Wieland Wagner's sketch for Parsifal, 1951.
Wagner had been mulling over the idea of a Grail opera at least since 1845, when he made a close reading of Wolfram von Aschenbach's Parzival. He fleshed out ideas for the story in the later 1850s, as he was also contemplating his never-realized Buddhist narrative, Die Sieger; in 1865, for the benefit of King Ludwig II, he wrote a detailed prose sketch. It appears that he long intended for this semi-Christian, semi-Buddhist mystical drama to be his final work. So it turned out to be — an eerie instance of long-term planning in a career that outwardly appeared chaotic and erratic. He began composing the music in 1877 and finished in January 1882. The première took place that summer; Wagner died in February of the following year.
All of Wagner's mythic-legendary operas entail complex syntheses and transformations of extant source material. The libretto of Parsifal might be his most remarkable achievement in this regard; Wolfram's Parzival is named as the primary source, but it often bears only a glancing resemblance to Wagner's story. At the core of the composer's scenario is the archetype Fisher King, who falls sick or is wounded and whose land falls into a wasted state as a result. Here that role goes to Amfortas, the ruler of the Grail Order, although it also applies to Amfortas's father, Titurel, the undying geriatric founder of the Grail community. The agent of Amfortas's suffering is the evil sorcerer Klingsor, who once castrated himself in an effort to gain admittance to the chaste order. He now wreaks revenge by tempting knights with various forms of sexual bait: the ancient Kundry, who has been wandering the earth since she laughed at Christ on the way to Golgotha, and also a teasing bevy of Flower Maidens. After defeating Amfortas, Klingsor came into possession of the Holy Spear, which is another Wagnerian fusion: the Parzival legends make mention of a spear or lance that bleeds from the tip, but Wagner fuses that weapon with the Lance of Longinus, which, in the book of Luke and in subsequent Christian legend, pierces Christ’s side as he hangs on the Cross. The Grail itself is the chalice from the Last Supper and the vessel into which Christ's blood dripped. This obsession with blood — it is also described flowing copiously from Amfortas's wound — is one of several elements that give Wagner's ostensibly sacred drama a quasi-pagan cast.
Lohengrin memorably began with a Prelude that made no effort at foreshadowing the drama, like most operatic overtures of previous eras, but that instead summoned a sacred mood, suggestive of the supernatural presence of the Holy Grail itself. Parsifal follows the same strategy, and its Prelude is even uncannier in effect, blending the lighter and darker strains of the scenario into an atmosphere that might be described as luminous grey. Wagner designed the score for the remarkable acoustics of the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, where the sound of the hidden orchestra blends and resonates in unexpected ways. That art of blending is exemplified in the unaccompanied thematic statement with which the prelude opens: an upward-wafting melody in A-flat major, not unlike the resigned melody that ends the Wotan-Fricka scene in Walküre, is played by violins, cellos, one bassoon, and one clarinet, with an English horn joining in in the second bar. The melody is then repeated against a shimmering atmosphere of string arpeggios and murmuring winds, now given to a solo trumpet, oboes, and violins, which form a kind of super-instrument of novel origin. Just after 2:00, the melody is transferred to the minor mode, thereby taking on a deeply melancholy cast, although it was hardly joyful to begin with. A fuller orchestral reprise again follows, with the trumpet-oboe instrument taking the lead. After four minutes, all we have heard is essentially one theme played four times in a row — a marker of the extreme slowness and stillness of the Parsifal sound-world. At 4:13, a new idea finally enters: the Dresden Amen, a fixture of Saxon church music in the nineteenth century. It here represents the Grail, and it is followed by a solemnly flowing motif of Faith. In the final part of the prelude the opening melody returns, in a more restless, developmental, forward-surging form. Steeped in grandeur and strangeness, serenity and foreboding, the prelude sets the tone for the unconventional drama to follow.
Pinckney Marcius-Simons, "Parsifal," 1902.
The opera is set on the slopes of Monsalvat, a mountain in northern Spain. Titurel built his castle on the northern side of the mountain, to guard the Grail and the Holy Spear. Gurnemanz, an old, faithful servant of Titurel, dominates the first act, serving up considerable quantities of exposition. We meet Kundry, who has arrived with balsam that might assuage Amfortas's pain. Amfortas himself takes a bath, though his pain is unrelenting. Both Amfortas and Gurnemanz await the "pure fool," the one "knowing through compassion," who can heal the wound. Gurnemanz proceeds to explain to a company of squires the fate of Amfortas, the role of Kundry, and the perfidy of Klingsor. The wild boy Parsifal arrives, having killed a swan, which is a sin against the rules of the Grail territory. Gurnemanz, sensing that the boy might be the awaited pure fool, takes the boy under his wing and brings him to the Grail Temple. When Parsifal wonders at the fact that they have traveled far with only a few steps, Gurnemanz says, "Here time becomes space." The Transformation music follows, with its hypnotic ringing of bells. Here is relatively traditional staging of this sequence, by Wolfgang Wagner at Bayreuth, with the ceremony of the Grail following:
Here is a demonstration of various bespoke instruments that the Steingräber piano company manufactured for the Bayreuth Festival, with the aim of evoking the sound of the Grail bells.
Act II is set on the southern side of Monsalvat, in a wasteland that Klingsor has transformed into a castle and magic garden, Parsifal is the sorcerer's next target; he deploys first the Flower Maidens, and, when they fail to seduce the chaste youth, Kundry. The exchanges between Parsifal and Kundry are of extraordinary intensity: one has the sense that Kundry is simultaneously trying to carry out her plan of seduction while also desperately seeking redemption from her condition of eternal wandering. When she succeeds in planting a kiss on Parsifal, the boy understands at once the source of Amfortas's suffering, and thereby gains the compassion that bring him to wisdom: "Die Wunde! Die Wunde!" Here is Jonas Kaufmann at the Met:
In one of the unearthliest passages in Wagner's unearthly oeuvre, Kundry reveals the origin of her cursed existence: "I looked at him — him — and — laughed!" The opening melody of the Prelude, which is usually identified as the "Abendmahl" or "Last Supper" motif, sounds in shrouded, muted form, giving way to Kundry's anguished scream. Here is the great dramatic soprano Martha Mödl in 1949:
In a quick denouement, Parsifal confronts Klingsor, catches the Holy Spear mid-flight, and dissolves the sorcerer's magic. Here is the ending of the act as staged by Stefan Herheim at Bayreuth in 2012 — a production in which Wagner's Haus Wahnfried becomes the setting and Klingsor represents Nazi evil:
The Prelude to Act III evokes the sorrow and torpor into which the Grail Order has fallen while Parsifal has been away. This is from Hans Knappertsbusch's stupendous 1962 recording:
The Grail ceremony has been suspended; Titurel is dead; it is Good Friday. Yet flowers are blooming in a meadow, and Gurnemanz has not surrendered his goodness of spirit. When Kundry reappears, wordless and groaning, he takes mercy on her. She says, in response, "To serve, to serve" — her only utterance in Act III. A black-clad knight approaches, whom Gurnemanz interrogates; his warlike apparel is inappropriate to the place and day. He discovers that it is Parsifal, holding the Holy Spear, and erupts in characteristically Wagnerian superlatives of joy: "O Wunder! Heilig hehrstes Wunder!" ("O wonder! Holy highest wonder!"). While Kundry bathes Parsifal's feet, recent events are reviewed, and mention of Good Friday causes Parsifal to break out in despair at the memory of Amfortas's wound and the suffering of the world. In his great monologue of the Good Friday Spell, Gurnemanz explains that the radiance of the meadow is nature's show of gratitude for the Savior's sign of love. Parsifal thinks back to the Flower Maidens: "I saw them wither, those who once smiled on me."
Here follows another passage of maximum Wagnerian eeriness. In the distance, we hear the Grail bells ringing, destabilizing the ambiguous Tristanesque harmony that followed upon Parsifal's phrase. A second Transformation sequence begins, this one drenched in anguish and terror. In the Grail castle, two parallel processions are under way, one bearing Amfortas on his litter and the other bearing Titurel's corpse.
From Krauss's 1953 Parsifal at Bayreuth (Pristine).
Amfortas, in a self-impaling monologue rivaling Wotan's in Act II of Walküre, can no longer bear the pain of the wound and demands to be put to death: "Plunge your swords in deep — deep, up to the hilt!" Parsifal now enters with the Spear, touching it to Amfortas's side, and declares that only the weapon which caused the wound can close it ("Nur eine Waffe taugt: das Wunde schliesst der Speer nur, der sie schlug").
The Grail is uncovered; the collective company sings the obscure, Gnostic-sounding formula "Redemption for the redeemer"; Kundry, at last released from her curse, sinks lifeless, with one last harmonic shudder in the orchestra (at 2:22 below, with a chord of A minor against D-flat major). Shadows linger past the beatific close.
