00:00:52.080As you may know, The Met just put on a very well-regarded production of Tristan und Isolde
00:00:59.180by Richard Wagner with Lise Davidson and Michael Spires with Yuval Charon directing.
00:01:05.980Moira will watch that and I'll go back to my 15 recordings of that opera and we'll eventually
00:01:10.820do an episode on Tristan und Isolde, but we didn't get to it yet.
00:01:15.820And this week is also Good Friday, which features very prominently in another opera of Richard
00:01:20.960Wagner's, namely his last one, Parsifal. Well, it just so happens we had done a Patreon-only episode
00:01:26.940on Parsifal late last year after Moira was kind enough to get me tickets for it. It's an opera
00:01:33.980that's all about medieval knights and holy grails, but in the hands of Richard Wagner, it's also all
00:01:39.440about compassion, about community, about politics, and about gender and sexuality. And it's based on
00:01:48.480the 13th century Middle High German chivalric romance, Parts of All, by Wolfram von Eschenbach
00:01:54.860with a little bit of Chrétien de Troyes thrown in there for good measure. But as always, when
00:02:00.860Wagner bases things on other things, it's pretty far from that. It ends up being all about Wagner
00:02:05.820and his world and about his obsessions and about the 19th century and its preoccupations and
00:02:12.080obsessions. Anyway, we had a really lovely conversation about this. We had a lot of fun
00:02:16.320with it and we thought why not share that with our listeners even the ones who aren't patreon
00:02:22.100patrons but if this is the kind of episode that you enjoy that goes a little bit deeper
00:02:27.160goes maybe into somewhat more recherche directions then why not become a patreon patron
00:02:33.000oven bit with the right no worries if not i know that gas currently is 90 000 a gallon
00:02:39.240but if you listen to this and you think well gee i'd love to hear more like this well why not
00:02:45.900head on over to Patreon.com and become a supporter.
00:02:49.560All right, well, with that, enjoy our previously Patreon-only episode on Richard Wagner's Parsifal.
00:03:02.640So, Adrian, how long do you think we're going to be recording for this one?
00:03:07.160Well, I think we've got to go for at least Parsifal length.
00:03:09.560So it's going to be about five hours with about three hours of that, us engaging in like processions around the stage, which is weird for an audio medium, I guess.
00:03:20.080But the CDs of Parsifal managed, so let's do it.
00:03:23.420Okay. All right. Five hours. Strap in, everybody.
00:03:26.300Yeah. With a 15-minute overture. I mean, this is already, we're making a good dent.
00:03:30.740We have only 14 more minutes of an overture to go.
00:03:36.580Whether you like it or not, you're in the middle of us recording about Parsifal and in bed with the right.
00:03:42.360We are here with a very special Patreon episode to dive into one of our little freak fixations, a little more Wagner for our lovely patrons.
00:10:29.040It's this relic spear that was used to, you know, inflict the famous side wound of Christ that is then used against Amfortas, the, you know, sort of king of the Grail Knights, to give him a side wound, which is a sort of spiritually magical wound that will never heal.
00:10:49.600That's right. And for lovers of medieval imagery, you will remember that this side wound is often rendered as something of a genital and it ain't a penis. So that's important.
00:11:02.480It's actually very interesting in the production we saw at the San Francisco Opera, which was like really no theater inflected.
00:11:12.540It was like really Japanese costumes, including some like weird armor on Parzival in Act Two that I was like, this seems like a little racist.
00:11:21.960I was like, you wouldn't have gone away with this five years ago.
00:11:24.880But the stage set was very into creating these large triangular items in like the background and on the like lowered curtain between acts that was meant to mimic the tip of the spear, but looked very, you know, yannick.0.66
00:11:45.140So there's already there's a lot of interesting gender stuff going on.0.51
00:11:47.760And above all, it's about male suffering, right?
00:11:50.500Like, the men's in the Grail Kingdom, as in America today, if our mainstream media is to believe, are suffering.
00:11:58.340Like, everyone's just having the worst time.
00:12:00.700There's more groaning in this opera than probably in any other opera other than the other one you saw, Richard Strauss' works.
00:12:11.260But there is a real emphasis on physical decline, physical suffering.
00:12:17.640Anyway, Parsifal is a young man who's lost his father and has sort of started traveling the world.
00:12:23.560And he comes into the Grail Kingdom and promptly kills like this holy swan, which is the symbol,
00:12:29.760and bumming the already depressive king out further by like killing this one animal he really liked.
00:12:35.280I thought also like nobody was supposed to kill anything within the like sacred grove in which the Grail Knights have their headquarters.
00:12:43.360It's a place where you're not supposed to profane the sacredness of the environment by doing something so vulgar as like killing a bird for food.
00:12:52.020Yeah. And basically, as the Grail Knights, above all the old knight Gornemonts, basically quiz this guy.
00:12:59.640Like, what the hell did you do that for?
00:13:02.000For those people who've seen The Ring or for those of our listeners who have listened to our shows about that tetralogy, he's a Siegfried character.
00:13:09.940He's very much a Kalos, a Wagnerian hero.
00:13:12.840a bit of a dummy. He's a benevolent0.63
00:19:26.020And so maybe let's leave it with the first act for a second.
00:19:29.680We'll go back to the second act in a bit.
00:19:31.620But I thought I'd give you a little bit of a sense of where this opera falls in Wagner's own oeuvre.
00:19:36.560Because I do think the gendered nature of suffering in this opera, there is a suffering woman who we also meet, but like, really, the failing male body is sort of a really important theme here.
00:19:50.220And there probably is not an accident that this is Wagner's final opera, right?
00:19:56.020He's writing this as he's contemplating his own mortality.
00:20:00.540And as, you know, his body does all the things a body at that age tends to do.
00:20:05.500He's starting to have heart problems. There are questions around like his stamina in terms of conducting, et cetera, et cetera. He both is extremely mystical in this and he is always able to sort of sneak in autobiography in ways that don't feel cheap. Right. Like the big question here is I sort of joked with you that like the passion of the Christ happens to a 33 year old man. Right. Like someone who really should not be having any mid to lower back problems if it weren't for these fucking Romans. Right.
00:20:33.580The pain that the men in Parsifal sort of feel is connected to senescence.0.98
00:20:39.640It's a community that's getting older.1.00
00:20:41.720It's a kind of kingdom that has maybe seen better days.0.99
00:20:45.040And it's these guys who were once hot shit and now one is basically in the grave and can't die.0.99
00:20:50.380And the other is like, oh, I just want to get out.0.99
00:20:52.800it's a political order that cannot maintain itself based around your like purportedly built
00:21:05.180on ideals that it can no longer live up to being executed by guys who are really too old for the
00:21:12.020jobs that they're in yeah exactly um so yes in terms of where this opera comes from wagner had
00:21:18.960this idea in the 1840s, which is really when he really gets cooking, like almost all his opera
00:21:24.180plots for the last 40 years of his life come out of that decade. But he really didn't start the
00:21:29.680project until after the first Bayreuth Festival in the early 1870s, which was this festival where
00:21:37.680he had built his own theater just to perform his works. The first Bayreuth Festival was,
00:21:43.820I think, of critical success, but not particularly financially successful. And so it took him a while
00:21:49.720to get this opera really off the ground. It was Ludwig II of Bavaria who really, I think,
00:21:54.660kept pushing him. And his wife Cosima also wanted him to do this. He finished it in Italy in 1882
00:22:02.240at the second Bayreuth Festival, I believe, conducted by the conductor Hermann Levy.
00:22:07.120The Bayreuth Festival runs for a couple of weeks in the summer. And the last performance of
00:22:13.660Parsifal in that year, 1882, is August 29th, where Wagner decides to take the baton in the
00:22:21.240orchestra pit for the third act of Parsifal. It's the only time that he would ever conduct in
00:22:26.980Bayreuth, and it's the last time he'll be conducting on German soil, basically. You may
00:22:31.700have seen our conductor at the San Francisco Opera House. Bayreuth famously lowered the orchestra
00:22:37.620pit because he wanted the sound to kind of come from nowhere. So it's quite possible no one had
00:22:41.460any idea that the composer himself was standing down there and doing something that he used to
00:22:46.340be quite good at, but that clearly the stamina was sort of leaving him to do. And he quietly
00:22:51.200substituted in for Hermann Levy and decided to conduct this himself. And he leaves Bayreuth
00:22:58.420the next month in September, never to return. He moves into this palazzo in Venice on the
00:23:03.480Canal Grande, and he conducted one more concert there in honor of Cosima's birthday. And then
00:23:10.120on February 13th, 1883, has a heart attack while working on an essay and dies in his wife's arms.
00:23:19.580Here's a fun fact. If people are wondering, why does Adrian work on this guy on gender?
00:23:23.700The sentence he was writing when he died was, quote,
00:23:27.440nevertheless, the process of women's emancipation proceeds only in ecstatic spasms.
00:23:32.500Well, in historical terms, I'm not sure he's totally wrong.
00:23:35.640look it's just there was nothing that he felt he couldn't apply it on he's like here's my take on
00:23:41.540women's liberation it's interesting what was really like the opera doesn't really have a
00:23:46.160conception of sin other than sexuality right yeah yeah sin and sex are synonymous it's not just that
00:23:51.700there's no kind of sex that isn't sinful which you do get the sense is like a pervasive understanding
00:23:57.960of sexuality in the opera's worldview but also there's not really any sin that isn't sexual
00:24:02.660there's no sense that the knights of the grail are going to like revolt and betray their purely
00:24:08.200incompetent master that doesn't seem to occur to anybody the avatar of sin in this like castrated0.98
00:24:15.860uh like evil villain wizard who's like running the whorehouse outside is sinful1.00
00:24:22.400partly because he has like transcendent sexuality by cutting his own balls off but also0.99
00:24:29.120because he is like wielding the human weakness for sexuality, like against these men who are0.99
00:24:36.320his betters who aspire to holiness, right? There's like a dark power in his castration
00:24:41.740or that his castration has given him. And that's actually said like pretty explicitly
00:24:45.300in the libretto, right? He's like more powerful because he cut his balls off.0.99
00:24:51.500Which is a very common Ragnarian trope. In the ring cycle, there are several figures who basically0.99
00:24:56.440attain power by forswearing love, by which Wagner means sexuality.
00:25:02.400It's like a Freud and anti-Freudian feminist and in one gesture, right? It's like Freud's
00:25:07.480like sense that men are preoccupied with castration anxiety definitely comes through
00:25:12.260in Wagner, but also the like anti-Freudian feminists, like cultural feminists of the 70s
00:25:17.740being like, well, actually, there is a sense of the castrated woman's superior power and the fear
00:25:24.840of that pervades a lot of the male psyche.
00:25:53.840Like you said something to me that I thought was really useful as I like watched the rest of the opera. You were like, yeah, it's like almost a Bildungsvermung story, right? Parsifal starts out as this like kind of innocent idiot. And he has to go through trials in order to mature so that he can return to the site of the opera's original conflict and resolve it with his own heroism.0.99
00:26:17.980But what Wagner does, instead of following us through a series of episodes in which Parzival learns those lessons, he writes those all out. Like all of the action of the Bildungsroman, like the classical maturation by trial, is written out of the opera itself.
00:26:34.880And we really only see Parsifal three times.1.00
00:26:39.100Once when he is young and idiotic.0.98
00:26:42.660A second time in Act 2, after he has been sent on his way through his journey of maturation and has already come pretty far along.1.00
00:26:51.740In Act 2, we see him going from being a complete idiot to actually having some kind of enlightenment.0.52
00:26:57.580But then, for plot reasons, he basically has to go on this long adventure before he can, as you say, enact three return.0.92
00:27:05.420Percival has, like, been through some stuff.
00:27:07.180He's got an army now, question mark, where he got it.
00:27:10.820But he's, like, leading his men into battle against this evil castrated wizard who's outside the gates of the Knights of the Grail's territory.
00:28:44.460I think the closest as 19th century opera gets to just a whorehouse scene, which is a real freaking contrast to the, you know, Eucharistic ritual that occupies the last 40 minutes of the first act.0.93
00:28:56.580Like, OK, wow. Record scratch, you guys.
00:29:00.300So Kundry shows up and Parsifal seems taken and she really gets somewhere, even though there are several red flags.
00:29:11.240She gets his attention. I forget what she calls him, but he's like, oh, this is what my mom used to call me. And somehow that doesn't end it.
00:29:19.180He doesn't know his own name. That's another like thing that we had forgotten is that in the first act, they're like, what is your name? Why did you kill this swan? And he's like, I do not know what my name is.
00:29:30.540kundri who like almost seduces him is a witch uh she is a sort of like magically empowered
00:29:39.320and yet unfree female spirit uh in the first act they've got her looking like bjork
00:29:47.540in our production she had like a really like a big coat like a big like fur like shaggy fur coat0.99
00:29:53.900And one of those, like, architectural wigs.
00:30:21.480She is a reborn version of Herodias, which is, I thought, a figure in the Bible or in biblical
00:30:30.960stories connected to John the Baptist. But in Parsifal, it's very clear she is supposed to
00:30:36.800have laughed at Christ when she saw him being crucified. And her curse is eternal life. She0.98
00:30:46.020just keeps coming back and back and back and sort of seems to fall asleep and then show up again
00:30:50.620and has this like real death drive where she what she wants is what Amfortas wants just like
00:30:56.160nothing. She's like just I don't want to go on. I'm not looking to be redeemed. I want to be
00:31:01.100ended. Right. She wants to die. In the libretto she's talking in a way that makes me think like0.98
00:31:05.140oh you you're asking to be sent to hell. You're asking to be sort of like freed from the terrible
00:31:10.480samsara of Richard Wagner's like cribbed version of Buddhism in which you're continuously reborn
00:31:17.600to suffer on behalf of the sin you committed in a past life.
00:31:22.840And what you want is to exit into a more straightforwardly Christian version0.74
00:31:29.180in which your sins can be purged by the fire of purgatory.0.86
00:31:33.780But yeah, so instead of both turning tail, frankly,
00:31:37.640the moment he's like, hey, this reminds me of my mom,
00:31:40.160they're like, let's take this awful vibe and take it somewhere even more awful.
00:31:45.320and she has been put up to it it's not her idea to seduce percival yeah but also that's a terrible
00:31:51.660line like why why would you do this she knows what his mom called him and she's like oh this0.99
00:31:55.740is gonna be this is a killer line it's like what the fuck are you doing girl she tells him the0.99
00:31:59.740story of his parents as her way of seducing him and she's like your parents made you by having1.00
00:32:06.460sex which is what we should do now and he's like hmm hard maybe like i might like almost goes for0.84
00:32:13.840And he's like, yeah, I'm definitely not saying no on this one. Then the date takes one further turn that I think gets it into epic all time worst of list and that she does get to kiss him. And in that moment, he has a flash of realization and he yells out Amfortas' name.
00:32:34.840Now, I know what that sounds like right now, but it's actually not that he's supposed to be gay.
00:32:41.800What it is is that he, in that moment, has a vision of the totality of Amfortas' suffering, right?
00:32:48.240He is finally having that moment of compassion and of feeling along with this other person that he was lacking in act one.
00:32:57.880So he is now finally attained enlightenment about this.1.00
00:33:03.080And Coindry's like, Jesus Christ, what the fuck?0.99
00:33:55.820so the moment he has this kind of compassionate realization this kind of enlightenment
00:34:03.100Klingzor shows up and is like I am gonna hit you with this spear and like haha he can't because
00:34:08.020he has attained enlightenment he gets the spear but then Kunri curses him she's like0.99
00:34:13.800we had a perfectly fine first date all about what your mom said how your parents had sex with each
00:34:18.700other and then you yelled out your best guy friend's name like I thought we were vibing man0.92
00:34:25.100And I'm going to curse you with wandering the world, and it'll only ever draw you back to me.0.97
00:34:32.100You now have enlightenment, but you can't go to those grail nights and actually make anything useful happen with that, because, like, good fucking luck getting there.0.96
00:34:40.420And that's where we leave it in Act 2.0.54
00:34:43.000And then in Act 3, we start at the grail castle, where things have gone from bad to much worse.
00:34:49.340And, like, basically, Tittrell is actually dead now.
00:34:51.580Amfortas is refusing to unveil the grail all the grail knights are just like suffering and then
00:34:59.040Kundry shows up in a role that is entirely mute she like makes like three or four noises that
00:35:06.220are all very carefully notated in the score but like she doesn't really have many lines at all
00:35:11.640I think she says one word Dinan Dinan she says she wants to serve and then Parsifal shows up
00:37:36.860She's in this weird in-between thing where like her sort of self-loathing allows her to become a tool, which then feeds her self-loathing, which then makes her a tool, et cetera, et cetera.
00:37:48.000So there is a kind of interesting psychological thing here where like what she has is a contradictory set of drives and no growth.
00:37:58.820Or there's some kind of growth that allows her to say like, hey, I'm going to lead him back to the grail and see what happens there.
00:38:05.160But we don't know what that is because she won't say, because she's just quiet.
00:38:09.040You know, we can make that about gender and about the fact that, like, he doesn't really give her a lot to work with.
00:38:13.160But remember Brunnhilde in The Valkyrie is, like, the most interesting psychology in the entire ring, probably.
00:38:20.200It's really that no one in Parzival has really any psychology.
00:38:23.600People have warring desires and dialectics, and eventually those come to a rest or to a standstill or, like, a resolution.
00:38:32.040Almost like a medieval kind of morality play.
00:38:34.460Like these people represent something and you're trying to get rid of individual psychology and almost make them sort of types and drives.
00:38:42.580Anyway, so that's that is the resolution of this opera.
00:38:48.580And this time, of course, like Parzival will participate in the ritual that he previously didn't understand.
00:38:54.160And there we even kind of, I think, get a theory as to like why he had to pass through the experience of the best little whorehouse in Grail land in order to then be able to take his place at the head of the Grail order.0.53
00:39:08.820The first act of Parsifal is almost entirely a communitarian thing, right?0.70
00:39:17.120It's really much more about groups of people moving, groups of people singing.
00:39:20.340And then Kundry and Parzival are sort of like the weirdos who are sort of bouncing through it all.
00:39:25.140And then in Act 3, you get much more the individual accommodating himself to the community and the two sort of coming to reconciliation, which is an interesting thing.
00:39:37.060Because on the one hand, compared to the Siegfried myth in The Ring, which we talked about at length with Alex Ross for the podcast, which really is a story, it's almost a libertarian fantasy of this one dude who just won't be part of any movement man or whatever, and in fact only dies when he starts making common cause with others, this can feel like a return to communitarianism.
00:39:59.740It's an opera that is really de-individualized. And yet, I think Wagner wants it to harmonize those two things, right? His individualism makes him better than the Grail Knights, who can only sort of reason from holy community. But he has to reconcile that with the community. Just him by himself is also no good, right?
00:40:20.160Is this like tension between the revered individual and the sort of assimilation into a broader community, is that part of why Nietzsche objected to this opera? Can you tell me a little bit more about Nietzsche's break with Wagner over Parzival?
00:40:34.560Yeah, he didn't like the whole compassion and sympathy thing. He liked Siegfried, remember? He thought that Siegfried at his stupidest and most callow showed what the ubermensch was going to be like. And Parsifal does start as someone literally who is beyond good and evil, right? He's like, what do you mean good and evil? I killed a swan. I'm sorry, like, I didn't understand these categories applied to that, right? I was hungry. That's an Ichean kind of position, right? Like, my nature demanded it, and I was hungry.
00:41:03.080I don't understand what we're talking about.
00:41:05.080We don't have to come up with weird metaphysical prejudices in order to justify this.
00:41:16.960And Nietzsche is like, well, I resent that.
00:41:18.400And the second thing is like the maturation, the integration into the group becomes one
00:41:26.240of religious fellow feelings, something that Nietzsche famously didn't like.
00:41:31.620In this opera, God is very much not dead and we have not killed him, right? And in fact, the comprehension of the opera as an opera is premised on, as you say, this kind of sacrilegious equation of watching an opera and watching the Eucharist, right?
00:41:48.720Now, on the one hand, to a devout Catholic, that might seem like, I'm sorry, did you just compare dudes in medieval costumes marching around a stage for a paycheck to the literal embodiment of the Savior in the Eucharist?
00:42:04.440It's actually, you have to be pretty ready to take your Christianity for a spin if you want to make that kind of analogy.
00:42:09.800On the other hand, it was way too Christian for Nietzsche's taste.
00:42:13.980The moment he read what Wagner called the poem, the libretto for this thing, when the relationship between these two men started rupturing.
00:42:21.560Well, if they want to make up somewhere in the mythical beyond, I hear that there's a magical spear going around that can solve basically all your problems.
00:42:30.060There's also something really interesting about the question of anti-modernism and modernism in this.
00:42:35.520Like on the one hand, the Nazis clearly read Wagner as like being an anti-modernist, right?
00:42:39.580Like you go back to the Grail legend, you go back to the Nibelungenlied, you go back to medieval Germany in the Meistersinger, you go back to the Tristan legend, etc., etc., in order to sort of repair what modernity has rent asunder.
00:42:53.760And the metaphor of the spear clearly is the thing that caused the alienation, that caused the disruption of our ritualistic lives, of the traditional harmony of our world, can also restore it, right?
00:43:10.460You don't attain salvation by removing that.
00:43:15.360But the thing itself that has changed what the world used to be like is also the thing that can save it.
00:43:20.960it's a really interesting opera in that way that like it both seems retrograde in certain ways and
00:43:26.940initially i think critics very much thought of it as that it's like this is a guy who
00:43:30.700had a bunch of brilliant and modern ideas when it came to the ring cycle and now is older and
00:43:37.980has a failure of nerve but i also think that the years since have been quite kind to this opera in
00:43:43.620the sense that there is a modernity here there's almost a theory of modernity here you know what
00:43:47.820But the fact that you can't go back, you know, this is not a return with a V kind of opera, even though a lot of people watched it and, of course, thought it was exactly that.
00:43:57.060But if you sort of think through the implications of it, it's clear that it's not.
00:44:01.200And so, yeah, I think it has retained its power over all this time.
00:44:06.040If people listen to this and they've listened to the ring, one important thing to pay attention to is the role of nature here.
00:44:13.080In the Ring Cycle, nature often shows up as a better guide than religion, than the gods, etc., etc., right?
00:44:23.660Famously, Siegfried is being told by other people what to do, who are all using him for various things.