A Pagan Spoiled: Sex and Character in Wagner’s Parsifal

Review by Derrick Everett for A Pagan Spoiled: Sex and Character in Wagner’s Parsifal
Rating:
This book is a valuable contribution to the understanding of Wagner’s last music-drama, although without bringing new insight or information to the discussion, and of limited value to the specialist, while being too narrow in its exploration of the work to serve as a general introduction. It might be a good choice for a second “Parsifal” book for a reader who has already digested, for example, Peter Bassett’s “Wagner’s Parsifal, the Journey of a Soul” (Kent Town, 2001). Winterbourne is right to dismiss the view that “Parsifal” is of value for its music alone, since the libretto is arguably the densest in allusion and the richest in irony and ambiguity that Wagner constructed, and therefore of great interest in its own right — but it is so intimately related to the music that they should be considered together. Winterbourne makes no attempt to do so.The subtitle of the book refers to Otto Weininger’s “Geschlecht und Charakter” (Vienna, 1903), the ultimate study in misogyny. Winterbourne devotes many pages to discussing Weininger and in particular to his use of Kundry as a representative of womankind. This is probably giving Weininger more attention that he deserves, although it is interesting — and a little disturbing — to note that his book was taken seriously only a hundred years ago. The reason for paying attention to Weininger is that Nike Wagner, in her book “Wagner Theatre” (Frankfurt and Leipzig 1998, translated into English and republished as “The Wagners: the Dramas of a Musical Dynasty”, London, 2000), has asserted not only that Weininger understood Kundry, but also that “Parsifal” (completed in 1882) is a staging of “Sex and Character”, and that the latter explains the former. This is Winterbourne’s starting point and, to his credit, he does not buy very much of Nike’s interpretation of “Parsifal” through the distorting lens of “Sex and Character”. There are some sections of the book in which Winterbourne seems to have lost the path and others that reveal his research to be inadequate, his knowledge of Wagner’s output to be incomplete and his reading of the libretto and related documents to be superficial. One cannot learn everything about Wagner from reading the “Selected Letters”. He discusses Wagner’s apparent lack of interest in “Faust” and the quest for unlimited knowledge, but overlooks Wagner’s orchestral work inspired by “Faust” and Wagner’s ideas about the veil of Maja. He has some difficulty in accepting that the Grail is held in “sullied hands” (page 58). He assumes that the “homeopathic” action of the lance is an idea that Wagner took from Wolfram’s epic poem “Parzival” (page 49), where the lance alleviates the pain of the wound but does not heal, ignoring the spear of Achilles, a hero considered by Wagner as the subject of a drama. He alludes to the myth of the wasteland, asserting, wrongly, that both Monsalvat and the unnamed domain of Klingsor have become wastelands. Wagner expressed his “idea of community” in “Parsifal”, not by showing an “exemplary society”, but by showing the catastrophic results of separating male from female, or masculine from feminine. Winterbourne is rightly sceptical concerning claims that Kundry is an anti-Semitic figure. He notes that Wolzogen suggested to Wagner that Kundry was a female Ahasuerus but overlooks the fact that already in the 1865 Prose Draft, Wagner had written that Kundry wanders in a manner reminiscent of the Wandering Jew (“ähnlich dem ‘ewigen Juden'”). He also seems not to be aware that it was H. Heine who first described his Dutchman as “the Wandering Jew of the sea”. That Kundry is another instance of this archetype, and that in one of her previous lives she was the notorious Herodias, consort of Herod or Herodes, does not make her a Jewess. Even if she were, the sympathetic nature of her portrayal rules out any possibility of an anti-Semitic subtext.

Winterbourne agrees with Nike Wagner in seeing this work as a “redemption drama”, although he is a little vague concerning the nature of that redemption. He makes some rather dismissive statements about Nirvana, a concept which deserves more serious attention than he is willing to give to it, and he obstinately refuses to see any character other than Kundry as based on Buddhist or otherwise Indian ideas. He considers and rejects the possibility that Kundry is “a bodhisattva approaching enlightenment”. It seems to me that he has misread Carl Suneson (in his monograph, “Richard Wagner och den indiske tankevärlden”, Stockholm, 1985, translated into German and republished as “Richard Wagner und die Indische Geisteswelt”). In fact it was Parsifal, not Kundry, who was seen by Suneson both as a Christ-figure and as one who finds and follows the path of the bodhisattva. Winterbourne chooses to disregard elements of the work that do not fit his interpretation. Thus, when Parsifal reveals that he has had many names, Winterbourne comments (page 33) that this should not be read as a suggestion that he, like Kundry, has been reincarnated, although he acknowledges Wagner’s belief in reincarnation — he cites a letter written to Mathilde Wesendonk in 1860 in which this is mentioned, and in which Wagner first revealed that he would introduce Kundry into the second act — and despite the evidence that names and naming were important for Wagner. Since this “revelation” of a second-act Kundry struck Wagner while he was rewriting the Venusberg scene, Winterbourne follows Anna-Christine Brade (in “Kundry und Stella: Offenbach contra Wagner”, 1997) in seeing Kundry as a reworking of Venus, combined with Elisabeth. Winterbourne’s assumption that, in Wagner’s original conception, Kundry only appeared in the first act is untenable. The whole point of Wagner’s original conception was that the restless Kundry of the first act was to reappear, much changed, in the third act. A Kundry who only appeared in the first act would have been pointless. Weininger, however, thought that she should have been allowed to die earlier, on the grounds that she became superfluous when Parsifal was not interested in having sex with her. This too is untenable; as Parsifal tells Kundry, he has been sent for her salvation. Winterbourne might have done better to focus on Wagner’s engagement with concepts of reincarnation, karma and Nirvana, which might have led him to quite different conclusions from those drawn by Weininger; whose interpretation was based on a narrow and partial understanding of only one of the central figures in Wagner’s redemption drama.