Loke, Andrew. 2020. ‘Theology and Philosophy of Religion in Richard Wagner’s Parsifal.’ Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie. 62: 372-388. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Redemption and Transformation: Making Sense of Richard Wagner's Parsifal
Religon and the Arts, 2016
The article discusses Richard Wagner’s last music-drama, which today is the traditional Good Friday “opera” in New York, Vienna, and other venues around the globe. I argue that Parsifal utilizes traditional Christian symbols and thereby transforms them, in order to help transform the world of the audience. The first part of the article summarizes the dramatic conflict and analyzes how the work appropriates the Christian symbolism of the Lord’s Supper. I also look at Wagner’s essay “Religion and Art,” which was written during the composition of Parsifal and presents an ethical critique of Christianity in the name of “true religion.” The second part of the article presents two assessments of Parsifal, both of which acknowledge its inherent religious symbolism but come to different conclusions regarding its significance (Christian versus atheistic). The third part of the article offers an alternative interpretation and implies trajectories for further research.
The Christianity of Richard Wagner
The Christianity of Richard Wagner, 2023
Like Christianity, the redemptive power of Love is the central controlling idea in all of Wagner’s operas, and he was one of the few composers versed in Philosophy and Theology. Yet some manifestations such as incest and adultery in Die Walküre remain shocking, even to contemporary audiences. Wagner was especially interested in German Idealism, and the thought of figures such as Schopenhauer, Feuerbach and Hegel, so he fits the mould of a socialist rather than that of a proto-Nazi, his notorious antisemitism notwithstanding. Of all the books in Wagner’s private library in Dresden, his copy of Luther’s translation of the New Testament was the most heavily annotated, yet his preparatory study for an opera ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ never got beyond the stage of sketches. Nevertheless, despite his often hostile attitude towards the Catholic Church, Wagner pestered his Jewish friends to undergo baptism and convert to Christianity. However, he was unable to convince Hermann Levi to convert ahead of conducting the premiere of Parsifal. This talk discusses the essence of Christianity and examines Wagner’s place in it.
2016
Throughout the course of this thesis, I examine the evidence of racial, religious and gender discrimination in Richard Wagner’s final music drama, Parsifal (1882). The question is how and with what effects these forms of discrimination are constructed. In other words, does the work promote or simply “just” dramatize discrimination, and what are the consequences of these actions? Furthermore, how should opera directors today tackle these evident forms of discrimination? In short, how can Parsifal still be acceptable and even relevant to produce today? I examine Parsifal broadly and interdisciplinarily as both a historical document – i.e. Richard Wagner’s original music score, libretto, stage notes and photographs from 1882 – and as a contemporary, live performance – i.e. the British director Keith Warner’s staging of Parsifal at the Royal Danish Opera from 2012. This, I believe, is essential in order to explore the work’s constructions of gender, racial and religious stereotyping and discrimination in its semiotic and performative interplaying dimensions – a methodological approach inspired by German theatre theorist Erika Fisher-Lichte. From a semiotic perspective, inspired by theorists such as Zygmunt Bauman, Simone de Beauvoir, Edward W. Said, Catherine Clément, Susan McClary and Herbert Lindenberger, I examine how the work reproduces and subverts stereotypes of the binary opposition between the norm and the Other in both the musical score, libretto and visual elements. From a performative approach, inspired by theorists such as Judith Butler, Erika Fisher-Lichte and Carolyn Abbate, I examine how these stereotypes are performed and subverted in the work as a staged (i.e. live visual, sounding and sensory) performance and experience. I show how Parsifal can indeed be read as a critique of racial, religious and gender discrimination - and go further to suggest that the work endorses an inclusion of the Other, symbolically represented in the characters Klingsor, Kundry and through the means of musical chromaticism. We move from Act 1 in which the Other is excluded, to Act 2 in which we are in the realm of the Other and finally to Act 3 in which the Other is included in the realm and characters. It is in this fact that I view Parsifal as a highly relevant work to produce today. Furthermore, this places Parsifal as a work embodying strong socio-political potentials. Directors today should then not shy away from staging Klingsor and Kundry as the Other, that being any supressed group of identity to fully embrace this subversive potential.
Wagner’s Parsifal: Christianity, Celibacy, and the Ideal of Medieval Brotherhood
'Unattended Moments' Conference, University of Otago, New Zealand, 2-5 April 2014
Wagner’s final opera Parsifal, which he termed a Bühnenweihfestspiel (‘stage-festival consecration play’), was first performed in 1878. It is a strange, serious, and beautiful work, alternately hailed as a profoundly Christian statement and a hyperbolic pseudo-religious spectacle, with occult or even Buddhist (derived from Schopenhauer) pretensions. The plot is based on medieval sources (chiefly Wolfram von Eschenbach’s epic poem Parzival), and shows Wagner’s continued fascination with the Grail legends that informed, at least partly, his earlier works Tannhäuser (1845) and Lohengrin (1848). Both those operas retained a view of human love as redemptive and integrated both negative and positive exemplars of womanhood (Venus and Elisabeth, Ortrud and Elsa, though it is worth noting that the virtuous women die in the final moments of both operas). The wretched and outcast seductress, Kundry, the sole female in Parsifal, is an extraordinary artistic creation, yet Wagner’s unambiguous rejection of her cements the view that the ideal male brotherhood, represented by the Grail Knights’ devotion to their wounded leader Amfortas, is offered to modern audiences as a template for society. Wagner’s plot in Parsifal picks up on two further motifs from Wolfram’s poem; that the Grail can bring wholeness to the wounded and diseased, and that true innocence – such as is embodied in Parsifal, the Holy Fool – is godly and good, and escapes the corruption of the world. These themes make Parsifal particularly difficult, in that the sexually profligate Wagner embraces celibacy, the composer who celebrates beauty forensically details a diseased community (that is still deemed both authentic and desirable) and its painfully wounded leader, and the one-time revolutionary embraces the abrogation of individual freedom that accompanies duty and devotion to a God-ordained hereditary leader. For these reasons, Parsifal is a unique combination of the medieval and the modern, so much so that it is difficult not to conclude that the nineteenth-century Wagner heralded the medieval as the cure for the ills of modernity.
Academia Letters, 2021
Durch Mitleid wissend, der reine Tor! (The pure fool, made wise by compassion!) Amfortas, Wagner's Parsifal 1 This article skims the shallowest academic curd off the deepest of musical cream: the topic of a purely Schopenhauerian, metaphysical perspective of composer Richard Wagner's first, and final, magnum opus, Parsifal. Sixteen hundred words will hardly suffice to introduce any substantial new content to the century-plus of enthusiastic Wagnerian discourse; however, such a memo may whet the appetite for a future, more satisfying conversation. 2 This piece briefly addresses the surface ramifications of Schopenhauer's compassionate metaphysics on the primary characters of Parsifal, Amfortas, and Kundry. Interpretations of Parsifal typically take an Aryan vs. Christian, feministic vs. patriarchal, or historical vs. mythological approach. Abbate and Dehnert recognize Schopenhauerian influence in the music drama, but do not suggest metaphysical compassion as a means of interpreting Wagner's gesamtkunstwerk. 3 Dahlhaus, Magee, and Tanner are arguably the 1
A Wagnerian Battle for Souls: Parsifal and the Crisis in American Protestantism, 1882-1904
Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 2020
The Metropolitan Opera premiere of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal in December 1903 stirred what was arguably the first American religious controversy over an artistic event to claim national attention in the twentieth century. Although the outcome was predictable – the protests appeared only to fuel box office success – the significance lies in what this controversy reveals about the music drama’s most ardent opponents and supporters at a key moment in American religious history. The 1903 Parsifal controversy unfolded in the midst of a crisis in American Protestantism, as conservative establishment Protestants defended their weakening hold on American culture, and their theologically liberal brethren viewed that same culture as both a source of spiritual inspiration and a cause for redemption. Drawing primarily upon accounts published in the New York press, nationally circulated periodicals (including strongly partisan contributions to the debate by The Musical Courier), and the writings of several prominent Protestant clergy and lay leaders, this reception study argues that the religious controversy surrounding the 1903 Parsifal production was a substantive skirmish in this American Protestant crisis, and brought forward competing interpretations of the music drama which highlighted the cultural implications of what had been, until that point, largely a theological dispute. Conservative response fastened onto elements of the drama found to be sacrilegious, while liberal response was conditioned by its kinship to the nineteenth-century phenomenon of Kunstreligion, and a broad view of redemption that extended beyond the individual soul to the artwork and the artist, and to all of culture.
Moloney brings a lifetime of studying the Gospel of John with literary, theological, and spiritual sophistication to this slim volume that is a testament to his own body of work as well as his careful reading of other Johannine scholarship. Focused and accessible, his investigation of the love theme in the Fourth Gospel is a careful academic analysis of the material, with M.'s familiar emphasis on how literary structure reveals theological meaning. Like a good teacher, M. knows how to engage an audience with a captivating story. Previous scholars have explored the major themes pursued in this book, such as love in the Gospel, the crucifixion of Jesus as exaltation, and the way the Christology of the Fourth Gospel points to the theology of the Father. M.'s contribution here is primarily twofold: first, to show the intimate association between the love theme and the "hour" of Jesus, and second, to balance an overemphasis on Jesus' words about love in the Fourth Gospel with attention to his actions that reveal love, not only for the Johannine community but also for the world. M. accomplishes these objectives by a deft combination of attention to both overarching literary structures and specific exegetical detail.
The Myth of Parsifal in Wagner's Telling
An investigation into the significance of the changes made to previous versions of the myth of Parsifal by Richard Wagner, as he prepared to compose his stage-consecration-festival-play. Written in response to a performance of Parsifal by Welsh National Opera in 2003, and to the Cambridge Music Conference on the theme of 'Grail Narratives' in 2006.