Summer 2008 Dess’ Stiller Frieden Dich Umfing? Volume 5, Number 3 —Parsifal

Wagneriana Du konntest morden? Hier im heil’gen Walde, Summer 2008 dess’ stiller Frieden dich umfing? Volume 5, Number 3 —Parsifal From the Editor he Boston Wagner Society will turn five on September 20. We are planning some festivities for that day that will include live music. This special event will be open to members and their guests only. Invitations will be forthcom- T ing. This year we have put in place new policies for applying for tickets to the Bayreuth Festival. Before you send in your application for 2009, please make sure that you have read these policies (see page 7). Here is a sneak preview of the next season’s events: a talk by William Berger, co-host of Sirius Met Opera’s live broad- casts and author of Wagner without Fear: Learning to Love–and Even Enjoy–Opera’s Most Demanding Genius (on October 18); a talk by Professor Robert Bailey, a well-known Wagnerian scholar and the author of numerous articles on Wagner, titled “Wagner’s Beguiling Tristan und Isolde and Its Misunderstood Aspects” (on November 15); an audiovisual presentation comparing the Nibelungenlied with Wagner’s Ring Cycle, by Vice President Erika Reitshamer (winter 2009). We will add more programs as needed. Due to space limitations, in this issue we are omitting part 4 of Paul Heise’s article “The Influence of Feuerbach on the Libretto of Parsifal.” The series will resume in the next issue. –Dalia Geffen, President and Founder Wagner from a Buddhist Perspective Paul Schofield, The Redeemer Reborn: Parsifal as the Fifth Opera of Wagner’s Ring (New York: Amadeus Press, 2007) he Redeemer Reborn is a very important book. Dense in ideas and analyses but not in language, this long-overdue work offers an unconventional, refreshing, and joyful way to T grasp Wagner’s vast worldview. In so many ways this astute and penetrating book turns the established Wagnerian canon on its head and demonstrates what we have always dimly intuited about Wagner’s works but haven’t had the foresight or courage to express. Here is one example: Wagnerian scholars have always maintained that the composer was much influenced by the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and the denial of will, as demonstrated in the ending of the Ring Cycle (which Wagner changed from a more optimistic denouement). Schofield notes: “We are certainly aware of the great tragedy that has just taken place, but emotionally, when we leave the theater, it is with thoughts of hope, renewal, and faith in the fundamental goodness of life. Nothing could be more anti-Schopenhauerian. Wagner has transcended Schopenhauer” (pp. 31–32). To a Wagnerian, this rings so true that one is glad that a scholar has finally brought this to our attention. Similarly, the quest for the Grail, rather than representing an abdication, is a search for enlightenment and renewal. Schofield, who is a Buddhist monk on leave from his monastery, maintains that what Parsifal gives up “is not the will, but the pursuit of desire and illusion” (page 34). The reader and listener will instinctively agree with this point of view, since the music speaks to us in the same terms as Schofield’s prose. Another major theme in the book is the idea of a character reborn in a subsequent opera in an attempt to expiate for his or her earlier failures. In Buddhist terms, this is the teaching of karma, which, of course, Wagner was familiar with from his readings, as Schofield amply demonstrates with quotations from Cosima’s diary. For instance, Alberich, the rejected lover, is reborn as Klingsor, who cannot control his sexual urges. Klingsor fails to change this karma and to achieve salvation, since self-mutilation does not signify self-control. Wotan, too, after his final renunciation in the Ring, is reborn as Amfortas in Parsifal but has not yet atoned sufficiently to expiate his overweening ambition. Brünnhilde, a Promethean figure guilty of participating in Siegfried’s murder, is reborn as Kundry, but in this case the character does achieve salvation at the end of Parsifal. Likewise, Parsifal, as the reincarnation of the foolish and thoughtless Siegfried in the Ring Cycle, acquires wisdom and becomes a redeemer. Schofield, a writer, musician, Wagnerian scholar for more than thirty years, and former editor of Leitmotive, in refreshingly accessible language, discusses the importance of Greek tragedy in Wagnerian drama from a Buddhist perspective, showing the consequences of arete, or “the attempt to make the universe answerable to one’s own individual will” (page 57). “The Ring,” writes Schofield, “is a portrayal of misdirected arete on the grandest of scales” (page 60). Schofield, who has thought deeply about these matters, then examines the Arthurian legends in great detail and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s work Parzival. He notes the parallels between the Volsunga Saga and the Arthurian legend in all their permutations. There is much to be savored in this very learned book, particularly when on page 74 Schofield sums up the importance of Wagner’s works in the following words: “Wagner gave musical and dramatic expression to the primal emotions in all of us that are suppressed . for and by society. Wagner lets them loose, opening all the doors to our deepest consciousness.” Due to Schofield’s wide-ranging mind and complicated subject matter, more subheadings would have helped the reader greatly. As it is, the reader must frequently refer back several pages to remember the original thread of the discussion. A more detailed index would have helped too. On the whole, though, Schofield has done an admirable job of distilling a tremendous amount of information and presenting it step by step, without overwhelming the reader. The Redeemer Reborn deserves a prominent place on any Wagnerian bookshelf. For an interview with the author, “A Discussion on Wagner and Buddhism,” see page 4. –Dalia Geffen A Defense of Regietheater Patrick Carnegy, Wagner and the Art of the Theatre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006) t’s rare that I fall in love with a book early in its introduction, but Patrick Carnegy’s Wagner and the Art of Theater is such a work. Published during a conflict of major pro- I portions among audiences, critics, and production teams over contemporary production styles, Carnegy’s book states boldly that operas exist to be interpreted in the light of the specific experience of the generations following the era of their creation. He backs up his thesis with impressive documentation, not least from the opinions of Richard Wagner himself. Carnegy stands by a fact insufficiently understood by audiences: the majority of the great opera composers were creatures of the theater, Wagner supreme among them, as recognized by his old Viennese nemesis Eduard Hanslick, who shortly after the composer’s death deemed Wagner “the world’s first Regisseur.” Those who decry Regietheater might consider that Wagner may well have pioneered it. Wagner’s family was steeped in theater and opera during an era in provincial Germany when an actor for spoken drama and an opera singer were most often one and the same person—a combination of talents he would strive to bring to the major opera stages of Europe. His own first stage appearance was at the age of four, his apprenticeship including stage management, choral directing, dance, acting (Nietzsche considered Wagner the finest actor he had ever seen—a skill that may illuminate his personal and political relationships off-stage as well), and various jobs backstage. Carnegy drops several surprises in the course of his narrative, ascribing to the eventually aborted premiere of Die Feen the story almost universally told of Tannhäuser: Wagner refused to allow an Arabian Nights–style palace hall to be pulled from the theater’s stock and used for the Wartburg, and Wagner was against strict historical realism in staging his music dramas and actually preferred a stylized, mythologized design concept for his settings, one that put them into a timeless evocation of the locations into which he placed his characters. With this fact in mind, Carnegy follows his chronicle of Wagner’s premieres (and the expansion of his understanding of the interdependence of sight, sound, and text onstage) with a fascinating, detailed look at the “ripple effect” of the composer’s reforms and theories on the arts after his death—all the arts, not just theater and opera—in Europe and America. A great advantage to Carnegy’s writing is its virtually complete avoidance of theoretical jargon. He lays out clearly the lines of descent from the composer through Gustav Mahler and designer Alfred Roller in Vienna; through Konstantine Stanislavsky and Vsevolod Meyerhold to Sergei Eisenstein in Russia; through Otto Klemperer and Caspar Neher at the Kroll Opera in Berlin; and through Swiss visionary Adolphe Appia to all of the above and then back to the source in the work of Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner in post–World War II Bayreuth. Carnegy documents proposed productions, ex- 2 perimental productions, great productions, failed productions—and the unceasing fascination with Wagner’s work that drove generations of men and women in both theater and opera. The reader, however, need not be conversant with either the technical or the critical terminology of the stage to understand anything that is discussed in this eminently readable, highly informative book. The most controversial part of the book for most contemporary Wagner lovers will be the detailed analyses of post– World War II Wagner productions in the Russian Zone of Occupation—East Germany. It is here that Carnegy confronts the issue of whether there have ever been productions that would fully have pleased Wagner, who was frustrated by the failure of so many stagings of his operas, not least his own direction of the premiere of the Ring of the Nibelung in 1876.

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