Sign of the Cross." I happen, oddly enough, to know the four Gospels exceedingly well; and I find nothing of "Parsifal" in them. It is much nearer to Buddhism in spirit, in colour: it is a kind of Germanised metaphysical Buddhism. Schopenhauer, not Christ, is the hero; and Schopenhauer was only a decrepit Mephistopheles bereft of his humour and inverted creative energy.

After hearing the whole opera twice, with all the supposed advantages of the stage, the main thing borne in upon me is that the stage and actors and accessories, far from increasing the effect of the music, actually weaken it excepting in the first act. In that act there is not a word or a note to alter. The story compels one's interest, and the music is rich, tender, and charged with a noble passion. Even the killing of the duck—it is supposed to be a swan, but it is really a duck—is saved from becoming ludicrous by the deep sincerity of the music of Gurnemanz's expostulations. The music, too, with the magnificent trombone and trumpet calls and deep clangour of cathedral bells, prevents one thinking too much of the absurdity of the trees, mountains, and lake walking off the stage to make the change to the second scene. On reflection, this panorama seems wholly meaningless and thoroughly vulgar; and even in the theatre one wonders vaguely what it is all about—for Gurnemanz's explanation about time and space being one is sheer metaphysical shoddy, a mere humbugging of an essentially uncultured German audience; but one does not mind it, so full is the accompaniment of mystical life and of colour, of a sense of impending great things. The whole cathedral scene—I would even include the caterwaulings of Amfortas—is sincere, impressive, and filled with a reasonable degree of mysticism. There is no falling off in the second act until after the enchanting waltz and Kundry's wondrously tender recital of the woes suffered by Parsifal's mother (here the melody compares in loveliness with the corresponding portion of "Siegfried"); indeed, the passion and energy go on increasing until Parsifal receives Kundry's kiss, and then at once they disappear. Between this point and the end of the act there is scarcely a fine passage. Every phrase is insincere, not because Wagner wished to be insincere, but because he tried to express dramatically a state of mind which is essentially undramatic. Parsifal is supposed to transcend almost at one bound the will to live, to rise above all animal needs and desires; and though no human being can transcend the will to live, any more than he can jump away from his shadow—for the phrase means, and can only mean, that the will to live transcends the will to live—yet I am informed, and can well believe, that those who imagine they have accomplished the feat reach a state of perfect ecstasy. Wagner knew this; he knew also that ecstasy, as what can only be called a static emotion, could not be expressed through the medium that serves to express only flowing currents of emotion; he himself had pointed out, that for the communication of ecstatic feeling, only polyphonic, non-climatic, rhythmless music of the Palestrina kind served; and yet, by one of the hugest mistakes ever made in art, he sought to express precisely that emotion in Parsifal's declamatory phrases. The thing cannot be done; it has not been done; all Parsifal's bawling, even with the help of the words, avails nothing; and the curtain drops at the end of the second act, leaving one convinced that the drama has untimely ended, has got into a cul-de-sac. And in a cul-de-sac it remains. There is much glorious music in the last act; the "Good Friday music" is divine; the last scene is gorgeously led up to; and the music of it, considered only as music, is unsurpassable. But heard at the end of a drama so gigantically planned as "Parsifal," it is unsatisfying and disappointing. It is to me as if the "Ring" had closed on the music of Neid-höhle with the squabblings of Alberich and Mime. The powers that make for evil and destruction have won; one knows that Parsifal is eternally damned; he has listened and succumbed, even as Wagner himself did, to the eastern sirens' song of the ease and delight of a life of slothful renunciation, self-abnegation, and devotion to "duty." The music of the last scene sings that song in tones of infinite sweetness; but it cannot satisfy you; you turn from the enchanted hall, with its holy cup and spear and dove, its mystic voices in the heights, its heavy, depressing, incense-laden atmosphere; and you hasten into the night, where the winds blow fresh through the black trees, and the stars shine calmly in the deep sky, just as though no "Parsifal" had been written.

"Parsifal" does not imply that Wagner in his old age went back on all he had thought and felt before. Born in a time when the secret of living had not been rediscovered, when folk still thought the victory, and not the battle, the main thing in life, he always sought a creed to put on as a coat-of-mail to protect him from the nasty knocks of fate. Nowadays we do not care greatly for the victory, and we go out to fight with a light heart, commencing where Wagner and all the pessimists ended. Wagner wanted the victory, and also, lest he should not gain it, he wanted something to save him from despair. That something he found in pessimism. In his younger days—indeed until near the last—he forgot all about it in his hours of inspiration, and worked for no end, but for the sheer joy of working. But towards the end of his life, when his inspiration came seldomer and with less power, he worked more and more for the victory, and became wholly pessimistic, throwing away his weapons, and hiding behind self-renunciation as behind a shield. He won a victory more brilliant than ever Napoleon or Wellington or Moltke won; and in the eyes of all men he seemed a great general. But life had terrified him; he had trembled before Wotan's—or Christ's—spear; in his heart of hearts he knew himself a beaten man; and he wrote "Parsifal."


— JOHN F. RUNCIMAN