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Woman as image and narrative in Wagner's Parsifal: A case study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2008

Barry Emslie
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Extract

In much nineteenth-century European art ‘The Woman’ appears as an essentially symbolic figure saturated with ‘higher’ significance. Perhaps only in those literary forms that depend heavily on narrative does ‘she’ have any real chance of escaping a passive role. Otherwise, the female figure was used by male artists in an almost de-personalised manner that invariably emphasised abstract characteristics. At times The Woman is ‘elevated’ – so it would have appeared – to the highest symbolic level: to Liberty, Virtue, Humanity, Science, Art, Europa, etc. ‘She’ is, in aesthetic production, frequently a normative and seldom a narrative figure. Indeed her status as the former helps preclude her from active participation in the latter, so that even in narratives she often appears merely to observe the stories in which she is nominally involved. In artistic discourse, her best chance of liberation from an essentially symbolic identity and of breaking into the realm of active ‘life’ is to assume those qualities that lie most at odds with her conventional, morally uplifting status. The ‘bad’ woman – whore, temptress, manipulator of men – has a better chance than her ‘good’ Doppelgänger of playing a role rather than of merely assuming an ideological part.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , July 1991 , pp. 109 - 124
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

1 Wagner's notion of the ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ has naturally encouraged commentators to unpick the ‘organic’ music dramas in order to reveal fundamental contradictions in their production and structure, most notably Adorno, Theodor, ‘;Versuch über Wagner’, Gesammelte Schriften, XIII (Frankfurt a.M., 1971).Google Scholar However, for many critics Parsifal remains the closest Wagner came to realising his ideal of a wholly integrated operatic practice. Tanner's, Michael ‘The Total Work of Art’, in The Wagner Companion, ed. Burbidge, Peter and Sutton, Richard (London, 1979), 206Google Scholar, calls it Wagner's ‘supreme dramatic masterpiece’ (see also n. 4).

2 See in particular Wagner's essay ‘Religion and Kunst’, published most recently in Soden, Michael von, ed., Richard Wagner: ‘Parsifal’ (Frankfurt a.M., 1983).Google Scholar

3 Pierre Boulez talks of: ‘A synthesis … between the Passions and Opera’ in the booklet included in the Deutsche Grammophon recording of Parsifal (2713 004).

4 In her diary Cosima distinguished between the sound-world of Parsifal and that of the Ring. In 1879 she wrote concerning Parsifal: ‘Richard said … that the instrumentation will be like shifting layers of cloud that separate and re-form.’ See Wagner, Cosima, Die Tagebücher, 2 vols., ed. Gregor-Dellin, Martin and Mack, Dietrich (Munich and Zurich, 1976 and 1977), II, 337.Google Scholar Arnold Whittall in Chapter 4 of Beckett, Lucy, Richard Wagner: ‘Parsifal’, Cambridge Opera Handbooks (Cambridge, 1981), 86Google Scholar, stresses the ‘satisfying, coherent’ musical construction.

5 Barthes, Roland, Mythologies (London, 1972), 88f.Google Scholar

6 See Dahlhaus, Carl, Richard Wagners Musikdramen ([Seelze], 1971), 141.Google Scholar

7 Michael Tanner (see n. 1), 187, writes, ‘Wagner's recommended courses for redemption never involve simply becoming a Christian – not even in Parsifal’ (my emphasis). It is my contention that the programme of Parsifal goes well beyond what may be regarded as the Christian agenda for salvation.

8 This is a point well made by Dahlhaus (seen. 6), 145 and 150.

9 Wagner, Richard, Briefe, ed. Kesting, Hanjo (Munich and Zurich, 1983), 374.Google Scholar

10 The question of Parsifal's passivity is of particular interest because it is linked to his ignorance. Normally the ignorant or unknowing Wagnerian hero is far from passive. Adorno observes that the dialectical contradiction between myth and the capitalist mode of production leads Wagner to prefer the active hero to the technical expert. Mime is too skilled a blacksmith to forge the sword, but Siegfried, as a child of nature, can do so. Likewise Beckmesser is too knowledgeable to master the Prize Song, which the amateur Walter has ‘composed’. See Adorno (n. 1), 103.

White's, David A. ‘Who is Parsifal's “Pure Fool”?: Nietzsche or Wagner’, The Music Review, 44 (1983), 202–7Google Scholar, suggests that the hero's foolishness amounts to a ‘deadly hatred of knowledge’ and a submission to authority (206), a position that underlines Nietzsche's famous attack on the work as lacking ‘self-affirmation’. See Nietzsche, , The Case of Wagner, trans. Thomas, Common in The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, III (London, 1899), 58.Google Scholar

Michael Tanner's analysis presents Parsifal, as Wagner intended, in the guise of active Redeemer and Kundry and Amfortas as the beneficiaries of his actions. Kundry ‘cannot initiate any course of action which will purify or redeem her’. See Tanner (n. 1), 213. The argument I have tried to lay out above is, of course, entirely opposed to this view.

11 Briefe (see n. 9), 394.Google Scholar

12 Briefe (see n. 9), 424 (08 1860 to Mathilde Wesendonk).Google Scholar

13 Wagnerites will be aware that in Tannhäuser there are also two female figures (Venus and Elisabeth) who are placed in opposition to each other as sensualist and virgin. The Parsifal ‘solution’ is clearly a bolder attempt to handle and synthesise the dilemma in which the sexual but virtuous male finds himself when confronted by the female embodiment of both qualities.

Readers familiar with feminist literary studies might well see in Wagner’s composite Kundry a partial manifestation of the negative, or frustrated, female figure (the ‘madwoman’) whom, it has been argued, women novelists were unconsciously compelled to marginalise when foregrounding the socially acceptable heroine. See Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven, 1979).Google Scholar

14 Briefe (see n. 9), 424 (08 1860 to Mathilde Wesendonk).Google Scholar

15 Wagner's contradictory behaviour as artist and respectable bourgeois is cleverly examined by Adorno (see n. 1), 14–16.

16 Amfortas's wound, which cannot ‘close’ and periodically bleeds as proof of his ‘shame’, suggests a remarkably close parallel with Freud's writings on female sexuality. In this case the sexual imagery is explicitly carried over into the religious ceremony, itself the cultural consequence of the initial Oedipal deed. As a result, what is inferior in the woman becomes, in the case of the tormented man, evidence of a flawed but none the less real relation with all that is holy. With regard to the inferior and mutilated state of female genitals (the vagina as wound, as evidence of ‘castration’), see Freud, Sigmund, ‘Femininity’ and ‘Female Sexuality’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XXI (London, 1953).Google Scholar

17 Briefe (see n. 9), 394 (05 1859 to Mathilde Wesendonk).

18 Von Soden (see n. 2), 112–13.

19 Michael Tanner (see n. 1), 212, writes concerning the climax of the Parsifal/Kundry encounter: ‘Kundry is becoming more confused: she really believes that, by seducing Parsifal … she will, to put it at its strongest, regain her virginity – an impossible ambition’. But is it? Impossible for Kundry perhaps, but not for Amfortas. The miracle that Kundry desires – the return to a pure state – is exactly what Parsifal will effect in Amfortas when he closes his ‘wound’ (seen. 16).

20 Cosima Wagner (see n. 4), II, 215.

21 For an analysis of Parsifal that emphasises how the ‘woman’ functions as an appropriated commodity torn between capitalist contradictions, see Carvalho, Mario Vieira de, ‘Parsifal oder der Gegensatz zwischen Theorie und Praxis als Dilemma der herrschenden Klasse’, Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft, 28 (1986), 309–19.Google Scholar

22 Cosima Wagner (see n. 4), I, 78.

23 On von Bülow beating Cosima see Cosima Wagner (n. 4), I, 126. On Cosima's ‘training’ as an obedient daughter and wife see Rieger, Eva, Frau, Musik und Männerherrschaft (Frankfurt a.M., 1981), 190–200.Google Scholar

24 Cosima Wagner (see n. 4), I, 206–7.

25 For a relevant and convenient collection of Cosima's Diary entries see Rieger, Eva, ed., Frau und Musik (Frankfurt a.M., 1980), 108–16.Google Scholar

26 Cosima Wagner (see n. 4), I, 99.

27 See Warner, Marina, Alone of all her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (London, 1978)Google Scholar, App. B, ‘A Muddle of Marys’, 344–5.

28 Warner, 235.

29 Warner, 229.