Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Author's Note
- 1 Introduction, or the Uses of Love
- 2 Sensuality and Spirituality in the Early Music Dramas
- 3 Music and the Eternal Feminine
- 4 The Ring of the Nibelung
- 5 Love and Death: Tristan und Isolde
- 6 The Mastersingers of Nuremberg
- 7 Parsifal
- 8 Contradictions and Speculations
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Author's Note
- 1 Introduction, or the Uses of Love
- 2 Sensuality and Spirituality in the Early Music Dramas
- 3 Music and the Eternal Feminine
- 4 The Ring of the Nibelung
- 5 Love and Death: Tristan und Isolde
- 6 The Mastersingers of Nuremberg
- 7 Parsifal
- 8 Contradictions and Speculations
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
There is an obvious solecism in approaching Parsifal in the manner I have already flagged. It is the common solecism to which all explanations of an artist's career that are structured around a chronological account of his or her work are vulnerable. And this is so even if that structure is, as here, played with fairly freely and certain works (in this case most obviously the three operas before The Flying Dutchman) and certain essential matters (in this case a technical musical analysis) are neglected. It is the solecism of seeing the final work as some kind of ipso facto summation; that is, as an aesthetic and intellectual summation of everything that has gone before simply because it is the final work. Furthermore, the matter can be taken so far as to suggest that the last opus is an end point to which the artist had been consciously working. Given that there is no more to come and assuming there are no sketches left behind for the next (and now inevitably) unfinished work, there is a wellnigh irresistible temptation to grasp at death as the incontrovertible narrative manifestation of telos – a telos which supposedly gives meaning to everything that has gone before. This temptation is all the stronger if the artist has had a relatively long life. We don’t, for instance, think it unreasonable that Verdi packed it in after Falstaff, although we shouldn't forget that he was of the opinion that he had packed it in after Aida twenty years before. Nor should we forget that he lived another seven years after Falstaff. And this desire to invest the artist's final work with extra meaning is all the greater if there is an element of death about it. It is self-evidently natural to see Britten's Death in Venice as a summation of his work as an opera composer, not least because he delayed an operation in order to complete it. But we cannot know what would have happened had that operation not gone wrong.
Despite these commonsense warnings, exactly this potential solecism is in play here. Parsifal is treated as a final point not simply because there is no music drama after it. Rather, it is seen as the appropriate final point for Wagner's stage works. And this is the case not simply because he said that it would be the last.
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- Richard Wagner and the Centrality of Love , pp. 223 - 254Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2010