WAGNER’S

PARSIFAL: CHRISTIANITY, CELIBACY, AND THE MEDIEVAL

BROTHERHOOD AS IDEAL IN MODERNITY

CAROLE M. CUSACK

INTRODUCTION

Richard Wagner’s final opera Parsifal, which he termed a Bühnenweihfestspiel
(“festival work for the initiation of a stage”), was first performed at Bayreuth in
1882.1 It is a strange, serious, and beautiful work, which is alternately hailed as a
profound Christian statement and a hyperbolic pseudo-religious spectacle, with
occult or Buddhist pretensions. The plot is taken from medieval sources, chiefly
Wolfram von Eschenbach’s epic poem Parzival, and exhibits Wagner’s ongoing
fascination with the Grail legends that informed, at least partially, Tannhäuser
(1845) and Lohengrin (1848). Those works espoused human love as redemptive
and integrated both negative and positive exemplars of womanhood (Venus and
Elisabeth, Ortrud and Elsa), though the virtuous women died in the final acts of
both operas. The wretched and outcast seductress, Kundry, the sole woman in
Parsifal, is an extraordinary artistic creation, yet Wagner’s near-total rejection of
her proposes the ideal male brotherhood, embodied in the Grail Knights’ loyalty
to their wounded king Amfortas, as a template for society. In direct opposition to
modern expectations, as Sandra Corse has observed, “Parsifal questions the
moral autonomy of the subject.”2 The idealisation of the Grail fraternity directly
challenges the modern idea of the individual through its emphasis on duty, and
devotion to a monarch. Its exclusively male membership challenges the modern
understanding of men and women as equal and complementary, and its celibacy
rejects the modern idea of sexuality as a positive and life-affirming force.

Wagner’s plot in Parsifal utilises 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.3 These themes make Parsifal a difficult
work in Wagner’s oeuvre, 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

1 The Earl of Harewood and Antony Peattie (eds), The New Kobbe’s Opera Book, eleventh edition

(London: Ebury Press 1997), 949.

2 Sandra Corse, “Parsifal: Wagner, Nietzsche, and the Modern Subject,” Theatre Journal 46:1

(1994), 95.
3 The stinging critique in Nietzsche Contra Wagner (1888-1889, published 1895) is relevant here.

Parsifal’s innocence, resistance to the sexual allure of Kundry and the Flower Maidens, healing of
Amfortas, and assumption of the role of Grail king at the opera’s conclusion deeply offended
Nietzsche, who rejected Parsifal as Christian, anti-sex, and life-denying. Bernard Wills, analysing
this critique, agrees that “the opera does endorse a Christian (or Buddhist) conception of human
life and nature as requiring redemption,” which “is contrary to Nietzsche’s demand that all of life
be affirmed in its negativity and destructiveness as much as in its creativity and beneficence …
Nietzsche could not have accepted the ethic of compassion at the heart of that vision …” Bernard
Wills, “The Case of Nietzsche: A Wagnerian Riposte,” Animus 14 (2010), 41.
hereditary leader.4 If these conservative, and in a certain sense Christian, ideas
made Parsifal controversial in the nineteenth century, it is even more so in the
twenty-first. Parsifal is a unique combination of the medieval and the modern, in
which it appears that the operatic modernist Wagner understood the medieval
as the cure for the malaise of modernity.

This chapter endorses the centrality of Richard Wagner (1813-1883) to operatic
modernism, and considers an instance of his influence on literary modernism, a
movement that flowered from approximately 1910 to 1960. It is concerned with
six interrelated questions or issues. These are: first, the relationship between
Wagner’s opera plot and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s text; second, the ways that
Amfortas and the evil magician Klingsor represent Christianity and Islam
respectively; third, the absence of women from Parsifal’s ideal society; fourth,
the impact of Parsifal on the modernist writer T. S. Eliot; and finally, the relative
weight accorded to medievalism and modernism in Wagner’s final opera.
Cultural critic Theodor Adorno acknowledged Wagner’s pre-eminence as an
operatic modernist in his 1938 critique (published as In Search of Wagner
[1952]). He argued that, though “Wagner represented the most advanced stage
in the development of music and opera” there were “both progressive and
reactionary elements” in his music.5 Adorno aimed to demonstrate that Wagner
was a dangerous anti-Semite whose artistic legacy led to the tyranny of Adolf
Hitler and the Nazi Holocaust, issues that are not germane to this chapter. Yet his
contention that the universality of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) that
Wagner advocated compromised his modernity, his historical situatedness, as he
proposed that allegory and myth contained “universal symbolism” and insights
applicable to all eras, is important, and must be assessed in terms of both
Wagner’s modernism and medievalism.6

WAGNER AND WOLFRAM

Medievalism may be generally defined as “how and why various individuals and
institutions have chosen to engage with the Middle Ages,” and it is acknowledged
that different motives may inspire, and outcome result, from such engagement.7
While Hopfkapellmeister at Dresden, Wagner read widely in German medieval
literature. This immersion resulted first in Tannhäuser, then Lohengrin, an opera
based on “an episode at the end of Wolfram’s Parzival, when the narrator
outlines how Parzival’s son frees Elsa and makes her promise not to ask his
name.”8 Over thirty years later, Wagner completed an opera using the tale of
Parzival, the youth who witnessed the mystery of the Grail, yet failed to ask the
question that would bring to an end the suffering of the Fisher King, as its theme.
This story was first recorded in the unfinished Perceval, ou Le Conte du Graal by

4 Stephen C. Meyer, “Parsifal’s Aura,” 19th-Century Music 33:2 (2009), 160.
5 Andreas Huyssen, “Adorno in Reverse: From Hollywood to Richard Wagner,” New German

Critique 29 (1983), 30.

6 Huyssen, “Adorno in Reverse,” 34.
7 Elizabeth Emery, “Medievalism and the Middle Ages,” in Defining Medievalism(s), ed. Karl

Fugelso (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2009), 78.

8 Mary A. Cicora, “Medievalism and Metaphysics: The Literary Background of Parsifal,” in A

Companion to Wagner’s Parsifal, ed. William Kinderman and Katherine R. Syer (Rochester, NY:
Camden House, 2005), 31.
Chrétien de Troyes (fl. ca. 1116-1191). An innocent boy, Perceval, is schooled by
Gurnemans to be courteous and not ask questions. At a mysterious castle ruled
by a wounded king with four hundred knights in attendance, Perceval witnesses
a procession. Squires carry a bleeding lance and lighted candles, and a maiden
carries a gem-encrusted “grail” (dish). He says nothing, and the next morning the
castle has vanished.

Subsequently two ladies, one lovely and one loathly, upbraid Perceval, telling
him that had he asked what ailed the Fisher King, the King would have been
healed and misfortune, now inevitable, would have been averted.9 Due to this
adverse circumstance, Perceval wanders for many years, and meets a group of
penitents who chide him for bearing arms on Good Friday. He goes to a hermit
and learns that the ailing king and the hermit are his uncles, and his grandfather
has survived for twenty years on the consecrated host alone. Perceval confesses
his sins and takes communion from the hermit, and the manuscript breaks off.10
Wolfram minimises his debt to Chrétien, and claims inspiration from a Provençal
poet, Kyot. Scholars now believe Kyot to be a “literary hoax”11 used by Wolfram
to account for the divergences from Chrétien in his poem, and that Chrétien is
the originator of the tale. Wolfram’s Parzival undergoes chivalric adventures,
including marriage to the virtuous Condwiramurs, and is contrasted with Gawan,
“the ideal Arthurian knight.”12 Wolfram adds to, and diverges from, Chrétien
when he tells the tale of Parzival’s father Gahmuret and his two wives Belacane,
mother of his son Fierefiz, and Herzeloyde, the mother of Parzival.13

Wagner’s stark plot uses only a few elements of Wolfram’s poem, and Edward R.
Haymes posits that these all relate to ritual, specifically the Grail ritual:
Wagner adds the references to the Eucharist and the passionate outbursts
of the suffering Amfortas, but the central event of the first scene is
Parzival’s silent and uncomprehending observation of the rite of the Grail
and his subsequent ejection from Munsalvaesche, the Grail castle. The
second Grail scene is not as mysterious as its equivalent in Wagner, but its
central event is also the healing of Anfortas and the elevation of Parzival
to Grail King. Beyond this the only things from Wolfram’s romance … [in]
Wagner’s text are certain details of the Good Friday scene, which …
becomes part of the larger Grail ritual.14

9 This chapter does not discuss the possible origin of the Grail legend in medieval Celtic literary

sources. For this hypothesis, see Roger Sherman Loomis, The Grail: From Celtic Myth to Christian
Symbol (London: Constable, 1992 [1963]), and John Carey, Ireland and the Grail (Aberystwyth:
Celtic Studies Publications, 2007). Wagner had read certain of the Celtic sources in translation,
and was definitely influenced by them, though to a lesser extent than by Wolfram’s Parzival.
10 Chrétien de Troyes, “Perceval,” in Arthurian Romances, trans. D. D. R. Owen (London: J. M. Dent

& Sons Ltd, 1987), 374-495.

11 Adrian Stevens, “Fiction, Plot and Discourse: Wolfram’s Parzival and its Narrative Sources,” in

A Companion to Wolfram’s Parzival, ed. Will Hardy (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1999), 110.
12 Edward R. Haymes, ““From Romance to Ritual: Wolfram, Arthur, and Wagner’s Parsifal,” in The

Arthurian Revival: Essays on Form, Tradition, and Transformation, ed. Debra N. Mancoff (London
and New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1992), 183.
13 Stevens, “Fiction, Plot and Discourse,” 113.
14 Haymes, “From Romance to Ritual,” 183.
This insight is important due to the contested nature of Christianity as portrayed
in Parsifal. Wagner’s last work has been viewed as the fifth opera of the Ring. The
Ring is an instance of “Pagan” medievalism, in which Wagner treats the passing
of the world of the Norse gods, and the dawn of the era of humanity. Attendance
at the Ring has taken on ritual dimensions, and can be understood as secular
pilgrimage.15 However, Parsifal is more properly classified as part of a second
grouping, an occult Christian “troubadour tetralogy” with Tannhäuser, Lohengrin,
and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868). The operas are linked in various
ways: Wolfram is a character in Tannhäuser, and his fellow minnesinger, Walther
von der Vogelweide (or Walther von Stolzing) is a character in Die Meistersinger
von Nürnberg. The rite of confession, and the forgiveness of sins, is central to
Tannhäuser, and the Catholic mass is central to Parsifal. Yet in Parsifal Wagner
attempts “a synthesis of Indian [Buddhist] and Christian beliefs.”16 It is sufficient
to note that this is a modern exercise that has no predecessor in the Middle Ages.

AMFORTAS AND KLINGSOR

In Act One of Parsifal the aged Gurnemanz summons the knights to prayer, and
Kundry delivers balsam from Arabia that relieves but does not cure the wounded
King. After Amfortas bathes, the squires ask Gurnemanz about the King’s wound,
and the lost Holy Spear. Gurnemanz tells them that Amfortas once guarded the
Holy Spear, and Titurel his father was guardian of both the Spear and the Holy
Grail, two items associated with the passion and death of Jesus Christ. Amfortas
was seduced by a femme fatale and wounded by the Spear, wielded by the
magician Klingsor. The wound cannot be healed, although Amfortas has received
a vision that a “pure fool” will heal him. Parsifal encounters the Grail knights
after killing a swan, an act that violates the sanctity of the community at
Montsalvat. This killing is criticised by Gurnemanz, both for its lack of reverence
for life, and for its absence of compassion. The advocacy of monarchy in Parsifal
means the swan is important as it is “under royal protection,” and underlines
Gurnemanz’s concern for “monarchic privilege, and a feudal worldview.”17 The
youth reveals he is nameless, but that his parents were Herzeleide (heart’s
sorrows) and Gamuret. The mysterious Kundry, feared and detested by the
Knights, reveals that Herzeleide died of grief at her son’s long absence, then
leaves. Gurnemanz invites the youth to witness the Grail ceremony: the wood
transforms into a temple; Titurel (who is to all intents and purposes dead) calls
on Amfortas to reveal the Grail; and “each time [Amfortas] performs it [the
uncovering of the Grail ritual], his wound bleeds and causes him terrible
agonies.”18 The youth is puzzled by the rite and Gurnemanz sends him away.

This first act establishes a parallel between the sufferings of Amfortas and the
sufferings of Christ, and between the Grail’s capacity to sustain the dead Titurel
and the saving power of Holy Communion in Catholic Christianity. The wound of

15 Carole M. Cusack, ““Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen: Medieval, Pagan, Modern.”

Relegere: Journal of Religion and Reception 3:2 (2013), 347.

16 Ulrike Kienzle, “Parsifal and Religion: A Christian Music Drama?” in A Companion to Wagner’s

Parsifal, 130.
17 Donald L. Hoffman, ““The Round Table: Bearing the Grail,” Arthuriana 18:1 (2008), 93.
18 Harewood and Peattie, The New Kobbe’s Opera Book, 950.
Amfortas is caused by illicit sex, and the resolution of the opera brings healing.
As Bernard Wills notes, “Amfortas’ wound (his sensuality) will bleed whenever
he reveals he Grail in a kind of parody of the shedding of Christ’s blood.”19 The
second act introduces the magician Klingsor, based on Wolfram’s Clinschor, a
sorcerer who owns the Castle of Wonders (Schastel Marveile), the Proud Castle,
and the Castle of Maidens.20 Wagner locates both Montsalvat and Klingsor’s
castle in Spain, and the division between the Catholic north and the Muslim
south is clear. Wagner’s stage directions for the first production state:
[t]he scene is laid first in the domain and in the castle of the Grail’s
guardians, Montsalvat, where the country resembles the northern
mountains of Gothic Spain; afterwards in Klingsor’s magic castle on the
southern slope of the same mountains which looks towards Moorish
Spain. The costume of the Knights and Squires resembles that of the
Templars: a white tunic and mantle; instead of the red cross, however,
there is a dove flying upwards on scutcheon and mantle.21
Klingsor and his domain are clearly identified with Muslim al-Andalus, the
medieval Islamic realm of the Alhambra and the Great Mosque of Cordoba,
where elegant buildings and beautiful gardens are inhabited by the enemies of
Christ. The Grail Knights are thus a chapter of the Knights Templar, who fought
the Crusades in the medieval Middle East against the armies of Islam. Parsifal
approaches Klingsor’s castle; the magician has summoned both Kundry and the
Knights who failed the Grail and fell under his spell. Parsifal defeats the Knights
in battle; Klingsor conjures a garden and a bevy of Flower Maidens to tempt him.

Apart from Kundry, the Flower Maidens are the only other females in Wagner’s
opera. It is important to recall that they are unreal phantoms, not women. The
garden and the Flower Maidens reinforce Klingsor’s Islamic identity; the garden
“fills the stage with tropical vegetation and a luxurious splendour of flowers,”
and the Flower Maidens are like the houris promised to faithful Muslim men in
paradise.22 They hold no allure for the youth, who is called by Kundry “Parsifal,”
a name he recalls his mother giving him. She is transformed into a seductive
beauty, who offers him “a last token of his mother’s blessing, the first kiss of
love.”23 Kundry’s problematic religious identity will be discussed in the next
section; suffice to say that she is clearly not Christian, though she is not identified
as Islamic. Parsifal’s insight that she is the seductress of Amfortas enables him to
resist her. Klingsor attacks Parsifal with the Spear, and he seizes it and makes the
Sign of the Cross with it. The illusory castle and garden disappear, powerless
against the might of Christ. The opposition of Christianity and Islam in Act Two,
and the vanishing castle, are elements of Wagner’s opera that are derived from
both medieval history and medieval literature.

KUNDRY AND THE ABSENCE OF THE FEMALE IN PARSIFAL


19 Wills, “The Case of Nietzsche,” 37.
20 Martin Jones, “The Significance of the Gawan Story in Parzival,” in A Companion to Wolfram’s

Parzival, pp. 12-76.

21 Richard Wagner, Parsifal, ed. Nicholas John (London: Opera Guides 34, 1986), 84.
22 Hoffman, “The Round Table,” 90.
23 Harewood and Peattie, The New Kobbe’s Opera Book, 950.
Both Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival are
lengthy, complex texts that are filled with fascinating female characters. One of
the most remarkable transformations of the Grail story that Wagner effected was
the erasure of women from it. Parsifal’s mother Herzeleide is present in memory,
but Kundry is the only woman who appears. This change makes the Grail Knights
a monastic community, whether Christian or Buddhist in inspiration, celibate
and cut off from women, whereas in Chrétien and Wolfram, the Grail Knights are
chaste but not celibate. For example, Perceval/Parzival is married and becomes
“patriarch of a long line of Grail kings.”24 Kundry shares the name of Cundrie the
Sorceress in Wolfram’s Parzival, but is almost entirely Wagner’s creation. She is
doomed to live for centuries, like his Flying Dutchman and the Wandering Jew of
folklore, and recalls one of her former identities as that of Herodias, the wife of
King Herod who effected the beheading of John the Baptist. In Parsifal she serves
Klingsor, who uses her sexuality to lure the Grail Knights, and their king,
Amfortas, to ruin. Wills argues Kundry incarnates the tension between nature
and spirit, and the asceticism of Amfortas and the perverted sexuality of the self-
castrated Klingsor. Parsifal, the innocent who is above these binaries, “restore[s]
the fellowship of love and naturalize[s] spirit even as he spiritualizes nature.”25

There are three lenses through which to understand Kundry: first, as a figure
descended from the “Loathly Lady” of medieval literature, whose role is to confer
sovereignty upon the future king after he treats her with courtesy; secondly, as
the penitent harlot in the Christian tradition of Mary Magdalene, who renounces
sexuality in favour of salvation; and finally, the ant-Semitic figure of the female
Jew, cursed to live many lives because she laughed at Jesus, dying on the cross.26
As Loathly Lady, Kundry in the first act of Parsifal is a cowed and despised figure,
a suspect woman who nevertheless attempts to assist the Grail brotherhood, and
who is treated with courtesy by the aged Gurnemanz, who knows more of the
history of the Grail and its guardians, Titurel and Amfortas, than the younger
members. In medieval texts such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Wife
of Bath’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400), the “Loathly Lady” is a hag who
rescues a rapist knight, who must find out what women want or die. She tells him
women desire mastery over men, and he marries her in gratitude. He learns she
can be beautiful at night (which facilitates their love) or by day (which saves his
reputation). He defers to her, and she reveals she will be beautiful all the time.27
The Loathly Lady is a descendent of the Irish Sovereignty Goddess of, a hag who
confers kingship on a young man who treats her kindly when others abuse her.28
Kundry’s roles in Parsifal confirm her as hag and beauty, though the context
differs. Parsifal is no rapist, they are not married, and his refusal of her sexual
approach constitutes the courtesy that makes her redemption possible.

24 Hoffman, “The Round Table,” 89.
25 Wills, “The Case of Nietzsche,” 37.
26 Byron Nelson, ““Webertotenlieder: German Musical Narratives of Women’s Deaths from

Kundry to Schoenberg’s Waldtaube.” The Opera Quarterly 12/4 (1996), 49.

27 John K. Bollard, “Sovereignty and the Loathly Lady in English, Welsh and Irish,” Leeds Studies in

English 17 (1986), 41-59.

28 R. A. Breatnach, “The Lady and the King: A Theme of Irish Literature,” Studies: An Irish

Quarterly Review 42:167 (1953), 321-336.

In Act Three, Gurnemanz, now a hermit, meets Kundry many years later. She
insists that she desires only to serve the Grail, which casts her as the repentant
Magdalene. Her prior sexual connection with Amfortas (a Christ figure) may also
reflect the esoteric Christian understanding of Mary Magdalene as Jesus’ wife or
lover.29 Parsifal arrives and Gurnemanz reproaches him for bearing arms on
Good Friday. He then recognises the Holy Spear, and tells Parsifal:
the whole brotherhood is in need of his healing power: since Amfortas
refused to perform the office, the Grail has remained covered. Deprived of
sustenance the Knights wander about pale and unhappy. Gurnemanz
himself has retreated to this corner of the wood: now that his old warrior-
lord Titurel has died, he himself longs for death.30
Parsifal, Gurnemanz and Kundry prepare for Titurel’s funeral: Parsifal baptises
Kundry in the spring. Nature is restored, as the meadows bloom on the day of
salvation. At the Grail temple, Amfortas begs the Knights not to insist that he
uncover the Grail, due to the agonies it causes Parsifal then heals his wound with
a touch of the Holy Spear. A dove descends on Parsifal, an unseen choir sings that
the redeemer has been redeemed (Erlösung dem Erlöser), and Parsifal announces
that henceforth the Grail will be always uncovered. The curse is lifted and the
baptized Kundry dies.

The portrayal of Kundry as Jewish and Wagner’s insistence on her baptism is
important, as Wagner’s relations with Hermann Levi, the Jewish conductor who
was to conduct the premiere of Parsifal demonstrate. Wagner, a notorious anti-
Semite, in 1880 treated Levi to a lecture on the “depressing, destructive influence
of Jewry on our public affairs,” and pressured him to be baptised before Parsifal
premiered.31 Wagner’s patron Ludwig II of Bavaria was a supporter of Levi, and
reminded Wagner that his access to the Munich orchestra required the position
of Levi as its conductor. Wagner conceded, but during the final performance of
Parsifal he took the baton from Levi, conducting the last act himself.32 Wagner
had written to Ludwig II about the Grail cycle over the years, emphasising that:
at a time when the world was harsh and hostile and the faithful were hard
pressed by the unbelieving and were in great distress, there sprang up in
certain divinely-inspired heroes, filled with holy love-longing, the desire
to seek out this strengthening relic of which tradition spoke, in which the
blood of the Saviour (sangue reale, whence San Greal, Sanct Gral, the Holy
Grail) had been preserved and was divinely potent for a humanity in dire
need of salvation.33
He was outraged that Ludwig II failed to share his abhorrence regarding Levi’s
conducting the premiere of the opera. Thus, Parsifal is a tale of redemption, but
as Martin B. Schichtman notes, it is also “an allegory [of] the revivification of
Aryan Christianity – and with it Germany’s glorious, if now obscured, history.”34

29 Sarah K. Balstrup, “Interpreting the Lost Gospel of Mary: Feminist Reconstructions and Myth-

Making.” Literature & Aesthetics 25 (2015): 11-12.

30 Harewood and Peattie, The New Kobbe’s Opera Book, 950.
31 Martin B. Schichtman, “Whom Does the Grail Serve? Wagner, Spielberg and the Issue of Jewish

Appropriation,” in The Arthurian Revival, p. 285.

32 Harewood and Peattie, The New Kobbe’s Opera Book, 951.
33 Ernest Newman, Wagner Nights (London: Picador, 1977 [1949]), 670-671.
34 Schichtman, “Whom Does the Grail Serve?” 285.
Consequently, Kundry’s Jewish identity and death as a baptized Christian are
crucial to the opera’s plot.

WAGNER AND THE WASTE LAND: T. S. ELIOT’S GRAIL LEGEND

It has often been observed that three of the great nineteenth-century precursors
or harbingers of modernism, the poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), the
painter Édouard Manet (1832-1883), and the operatic composer Wagner were
all profoundly influential upon the works of Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965),
arguably the greatest modernist writer in the English language.35 Eliot, who was
a devotee of Wagner in his youth, later came to see his cultural influence as
“pernicious.”36 This rejection is not simple to explain: Eliot shared Wagner’s anti-
Semitism, and derogatory references to Jews abound in his poetic oeuvre; Eliot
adopted a conservative monarchism in politics, akin to the anti-revolutionary
stance evidenced in Wagner’s last great work; and he converted to an intense
Anglo-Catholic form of Christianity, which shared with Roman Catholicism and
Orthodoxy a deep liturgical orientation and a high aestheticism.37 The literary
historian Stoddard Martin suggests that Eliot minimized his debt to Wagner as
the composer was unfashionable for most of Eliot’s career, and also because
Romanticism, which Wagner is also identified with, was not compatible with
Eliot’s espousal of literary Classicism and his “admonitions against ‘extreme
emotionalism’.”38

It is not possible to establish if Eliot ever saw a performance of Parsifal, though
he certainly had the opportunity to do so. Bayreuth lost its exclusive copyright
on the work in 1913, and in 1914, the year Eliot moved to Europe to live
permanently, “there were productions in more than 50 European cities.”39 The
most direct connection between Parsifal and The Waste Land, a lengthy poem
that Eliot worked on for some time before its publication, in a radically
shortened form after being edited by fellow-poet Ezra Pound at Eliot’s behest in
1922, is the celebrated book by Jessie Weston, From Ritual to Romance (1920).
Weston, an ardent Wagnerian, had published Legends of the Wagner Drama in
1896, and in the preface to From Ritual to Romance she stated that the work
originated in two sources, “her reading of The Golden Bough and conversations
she had during the Bayreuth Festival of 1911.”40 The Waste Land can be read in
part as a re-writing of the Grail legend; the opening section, “The Burial of the
Dead,” describes a barren and blighted land that derives as much from Arthurian
legends as from the Old Testament. The women who appear in the second and
third sections, “A Game of Chess” and “The Fire Sermon,” appear to be many and
yet one, which recalls the longevity and varied roles and identities of Kundry. In

35 Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture (London: Duckworth, 1998), 63.
36 Stoddard Martin, Wagner to “The Waste Land”: A Study of the Relationship of Wagner to English

Literature (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1982), 194.

37 Anthony Julius, T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1995); Barry Spurr, ‘Anglo-Catholic in Religion’: T. S. Eliot and Christianity (Cambridge:
Lutterworth Press, 2009).
38 Martin, Wagner to “The Waste Land”, 195.
39 Sarah Wintle, “Wagner and The Waste Land – Again,” English 38/162 (1989), 238.
40 Philip Waldron, “The Music of Poetry: Wagner in ‘The Waste Land’,” Journal of Modern

Literature 18/4 (1993), 431.

the third section, “The Fire Sermon” (which calls to mind a sermon of Siddhartha
Gautama, the Buddha), Eliot references the concluding scene of Parsifal, in which
the unseen choir sings “Erlösung dem Erlöser.” This reference is mediated via the
Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine (1844-1896), who published a sonnet titled
Parsifal, in the Revue Wagnérienne in 1886. This short poem presents Parsifal as
a hero overcoming obstacles, and concludes with a description of him unveiling
the Grail, with the choir singing “dans la coupole.”41

Eliot’s poem deliberately travesties the lofty final scene of Act Three of Parsifal:
in place of the spring is the Thames, characterised by litter and rats; the purity
and chastity of the Grail brotherhood and the penitence of Kundry give way to
“fertility rites, adultery, rape and homosexuality,”42 and a mispunctuated
quotation of Verlaine, “Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole.”43 In the
brief fourth section, “Death By Water,” mention is made of “Gentile or Jew,” and
section five, “What The Thunder Said,” describes a dry landscape without water
and an empty chapel, in direct contract to the spring in which Parsifal baptizes
Kundry, and the worshippers in the Grail temple. Fascinatingly, in The Waste
Land Eliot blends allusions to the Bible, the Upanishads, the Grail legends, and
the Buddha’s sermons: Martin comments that it was only after the publication of
this important poem that he moved to a “clear espousal of Christian orthodoxy,”
in contrast with Wagner, “whose blending of Eastern and Western mysticism in
Parsifal represented the goal and endpoint of a life’s work.”44

Eliot, while ambivalent about the legacy of Wagner and any debt that he as an
artist, poet, and Christian might owe to him, testifies to the enduring importance
of the Grail story in high literary modernism, and to the shadow that Wagner cast
over all modernist projects. Sarah Wintle encapsulates the dilemma succinctly;
Eliot recognised Parsifal as the Wagnerian opera “whose mythological structure
is closest to his own and which also sings of redemption more clearly and less
ambivalently than any other Wagnerian opera,” and realized it was necessary to
use merciless parody to negate the power of its allure for him.45

THE MEDIEVAL AS CURE FOR THE MALAISE OF THE MODERN

Wagner was firmly of the opinion that in an era when religion had lost its power
and authority (had become “artificial,” as he put it), art had the capacity to
“rescue its essence by apprehending the mythical symbols – which religion
wishes to be believed true in a literal sense – according to their symbolic value,
in order to reveal the profound truth hidden in them by representing them
ideally.”46 The focus on Christianity in his final opera, and his stated desire that it
be staged only at Bayreuth in a purpose-built theatre, to all intents and purposes
as a religious service, confirm that the composer understood Parsifal to be a
deeply spiritual musical work that was able to function as religion in the lives of

41 Waldron, “The Music of Poetry,” 426.
42 Wintle, “Wagner and The Waste Land,” 240.
43 Waldron, “The Music of Poetry,” 426.
44 Martin, Wagner to “The Waste Land”, 211.
45 Wintle, “Wagner and The Waste Land,” 240.
46 Meyer, “Parsifal’s Aura,” 152.
those who witnessed it. From the earliest performances, audience members
reported religious or spiritual experiences. The English cleric Hugh Reginald
Haweis described the impact of the Grail scene as follows:
[t]he whole assembly was motionless; all seemed to be solemnized by the
august spectacle – seemed almost to share in the devout contemplation
and trance-like worship of the holy knights. Every thought of the stage
had vanished. Nothing was further from my own thoughts than play-
acting. I was sitting in devout and rapt contemplation. Before my eyes had
passed a symbolic vision of prayer and ecstasy, flooding the soul with
overpowering thoughts of the divine sacrifice and the mystery of
unfathomable love.47
That a Christian clergyman could respond to Wagner’s theologically eclectic and
decidedly unorthodox opera may in part be due to the revival of Catholicism in
Britain. Wagner presents the Catholic mass in Parsifal, and the description of
Amfortas’ wound and sufferings shares an aesthetic with the Catholic cult of the
saints and relics. After the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act in 1829,
Catholicism emerged as a powerful force for affective Christian experience.
Romanticism’s interest in picturesque medieval ruins and the exotic Catholicism
they evoked, and the Enlightenment values of freedom that facilitated the
adoption of personally satisfying forms of religious devotion, combined with a
resurgent ritualism to revive medieval religious forms including pilgrimages,
devotion to relics, and monasticism.48

The eighteenth century, and its dominant intellectual current the Enlightenment,
in part advocated the abolition of monarchy and the establishment of democracy,
though in reality only the American Revolution (1775-1883) was successful in
delivering this outcome. The French Revolution of 1789 collapsed into the Terror
and the eventual emergence of Napoleon Bonaparte as a new kind of Emperor,
one based on merit (conquest) rather than heredity. The cultural legacy of the
Enlightenment included: human faith in the power of reason; the denial of the
Christian notion of original sin, and the assertion that humans were born free
and good; criticism of all sources of authority, including religious institutions and
government; the advocacy of science as a verifiable source of true knowledge;
and a interest in the human rights of groups formerly excluded from power (for
example, slaves and women) that fuelled the movement for democratic change.49
These shifts rendered religion a private matter that involved personal choice and
commitment for the individual, and the state as a secular body that treated all
religions equally.

The conservative philosopher Roger Scruton has argued for the indissolubility of
art and religion in what he terms “genuinely religious epoch(s)”. The intimate
relationship between religious music, art, and literature in the Catholic Middle
Ages is undeniable. Interestingly, Scruton believes this can only occur where

47 H. R. Haweis, quoted in Meyer, “Parsifal’s Aura,” 153.
48 Mary Heimann, Catholic Devotion in Victorian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995),

1-37.
49 Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Tolerance Came to the West (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 2003), 291.

there is a “common religious culture.”50 The emergence of the modern secular
state which protects the rights of religiously different citizens is thus in answer
to, rather than the cause of, the societal fragmentation that set religion on a path
of decline in modernity, and untethered art, enabling it to take on the role of
religion for soi-disant cultural elites. Gerhard Regn argues that Bayreuth is a self-
conscious pilgrimage site that presents Wagner’s operas as performances that
are rituals. He notes that Adolf Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels,
praised attendance at Parsifal as a “four hour divine service,” and that “in staging
the aesthetic, Parsifal lays claim to the presence of the religious.”51

Wagner’s ambivalence to both the medieval and the modern is apparent in his
own life, which involved unconventional sexual and familial structures, and a
defiant attitude towards church and state. It is also clear in his operas, where the
world of power is dominated by males (both men and gods) and is inevitably
corrupted, and “the side of truth telling, subversion, and transcendence tends to
be associated with women.”52 The contradictions abound: the radical young
Wagner, on the barricades in Dresden with the revolutionary anarchist Mikhail
Bakunin (1814-1876) in 1848 became dependent on the hereditary monarch
Ludwig II of Bavaria, and his magnificent operatic heroines all die after achieving
the redemption of the hero, the society, or the world. As Wintle wryly observes,
“while the music passionately sings of the triumph of love, the stage is empty of
life.”53 This tension recalls Adorno’s claim that Wagner as pre-eminent musical
modernist nevertheless incorporated regressive as well as progressive elements
in his operas, and that his assumption that the Gesamtkunstwerk was universally
significant compromised its modernity. Music scholar David Huron argues that
Wagner’s music is quintessentially modernist because it departs from classical
forms to create a “music of hunger, rather than of fulfilment.”54 Technically, his
music is modern, but the stories it tells are not. Wagner feels the pull of medieval
culture keenly, and in his last years acknowledged it as more powerful than the
lure of modernity because of its tradition and stability, which contrasted with the
hurried pace of the modernist quest for the new.

CONCLUSION

It is difficult to comprehend, but Wagner appears to have viewed an aesthetic
version of the medieval as an appropriate solution to the ills of modernity, which
included democracy, the extension of rights to all races and creeds, and the loss
of prestige experienced by high culture after the industrial revolution, which
resulted in banal, commercial art-forms for consumption by the bourgeoisie. His

50 Scruton, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture, 17.
51 Gerhard Regn, “Negotiating Religion and Art: Wagner, Petrarch, Dante,” Modern Language

Notes 126:4 (2011), S78-S79.

52 Michael P. Steinberg, “The Politics and Aesthetics of Operatic Modernism,” The Journal of

Interdisciplinary History 36:4 (2006), 637.

53 Wintle, “Wagner and The Waste Land,” 231.
54 David Huron, Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation (Cambridge, MA and

London: The MIT Press/A Bradford Book, 2006), 339. It is important to realise that Huron does
not mean this in a subjective manner, but refers to Wagner’s deliberate avoidance of traditional
cadence to unsettle listeners by leaving musical structures open and unresolved. He provides a
technical discussion of Wagner’s musicological techniques to support this contention.
assessment of his own genius, the profundity of his operatic works, and the
sacred pretensions of his purpose-built Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, led him to
believe that the Gesamtkunstwerk could function as religion in modernity.55 The
Ring is the work most often characterised in this way, because of its refusal of
traditional religious solutions, its insistence on humanity’s need to address the
question of its own existence, which is seen as compatible with secularisation.
Michael Steinberg argues that the key quality of modernism is “the courage of
ambivalence, the refusal to accept inadequate alternatives,”56 an observation that
is apposite to the Ring. Yet Wagner’s final work, Parsifal, also may function as
religion, but offers a radically different solution, which Tom Sutcliffe explains as:
“hierarchy, Christian stability, tradition, [and] enlightenment through pain and
pity.”57 The medievalism of this last answer offered by the prophetic operatic
modernist is undeniable, and demands recognition.

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