¹ Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzval, trans. Hatto, A. T. (London, 1980), 244 and 241.Google Scholar

² Abbate, Carolyn, ‘ “Parsifal”: Words and Music’, in Parsifal, English National Opera Guide 34 (London, 1986), 48, notes that the stories in Act I (those of Kundry, Amfortas, Titurel and Klingsor) all ‘generate a temporal circle that will constantly and inevitably turn back to a single event. This event is Klingsor's wounding of Amfortas, a moment laden with mythic significance’. It is also laden, as we will argue, with meaning related to both social order and sexual illness.Google Scholar

³ See Cicora, Mary A., ‘Parsifal’ Reception in the ‘Bayreuther Blätter’ (New York, 1987), 5.Google ScholarSee also Beckett, Lucy, Wagner, Richard: ‘Parsifal’ (Cambridge, 1981), 103ff., for a summary of the responses to the Christian elements.Google Scholar

⁴ On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Kaufmann, Walter (New York, 1967), 100,Google Scholar and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1967), 288.Google Scholar

⁵ ‘Religion und Kunst’, Blätter, Bayreuther (October 1880), in Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen (Leipzig, 1911–1916), X, 211–52.Google Scholar

⁶ See Nelson, Byron, ‘Wagner, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche: On the Value of Human Action’, Opera Quarterly, 6 (1989), 30–1;CrossRefGoogle ScholarFloros, Constantin, ‘Studien zur parsifal-Rezeption’, in Richard Wagner, ‘Parsifal’, Musik-Konzepte 25, ed. Metzger, Heinz-Klaus and Riehn, Rainer (Munich, 1982), 17 and 21–2.Google Scholar

⁷ (New York, 1991).Google Scholar

⁸ Holloway, Robin, ‘Experiencing Music and Imagery in “Parsifal” ‘, in Parsifal (see n. 2), 40.Google Scholar

⁹ Conrad, Peter, A Song of Love and Death: The Meaning of Opera (New York, 1987), 173.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Beckett, 25.Google Scholar

¹¹ Mike Ashman, ‘A Very Human Epic’, in Parsifal (see n. 2), 9–10. Peter Wapnewski further argues that ‘Wagner always suffered in a sense from Amfortas's wound. That is, he was never able to tame the sexual urge with socially approved norms’ (in ‘The Operas as Literary Works’, in Ulrich Müller and Peter Wapnewski, eds., Wagner Handbook, trans, and ed. John Deathridge [Cambridge, 1992], 92). He goes on to suggest that Wagner's love for Judith Gautier at this time makes Parsifal into a kind of ‘purification exercise’ whereby Wagner tried to ‘tame and chastise the strongest of urges, and to guard against its destructive potential’ (93).Google Scholar

¹² (Stuttgart, 1875), II, 230.Google Scholar

¹³ This is Wynne-Finch's 1935 prose translation, cited in Cleugh, James, Secret Enemy: The Story of a Disease (London and New York, 1954), 66.Google Scholar

¹⁴ The Principles and Practice of Medicine (New York, 1892), 169.Google Scholar

¹⁵ The recent exhumation of a sixteenth-century Neapolitan mummy has shown that the woman (Maria d'Aragona) suffered from a syphilitic ulcer to which had been applied a balsam of vegetable filaments immersed in sulphur. See Gino Fornaciari et al., ‘Syphilis in a Renaissance Italian Mummy’, The Lancet (9 September 1989), 614.Google ScholarSee also Winslow, Charles E., The Conquest of Epidemic Disease (Princeton, 1944), 125.Google Scholar

¹⁶ For the nineteenth-century German debates, seeMiiller, Friedrich Wilhelm, Die venerischen Krankheiten in Alterthum: Quällenmäsige Erörterungen zur Geschichte der Syphilis (Erlangen, 1873), andGoogle ScholarProksch, J. K., Die Geschichte der venerischen Krankheiten, 2 vols. (Bonn, 1895).Google Scholar For a recent overview of the debates in general, see Armelagos, George J., ‘The Origin and Antiquity of Syphilis’, Current Anthropology, 29 (1988), 703–20.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Cited in Claude Quétel, History of Syphilis, trans. , Judith Braddock and Pike, Brian (Cambridge, 1990), 45. These words also appeared as the epigraph to Oscar Panizza's 1897 'syphilis’ tragedy, The Council of Love.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Cited in Quétel, 54. See also Temkin, Owsei, The Double Face of Janus and Other Essays in the History of Medicine (Baltimore, 1977), 475, andGoogle ScholarSigerist, Henry E., Civilisation and Disease (Chicago, 1943), 76.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Bentley, Greg W., Shakespeare and the New Disease: The Dramatic Function of Syphilis in ‘Troilus and Cressida’, ‘Measure for Measure’, and ‘Twton of Athens’ (New York, 1989), 7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁰ Sigerist, 78.Google Scholar

²¹ See Lasowski, Patrick Wald, Syphilis: Essai sur la littérature française du XIX siècle (Paris, 1982).Google Scholar

²² See Showalter, Elaine, ‘Syphilis, Sexuality, and Fiction of the Fin de Siècle’, in Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, ed. Yeazell, Ruth Bernard (Baltimore, 1986), 92. Typical is the entry on venereal disease in the 1830 Gunn's Domestic Medicine (rpt. Knoxville, 1986), 260–1.Google Scholar

²³ Ashman (see n. 11), 13; see also Abbate (see n. 2), 49.Google Scholar

²⁴ After all, in some countries, if accused of syphilis (or leprosy or the plague), one could be legally removed from society. See Bentley, 109–10, and Holdsworth, Sir William, A History of English Law (Boston, 1962),’ VIII, 347–9.Google Scholar

²⁵ In Search of Wagner, trans. Livingstone, Rodney (London, 1981), 94. The citation following is from pp. 93–4.Google Scholar

²⁶ Whittall, Arnold, ‘The Music’, in Beckett (see n. 3 ), 66.Google Scholar

²⁷ Abbate, 52.Google Scholar

²⁸ Temkin (see n. 18), 477. According to popular lore, if not historical facts, Indian women brought back by Columbus in the 1490s were thought to have ended up as prostitutes in Naples at the time when Charles VIII and his troops besieged the city. By the nineteenth century, military physicians were concerned about the effect of this disease upon their forces. The chief surgeon of the navy at Brest estimated that 2144 o f 6294 able seamen contracted syphilis from 1850 to 1855. See Quétel (n. 17), 230.Google Scholar

²⁹ Gutman, Robert W., Wagner, Richard: The Man, His Mind and His Music (1968; rpt. New York, 1990), 438. We are reminded of Elaine Showalter's reading of Bram Stoker's Dracula in terms of nineteenth-century ‘syphilophobia’. See Showalter, 99–101.Google Scholar

³⁰ Showalter, 88.Google Scholar

³¹ Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York and London, 1991), 262.Google Scholar

³² The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. I, Education of the Senses (New York, 1984), 326.Google Scholar

³³ Doane also calls on Sander Gilman's ‘Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature’ (Critical Inquiry, 12 [1985], esp. p. 232), with its thesis of the sexualisation – and medical pathologisation – of prostitutes and black women in the last century. The non-white, non-European woman constructed as erotic ‘other’ is, of course, not foreign to opera: the bourgeois audience at the Paris Opéra-Comique was shocked at Bizet's 1875 portrayal of the sexually aggressive gypsy, Carmen.Google Scholar

³⁴ Gutman, 427; Rose, Paul Lawrence, Wagner: Race and Revolution (New Haven, 1992), 164.Google Scholar

³⁵ Gutman, 427, links the sexual relations of Kundry and Amfortas to ‘criminal miscegenation. and calls Klingsor's garden a symbol of Jewish luxury. Klingsor is also read as Jewish in terms of the music (428). Rose calls Klingsor ‘in spirit a Jew’ in his search for material power, like ‘those Germans who have surrendered to Judaism [and] have cut themselves off from the idealism of Germanness’ (163). Adorno saw the ‘glorified blood-brotherhood’ of Parsifal as Nazi-like (140), but the opera was not put on at Bayreuth from 1940 to 194. because it was not one of the Nazis’ favourites.Google Scholar

³⁶ See, for the possible complexities of representation, Gilman, Sander, The Jew's Body (New York and London, 1991).Google Scholar

³⁷ Rose, , 164.Google Scholar

³⁸ Pro and Contra Wagner, trans. Blunden, Allan (London, 1985), 99.Google Scholar

³⁹ Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (Ithaca, NY, 1988), 256.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Kramer, Lawrence, Music as Cultural Practice, 1800–1900 (Berkeley, 1990), 138.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Wapnewski (see n. 11), 91.Google Scholar

⁴² Poag, James F., Wolfram von Eschenbach (New York, 1972), 86.Google Scholar

⁴³ Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, 1990), 1.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States since 1880 (New York, 1985), 5.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Ashman (see n. 11), 12.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Whittall's discussion is on 69–77.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ See Cicora (n. 3 ), 18–19, 25–7, 153.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Showalter (see n. 22), 88.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ See Chailley, Jacques, ‘Parsifal’ de Richard Wagner: Opéra initiatique (Paris, 1979), 23–7.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ See Frazer, J. G., The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, abridged edn (London, 1922), 749.Google Scholar

⁵¹ See, for example, Risé, Claudio, Parsifal: L'iniziazione maschile alia donna e l'amore (Como, 1988);Google ScholarGrunsky, Hans Alfred, ‘ “Parsifal” im Lichte der Tiefenpsychologie’, Programmhefte der Bayreuther Festspiele: Parsifal (1951), 6–28;Google ScholarCanzler, Peter, ‘Parsifal und das Mideiden des Psychoanalytikers’, Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse, ed. Beland, H., Eickhoff, F.-W., Loch, W., et al. , 21 (1987), 33–57; Robert Bosshart's 1930 reading in the Bayreuther Blätter in Cicora, 51.Google Scholar

⁵² Mann, (see n. 38), 120. The two subsequent citations are from pp. 123 and 128–9, respectively.Google Scholar

⁵³ Conrad, (see n. 9), 183.Google Scholar

⁵⁴ Mann, 128. Mann was of course an expert in the representation of syphilis. In Doktor Faustus, the composer Adrian Leverkühn can be seen as a parodic anti-Parsifal who does not resist (indeed seeks out) the snares of the prostitute, Esmeralda, who admits to him that she has the disease. The novel contains long, detailed clinical descriptions of the stages of his syphilis. Like Parsifal, Doktor Faustus is a late work of its creator, and in both there are parallel concerns with Germany society in a state of decay and crisis, though different messages about the possibilities of redemption. But it is the intertextual linking of Kundry with the syphilitic prostitute in this reading of the novel that is particularly suggestive. See also Cicora, Mary A., ‘Wagner Parody in Doktor Faustus’, Germanic Review, 63 (1988), 133–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar