Teacher's Guide Cambridge Pre-U MUSIC Available for teaching ...

Cambridge Pre-U Teacher Guide
Klingsor, but also the suffering of his victim, Amfortas. This helps to bring to life the otherwise
rather passive character of Amfortas, and makes a telling and very human point about the ways in
which praiseworthy aspirations can all too often be compromised. Similarly, the music depicting the
Knights of the Grail as they assemble for the ceremony in the second part of Act I has been thought
by some commentators to convey something of the rather smug self-satisfaction that can often be
characteristic of those who believe themselves to be members of an elite group. While Klingsor’s
motivations are wholly concerned with revenge, it is difficult to feel that the Grail brotherhood is one
that he would necessarily have wanted to join: their strongly diatonic music suggests that they may
have become rather too confident in their role as a chosen people.
The heart of the drama lies in Act II and in the astonishingly perceptive scene between Parsifal and
Kundry. Her attempt to make a parallel between maternal love and sexual love has clear Freudian
implications and some of the music through which this is expressed has a disturbing voluptuousness
that is equally ahead of its time. The stages of Parsifal’s self-discovery, and the increasingly desperate
ploys used by Kundry to try to prevent it, are portrayed in some of Wagner’s most tellingly purposeful
music. However much his view of the relationship between words and music may have changed in
the thirty years since he wrote Oper und Drama, the integration of music with the demands of the
drama is as complete in this scene as in any of his other works.
In a very real sense, however, the music propels the drama of Parsifal far more than either the words
or the stage action, which is often extremely static. Wagner was all too well aware of the intrinsic
problem of a drama in which a great deal of background has to be explained: that had been his
primary motive for extending the Ring back in time from his initial idea of a single drama based on
Siegfried’s death. In Parsifal he had no alternative but to incorporate the background to the story into
the text of Act I, the first part of which is largely taken up by Gurnemanz’s narration of events that
took place in the past. In the absence of virtually all stage action, it is the orchestral music that has to
carry this scene and show the significance of what Gurnemanz describes. This may account for one
of the principal differences between Parsifal and Wagner’s other mature dramas: with only a single
exception the main leitmotifs are all introduced first by the orchestra rather than in a vocal line (the
exception being the ‘pure fool’ motif that belongs with the words of Amfortas’s vision). Not only is
the role of the orchestra therefore more overtly significant in Parsifal than in even the latter stages
of the Ring, but there is a particular quality about the orchestral sound that further distinguishes
Parsifal from Wagner’s earlier works. Before he started the orchestration he had experienced the
distinct acoustic of the Festspielhaus, with its hidden orchestra pit. Parsifal was orchestrated with
this acoustic consciously in mind and the consequence was a much more blended sound, subtly
refined and almost hieratic in effect. Wagner found an exact parallel in the orchestral sonority for the
pronouncedly ritual character of the drama.
Wagner described Parsifal as a Bühnenweihfestspiel – literally, a ‘festival play for the consecration of
the stage’. The stage he had in mind was of course that of the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth and there
is little doubt that he saw its performance there as imparting a quasi-religious consecration to the
theatre itself and, by implication, to the festivals that were its raison d’être. The first performance
took place on 26 July 1882, conducted by Hermann Levi. Under the terms of Wagner’s agreement
with the Munich Court Theatre following the performances of the Ring in 1976, Parsifal was to be
given by performers from Munich, where Levi was the court Kapellmeister. Wagner was therefore
obliged to accept him as the conductor, even though he objected to a Jewish musician directing an
ostensibly Christian drama. There were sixteen performances in total and at the last of them Wagner
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