Análisis Estratégico Territorial

Introduction

S

Parsifal, one might expect the opera to be about the means to its

achievement. From the Christian standpoint, faith in God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is required for salvation. Wagner’s young hero, however, seems less concerned with faith than with salvation or redemption. Indeed, he seems not to give much thought to the afterlife, seeking rather to be saved and redeemed in this life. He seeks redemption for not questioning the cause of Amfortas’s suffering, and thereby showing a lack of compas- sion. In Christian terms, he has failed to live up to Jesus’s teaching that we should love our neighbors as we love ourselves. Parsifal specifically seeks salvation from surrender to sexual seduction in the person of Kundry, a surrender associated in his mind with eternal damnation. In a truly Christian drama, loving one’s neighbor would proceed from love of God and salvation from faith in God. These matters and related ones in Wagner’s work lack that sort of clarity and simplicity.

The same can be said for Wolfram von Eschenbach’s classic rendition of the Grail story in his medieval epic Parzival. There, indeed, the nature and degree of the hero’s piety is in still greater doubt. Parzival’s regret over having failed to ask about Anfortas’s suffering is not so much a feel- ing of sinfulness as shame over having failed to live up to chivalric ideals. His goal is rather redeeming his honor than achieving redemption from sin. His aim is to become Grail King in spite of having missed that chance on the day appointed for him to heal Anfortas’s wound by asking the fate- ful question. Faith does not seem to motivate Parzival’s actions; on the contrary, misfortune moves him to doubt God’s existence or to deny God his allegiance. Parzival, moreover, appears unconcerned about salvation.

The decidedly Christian atmosphere of Wagner’s opera owes far more to Wolfram’s source, the unfinished courtly romance Perceval by Chrétien de Troyes. Our last view of Perceval is his encounter with a group of knights

and ladies returning from their Good Friday pilgrimage to a pious hermit.

These pilgrims direct him to the hermit (6237–6519).1 _{Through these}

encounters, Perceval’s thoughts are turned toward faith in God and hope for redemption and salvation. Because Chrétien’s epic remained unfinished, we do not know how Perceval was to reach his destiny of succeeding the Grail King or how the latter was to be delivered from his suffering.

Wagner’s Parsifal deviates from its two principal medieval predeces- sors in important ways, among the most striking of which is its reduction of the role of women to a single figure, the seductress Kundry. Although, in Joseph Chytry’s words, “Parsifal was primarily meant as Wagner’s

encomium to Agape¯ over Eros,”2_{the theme of seduction itself is a major}

innovation on Wagner’s part. As we shall see, there are no seductresses in Wagner’s medieval predecessors, although erotic attractions are certainly not lacking; quite the contrary. And not only in the depictions of courtly society, but in the Grail company, which abides by courtly decorum and demeanor, women are present and active in equal numbers with the men. In society and at the Grail castle, the noble women are beautiful and the knights handsome, as befits courtly romance. The lone exception is Cun- drie herself, who serves as messenger at the Grail castle and is so ugly that one would wish to be able to say that she is beautiful. To compensate for her lack of beauty she dresses in the latest and finest fashions, whereas Wagner’s Kundry has to hide her ravishing beauty in order to receive acceptance as servant to the knights of the Grail.

Wagner’s Grail knights thus appear to have withdrawn radically into an all-male community. We do not hear even of any female servants at the Grail castle. Kundry is able to steal her way into their territory only by virtue of her knowledge of medicinal herbs and the knights’ hope that she will be able to heal Amfortas’s wound or at least lessen his suffering. Even so, she would not have been able to gain even that limited admittance had she presented herself in anything approaching the beauty she possesses. Women’s presence for Wagner’s knights carries the danger of succumbing to erotic desire; and it is resistance to the tug of desire on which the knights base their claim to purity and virtue. Even in her ugly, beast-like disguise Kundry arouses suspicion on the part of Gurnemanz’s young charges, who in seeming error but with unerring instinct, suspect that

1_{Chrétien de Troyes, Le Roman de Perceval ou le conte du Graal (Geneva:}

Librairie Droz; Lille: Librairie Giard, 1956); in English: Perceval: The Story of the

Grail, trans. Burten Raffel (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1999). Passages will

be identified in the text by line, e.g. (4401).

2_{The Aesthetic State: A Quest in Modern German Thought (Berkeley and London:}

she is herself the seductress responsible for the wounding of Amfortas

(1, 14–15).3 _{We are left with the impression that the Grail company}

attracts, even seeks, novices of misogynist bent, young men whose visceral

reaction to women is to see them as seductresses, as daughters of Eve.4

In Parsifal, Amfortas’s father, Titurel, is the founder of the Grail com- munity. As Gurnemanz explains to the young squires, Titurel was sum- moned by God to create the community. Apparently, Gurnemanz was not present at Titurel’s reception of that call; indeed, the call evidently came in a vision experienced by Titurel alone (1, 17). In any event, Titurel seems to interpret his vocation as the founding not merely of a company of knights to defend the faith against the infidels on the southern boundaries of Christendom, but of an exclusively male company, with even the pres- ence of women prohibited. Although the question is not raised in the opera, it does pose itself nonetheless: since Amfortas cannot have sprung full grown from Titurel’s brow, who was his mother and what became of her? More important, if we assume that Titurel raised Amfortas in place of his mother, and since there seem to be no women at all at the Grail castle, Amfortas’s fateful encounter with Kundry as a ravishing beauty on his first venture beyond the territory of the Grail castle must have been his first encounter with a woman since his early boyhood or infancy.

In Chrétien’s Grail castle, by contrast, women have a prominent place. The sword that the Grail King presents to Perceval is a gift to the former from “ ‘That golden-haired girl, / Your beautiful niece,’ ” as the servant says to the Grail King (3146–47). Not only does Amfortas’s counterpart here have a beautiful niece, but the Grail itself is carried by a member of the fairer sex: “And then two other servants / Entered, carrying golden / Candleholders worked / With enamel, They were wonderfully handsome / Boys . . . / . . . A girl / Entered with them, holding / A Grail-dish in both her hands / A beautiful girl, elegant / Extremely well dressed. / . . . / . . . Then another / Girl followed the first one, / Bearing a silver platter” (3213–32). Chrétien’s Grail Knights clearly are accustomed to seeing beautiful girls, in contrast to the knights in Wagner’s opera.

In Wolfram’s Parzival the role of women in the Grail procession is greatly expanded. No fewer than two dozen beautiful women in dazzling

3_{Richard Wagner, Parsifal: Ein Bühnenweihfestspiel in drei Aufzügen, ed.}

Wilhelm Zentner (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1974). Further references to this source will be parenthetical, identified by act and page number, e.g. (2, 45).

4_{This dimension of Parsifal has been commented on by various authors.}

James Treadwell, in a chapter on “desire” in his recent book Interpreting Wagner (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2003), 169, refers to “the opera’s strenuous, almost maniacal insistence on chastity.”

attire precede the one carrying the Grail. Here she has the title of Grail Queen and is the sister of the Grail King Anfortas, as one later learns. Her name, moreover, is Repanse de Joie, establishing an association between the Grail, joy, and female beauty. Purity is associated here not with male renunciation of desire but with female chastity and the accompanying

absence of deceit (5:235, 25–30).5_{In Wolfram’s telling, or, more precisely,}

as the hermit Trevrizent tells Parzival, the Grail King may marry, but only the wife appointed for him by God, as revealed in miraculous inscription on the Grail (9:478, 13–16).

Wolfram’s Anfortas has thus not grown up in an exclusively male soci- ety, but has been exposed to beautiful women, who have an integral role in the ritual life of the Grail. While Wagner’s Grail knights resemble monks in many respects, Wolfram’s Grail company seems to combine elements of monastery and convent, with the important difference that the knights and ladies of Wolfram’s Grail castle may leave to marry, as God (via inscriptions on the Grail) may ordain. No explanation is given in Parzival for the ori- gin of the Grail company and Grail castle, though the earliest of the Grail kings of whom we learn is named Titurel. In this work, though, he is Anfortas’s grandfather. Titurel’s successor as Grail King was Frimutel, Anfortas’s father. At Frimutel’s death as a result of a joust, Anfortas, as his elder son, was summoned while still a boy to the Grail castle as Grail King (9:478, 1–7).

In Trevrizent’s account to Parzival, with Anfortas’s arrival at puberty he chose for himself a woman to whom he dedicated his service as a knight, and in so doing acted in a manner contrary to the commandment associ- ated with the service of the Grail (9:478, 8–22). Anfortas is not presented to us as having been the victim of seduction or as having succumbed to it. He sought a woman’s love in response to an adolescent awakening of sex- ual desire. As Trevrizent confesses to Parzival, much the same happened with him himself (9:495, 13–18). Despite Anfortas’s loss of his father while still a boy and having perhaps left his mother already at that time to become Grail King, he remained in close touch with his family; his sister

5_{Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzifal, ed. Walter Haug, Bibliothek des Mittelal-}

ters: Texte und Übersetzungen, vol. 8, nos. 1–2 (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994). Passages will be identified in the text by book, strophe, and verse, e.g. (9:480, 10–15). The secondary literature on Wolfram’s Parzival is vast. The following three items provide a good overview, together with the detailed notes provided in the edition above: Joachim Bumke, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Sammlung Metzler: Realien zur Literatur, vol. 36, 8th ed. (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2004); Heinz Rupp, ed., Wolfram von Eschenbach, Wege der Forschung, vol. 57 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1966); and Will Hasty, ed.,

had become Grail Queen and his brother Trevrizent had withdrawn to life nearby as a pious hermit after Anfortas’s wounding, in order to seek God’s rescue of his brother from his suffering (9:480, 10–15). The fourth of Frimutel’s children is Parzival’s dead mother Herzeloyde, so the Grail kingship remains a family matter, a dynasty as much as a holy order. In Wagner’s opera, by contrast, Parsifal is not related to Amfortas, who appar- ently has no siblings or other family save for his father Titurel.

Sexual desire, as distinguished from fleshly lust, is not set in opposition to Christian piety in either Chrétien’s Perceval or Wolfram’s Parzival as it decidedly is in Wagner’s Parsifal. Indeed, erotic passion is celebrated, espe- cially in so far as it leads to marital fidelity, and is not censured except where it would lead to violation of God’s commandments, such as those against adultery and covetousness.