wagner’s last chorus consecrating space and spectatorship

Cambridge Opera Journal, 17, 1, 1–36 � 2005 Cambridge University Pressdoi:10.1017/S0954586705001965

Wagner’s last chorus: Consecrating space andspectatorship in Parsifal

RYAN MINOR

Abstract: In Opera and Drama Richard Wagner promised to abolish the opera chorus. Althoughthe chorus’s continued appearance in Wagner’s later works seems to belie this pledge, this essayargues that Wagner symbolically made good on his promise in his treatment of the knights inParsifal. For most of the drama, the knights serve as active, even demanding, participants. Yetas the work closes, the knights simply join the off-stage treble voices to reflect on the action.Their reverent spectatorship now parallels that of the intended audience of Bayreuth itself, thetheatrical space that Parsifal – Wagner’s Bühnenweihfestspiel – was written to consecrate. Thisdramaturgical transformation is matched by a musical one, in which the intense chromaticismmarking much of the knights’ earlier music is abandoned for a mediated yet insistentdiatonicism far removed from the chromatic space of the principals. By eliminating the chorusfrom the active sphere of the drama, Wagner counteracted a Nietzschean ideal of communalauthorship ‘from below’ that had previously dominated German theorising of the chorus.

Thus Wagner created a phantasmal worldof sounding space, of visible sound, ofacting schemata, of singing concepts andconceptual tones. He called it Parsifal.Paul Bekker1

Richard Wagner famously avoided the designation of his mature works as ‘operas’.Tristan und Isolde is a ‘Handlung’ ( ‘action’ or ‘drama’ ), Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg

a ‘music drama’, and the three full-length works in the Ring cycle bear thedesignation ‘Bühnenfestspiel’ ( ‘stage festival play’ ).2 Most intriguingly, Parsifal is a‘Bühnenweihfestspiel’ ( ‘stage consecration festival play’ ), whereby the stage to beconsecrated at the work’s 1882 première was that of the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth.Parsifal ’s generic designation has often been rendered into English as ‘sacredfestival drama’, a translation which reflects the work’s unmistakable religiosity butmisrepresents it as well; ‘sacred’ is simply a mistranslation.3 But the ‘consecration’

I would like to thank Richard Cohn, Berthold Hoeckner, Gundula Kreuzer and David Levinfor their insightful comments on earlier versions of this paper.1 Paul Bekker, Richard Wagner: His Life in His Work, trans. M. M. Bozman (New York, 1931), 477.2 Wagner’s thoughts on the term ‘music drama’ as a catch-all generic designation can be

found in his essay ‘U}ber die Benennung ‘‘Musikdrama’’ ’. I cite all of Wagner’s writingsfrom the second edition of his Gesammelte Schriften, 10 vols. (Leipzig, 1888), abbreviatedhereafter as GS. For English translations, PW will refer to Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, trans.William Ashton Ellis, 10 vols. (London, 1892–9; rpt. London, 1995); all translations in thetext are my own, heavily altered from Ellis’s, unless otherwise noted. The ‘music drama’essay is GS, IX, 302–8, and PW, V, 299–304.

3 The question of Parsifal ’s (and Parsifal’s ) religiosity has dogged the work since its première;at the core of the issue is whether ‘representing’ a Christian ritual in the way Wagner doesnecessarily endorses that ritual as a model for the representation itself – that is, whether thereligious overtones of consecration and the undeniably Christian communion rite represented

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which differentiates Parsifal ’s generic designation from that of the Ring works ishardly inconsequential. How we might approach Wagner’s curious locution is thesubject of this essay.

Commentators have proposed a wealth of explanations: consecrating theBayreuth stage transforms dramatic representation into a sacramental event; itsanctifies a place honouring German-ness; it marks out a sacred space promising thesuspension of modernity; its advertised location outside the opera industry promisesthe ultimate cultural commodity; its mixture of theatre and religion creates aChristian correlate to ancient Greek drama.4 These interpretations can be expandedupon, particularly insofar as the work’s consecratory promise functions not only asa rhetorical announcement but as a dramatic process. For Wagner’s nomenclaturesuggests that Parsifal consecrates not in addition to the drama – that is, by dint ofthe quasi-religious subject matter and the obvious correlation between the templeportrayed in the work and the temple of Bayreuth – but through the drama.Performing Parsifal, Wagner claims, does something to theatrical space. Yet whatspecifically in Parsifal could have consecrated the Bayreuth stage? After all, thetheatre had already been dedicated at the laying of its foundation in 1872, and it hadgiven the first full performances of the Ring in 1876. If anything, the theatre’sexclusively Wagnerian pedigree might suggest that its stage was hardly the mostneedy candidate for Wagner’s programme of redemption and renewal. Furthermore,given the fact that Parsifal was intended to be performed only at Bayreuth, and thusthat its consecratory function was seemingly limited to one stage, how are we toaccount for its subsequent performances there? Could the Bayreuth stage beconsecrated over and over? And why might this have been desirable?

The discourse of consecration was not unfamiliar in Wagner’s Germany. It was,in fact, rather common, especially as countless festivals throughout the newlyunified state consecrated monuments to the fledgling nation and its imagined past.5

footnote continued from previous pagein the work are annexed by the work itself. For a compendium of critical response to theissue, see Constantin Floros, ‘Studien zur Parsifal-Rezeption’, in Richard Wagner: ‘Parsifal’, ed.Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn, Musikkonzepte, 25 (Munich, 1982), 14–57.

4 These are the claims, respectively, of: James Treadwell, Interpreting Wagner (New Haven,2003), 232; Hans Mayer, Richard Wagner. Mitwelt und Nachwelt (Stuttgart, 1978), 242; MichaelP. Steinberg, ‘Music Drama and the End of History’, New German Critique, 69 (1996),163–80; Gary Tomlinson, ‘Ghosts in the Machine’, in Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera(Princeton, 1999), 127–42; and Rosemarie König and Kurt Pahlen, Richard Wagner: ‘Parsifal’(Mainz, 1997), 251. One might add Mike Ashman’s entertaining suggestion that theconsecration was simply a monetary gift to Wagner’s heirs, a capital venture as it were onbehalf of Cosima and Siegfried. See Ashman, ‘A Very Human Epic’, ‘Parsifal’: RichardWagner, ENO Opera Guide, 34 (London, 1986), 7. Closest to the reading I propose is PeterHofmann’s claim that the Bühnenweihfestspiel amounts to a ‘utopian liturgy’ meant to coerceritual and aesthetics onto its public, but Hofmann unfortunately gives sparse evidence forthe claim. See his Richard Wagners politische Theologie. Kunst zwischen Revolution und Religion(Munich, 2003), 240.

5 The canonical account remains Thomas Nipperdey’s ‘Nationalidee und Nationaldenkmal inDeutschland im 19. Jahrhundert’, Historische Zeitschrift, 206/3 (1968), 529–85. See also DieterDüding, Peter Friedemann and Paul Münch, eds., Öffentliche Festkultur. Politische Feste inDeutschland von der Aufklärung bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg (Hamburg, 1988).

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One chief participant in these festivals was the chorus, who was entrusted withenvoicing the sentiments of the German public.6 I propose that there is afundamental correlation between the treatment of the chorus in Parsifal and theconsecration which, Wagner insisted, the work performs. As public ceremony,consecration adjudicates both space and residency; to consecrate a building is to layclaim not only to the space itself but the constituency for whom it is intended. Thechoruses who populate the space of Parsifal undergo a marked dramaturgicalchange, and I suggest that their transformation registers the consecration of boththe space internal to the work and that of the theatre in which it was performed.

My account of this consecration involves many choruses: those in Parsifal andseveral from Wagner’s previous works, as well as theoretical ones in the musings ofSchiller, Wagner and Nietzsche. But in many ways it is the story of just one chorus,insofar as these choruses were never conceived as just ‘a’ chorus, but ‘the’ chorus.For Parsifal employs the chorus in a programmatic way – that is, it makes a claimas to what the ideal chorus can and/or should do.7 And ultimately Parsifal whittlesdown a multiplicity of choruses to one. Or, perhaps, none, at least in any dramaticsense: at the end of the work, the chorus is reduced to distant voice alone, and itsethereal A P sounding in the space of Wagner’s consecrated theatre idealises achorus now thoroughly disembodied and displaced from its earlier dramatic role.According to the tenets in Wagner’s dramaturgical and aesthetic tracts, his lastchorus also represents the last chorus; in Parsifal, what is a gain in the consecrationof space is a loss in the communal autonomy of its inhabitants.

Parsifal ’s two choruses

For the most part, Parsifal ’s choruses seem to have minimal bearing on the work’snarrative. The flower maidens that adorn Klingsor’s realm function solely assympathetic decoration: their charms fail to tempt Parsifal, and they presumablyperish with Klingsor at the act’s close. Although the knights of the Grail areparticularly insistent on regular unveilings of the Grail, and it is for the survival oftheir Grail community that recovering the spear and healing Amfortas gain suchurgency, neither the knights nor the mysterious treble voices heard ‘aus der Höhe’( ‘from the heights’ ) have much direct effect on the plot. There is a notablecontradiction, however, between the insignificance of the chorus in furthering the

6 On the role of the chorus in these festivals, see my ‘National Memory, Public Music:Commemoration and Consecration in Nineteenth-Century German Choral Music’, Ph.D.diss. (University of Chicago, 2005). See also Friedhelm Brusniak and Dietmar Klenke, eds.,‘Heil deutschem Wort und Sang!’ Nationalidentität und Gesangskultur in der Deutschen Geschichte –Tagungsbericht Feuchtwangen 1994, Feuchtwanger Beiträge zur Musikforschung, 1 (Augsburg,1995).

7 The function of the opera chorus in the nineteenth century remains under-researched,especially with regard to the German repertory. Italian opera has fared better: see MarkusEngelhardt, Die Chöre in den frühen Opern Giuseppe Verdis (Tutzing, 1988); Philip Gossett,‘Becoming a Citizen: The Chorus in Risorgimento Opera’, this journal, 2 (1990), 41–64; andJames Parakilas, ‘Political Representation and the Chorus in Nineteenth-Century Opera’,19th-Century Music, 16 (1992), 181–202.

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action and the significant amount of time it spends singing. As we shall see, thechorus’s minimal dramatic contribution holds relatively true to Wagner’s treatiseOpera and Drama, whereas its steady vocal presence violates the treatise’s tenetsaltogether. In fact, it is in the chorus’s music that its unimportance as a dramaticparticipant is ultimately claimed as its supreme virtue. But such a claim is also oneof contention, with two opposing ideals of the chorus represented by the knights ofthe Grail and the disembodied treble voices which periodically sound from theheights of the temple’s dome.8 In a telling detail that illustrates this contended visionof choral agency, the knights’ chorus veers off from the central musical narrative,whereas the treble voices from above strictly adhere to it.

Example 1 shows the dome chorus singing the opening bars from the Act Iprelude, most notably the rising ‘communion’ motif in bars 1-2. Both the motif andits accompanying A flat major often appear with reference to the Grail, and theirlink to the act of communion is established in Example 1, as the unseen voices singthe motif, a cappella, to Christ’s words: ‘Nehmet hin meinen Leib, nehmet hin meinBlut, um uns’rer Liebe Willen!’ ( ‘Take my body, take my blood, in token of our

8 Wagner’s division of the treble voices across various heights in the dome is a nice touch,suggesting levels of ethereal presence, but it is unintelligible in performance; the effect issimply one of treble voices from above. The inclusion of tenor voices in some of the treblechorus’s music (at the same pitch level ) is similarly unintelligible.

Ex. 1: Parsifal, Act I, bars 1440–45.

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love!’ ). This later, texted phrase seems to have been composed early in the work’sgenesis, and it was upon this music from the Act I communion scene that Wagnerbased the prelude.9 The sung recitation of Christ’s words not only provides anexplanatory text for the opening musical motifs of the drama (as such, it is a classicinstance of Wagner’s leitmotivic technique); it also links the memory of the text andits ritualised recitation to the uncovering of the Grail, for it is only after Amfortasgrudgingly agrees to have it uncovered that the temple is illuminated and thecommunion text is sung.

The repetition of the prelude’s opening motifs by the unseen chorus inExample 1 accords with Gurnemanz’s famous proclamation to Parsifal that ‘timebecomes space’ in the Grail dome.10 The free-floating sense of timelessnesscharacterising the beginning and end of the phrase, the exact repetition at the closeof the act of music from the prelude, and the recitation of biblical quotation allcontribute to a sense of time suspended or looping back on itself. Time becomesspace as a distant event ( the Last Supper) is made present in and through the sacredspace of the temple. Yet what can account for the third bar, when a sudden fall toC minor and strong metric accents interrupt the otherwise floating exposition of theA flat major tonic? Here, it would seem, time reasserts itself with a vengeance. Ina literal sense, the third bar quite firmly establishes a sense of metric time. Moreover,leitmotivic analysis has named this sudden descent into C minor ‘Amfortas’swound’, or the ‘Schmerzensfigur’; as Wagner told Cosima upon playing the motif

9 See William Kinderman, ‘Die Entstehung der ‘‘Parsifal’’-Musik’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft,52 (1995), 66–97, especially 88–91. It is interesting to note that the two phrases werereversed in the sketches: initially, the first phrase was ‘Nehmet hin mein Blut’. One canonly speculate why Wagner changed the order; perhaps mentioning the blood first mightdraw too close a connection between Christ’s holy blood and the decidedly unholy woundof the bleeding Amfortas. Wagner’s take on the communion ritual was in any event unique– in his version, blood became wine and flesh bread rather than the other way around. OnWagner’s communion theology, see Christina von Braun, ‘Wagner: A Poisonous Drink’,trans. Anja Belz, New German Critique, 69 (1996), 37–51.

10 This utterance has spawned a virtual cottage industry of Wagnerian exegesis. Almost equallycited is Lévi-Strauss’s suggestion that Gurnemanz’s words ‘are probably the most profounddefinition that anyone has ever offered for myth’. ‘From Crétien de Troyes to RichardWagner’, in The View from Afar, trans. Phoebe Hoss and Joachim Neugroschel (New York,1985), 219. See most recently Hans Melderis, Raum – Zeit – Mythos. Richard Wagner und diemodernen Naturwissenschaften (Hamburg, 2001), for an ambitious, if vague, attempt to framethe statement in the terms of Einsteinian relativity. On a less exalted plane, Hans-JoachimBauer has pointed out that the time/space convergence is highlighted musically by anamalgamation of motifs in the transformation music which follows; see his Wagners ‘Parsifal’.Kriterien der Kompositionstechnik (Munich, 1977), 133.

Ex. 2: Parsifal, Act III, bars 1092–94.


for her, ‘Amfortas’s agonies are included therein’.11 The fall of a fifth followed bythe ascent of a minor third reappears throughout the work, most notably withreference to the wound or Amfortas’s loss of chastity and his spear. Amfortas’sfailure to withstand Kundry’s and Klingsor’s temptations has introduced time – and,subsequently, decay – into the hermetic space of the Grail and its rituals. The Cminor wound within the A flat major Grail music is not just a Leittonwechsel inneo-Riemannian terms; it is also, in David Lewin’s enviable pun, a Leid-ton, a symbolof suffering and the wound that will not heal.12 And as analysts as early as Lorenzhave suggested, it is the motivic work of Parsifal to close the wound, to prevent theprecipitous drop from the communion theme into the Schmerzensfigur – and torestore to the space of the Grail its amorphous timelessness.13 Indeed, at the end ofthe work (Ex. 2), as Parsifal heals Amfortas’s wound, unveils the Grail, and offersredemption to the stricken community, the communion motif is heard without thewound in its side; the ascent from the submediant continues past the upper A Poctave to a B P over a dominant chord, thus linking the communion motif with theso-called ‘Dresden Amen’ motif. Christian ritual (communion) and communalexpression (the Amen motif ) have been joined.

That Parsifal will be the agent of this redemption is not much of a surprise; hisentrance immediately followed the treble voices’ statement of the Torenspruch

( ‘prophecy motif’ ) foretelling the arrival of a pure fool, and Gurnemanz unwittinglydrives the point home by calling the young intruder a fool. But at the Act Icommunion, Parsifal’s ‘time’ has not yet come. Just as Amfortas’s wound can onlybe healed by the spear that inflicted it, so, too, can the decaying temporality broughton by the wound only be healed by a redemptive temporality marking the spear’seventual return: only the future can return Monsalvat to its timeless past. But for thetime being, the Grail realm is caught in a tricky loop: time becomes space, yet theincreasingly pallid health of that space can only invest its hope in the promise oftime itself.14 Until that happens, though, the attempt is made to maintain the ritualsreflecting Monsalvat’s earlier, timeless, spatiality. The treble voices ‘aus der Höhe’literally embody a sense of space in their positioning above the main stage. As notedabove, the music which they repeat – the floating timelessness of the communionand spear motifs – is itself spatially conceived in its arched shape and relativefreedom from a strong metric pulse. Similarly, exact repetition itself – of theprelude’s music or of Christ’s words – confers a sense of space in its denial of

11 Cosima Wagner, Die Tagebücher, ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack, 2 vols.(Munich, 1982), II, 1065.

12 See David Lewin, ‘Some Notes on Analyzing Wagner: The Ring and Parsifal ’, 19th-CenturyMusic, 16 (1992), 49–58, here 56.

13 Alfred Lorenz, Das Geheimnis der Form bei Richard Wagner, 4 vols. (Berlin, 1924–33; rpt.,Tutzing, 1966), IV, 13–14; see also Kinderman, ‘Die Entstehung’.

14 Parsifal’s redemptive promise has been fertile ground for similar Lacanian readings. MichelPoizat argues persuasively that the Grail itself functions as a kind of lost object, and SlavojCižek sees in the healing power of the spear a metaphor for desire itself. See Michel Poizat,The Angel’s Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera, trans. Arthur Denner (Ithaca, 1992),192, and Slavoj Cižek, ‘ ‘‘There is no sexual relationship’’: Wagner as Lacanian’, New GermanCritique, 69 (1996), 7–35.

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time and change. But perhaps the most compelling link between this chorus’srepetitions and spatiality is simply the exact correlation between its music and themusical narrative of the Grail itself. The treble voices merely repeat the musical-dramatic narrative established thus far; in singing both the ‘timeless’ music of thecommunion and spear themes as well as the ‘time-bound’ C minor wound ofweakness and decay in its middle, their music is literally the music of the sacredand desecrated Grail space itself: it has recorded and faithfully re-presents thesum state of the Grail realm’s past and present. It is music as space and of its ownspace.

The knights, on the other hand, present a strikingly different reflection of theGrail lair. Example 3 shows the first utterance of the knights on the communionmotif. Starting with a faster tempo, the knights are accompanied by dotted marchrhythms in the orchestra. Gone are many of the off-beats and tied notes of theoriginal communion theme; the knights sing it strictly on beat (bar 1528),straying from the duple stresses only to add syncopations (bars 1530, 1532)which serve to strengthen the beat rather than displace it. (For the première,Wagner insisted that the music here sound kräftig.15 ) Most notably, the knightsseem not to suffer from Amfortas’s wound. Their lack of concern for hissuffering will be shown poignantly in the third act, but already in the Act Icommunion it seems that the knights are entirely unconcerned about the

15 Heinrich Porges notated Wagner’s instructions during the rehearsal process; see ‘DasOrchester muß wie die unsichtbare Seele sein’. Richard Wagners Bemerkungen zum ‘Parsifal’Aufgezeichnet während der Proben und Aufführungen 1882 von Heinrich Porges, ed. Rüdiger Pohl(Berlin, 2002), 94.



‘Schmerzensfigur’ in Amfortas’s side, provided he perform his ritual duty. In bar1532 the knights not only avoid what would be a drop to G minor (as the treblevoices had done in bars 1501–1505); they also seem to savour its absence byjumping down to the expected G, but doing so on a playful syncopation,preceding it with a prolonged high E P, and following it with an A P ( rather thanAO) which further emphasises the E flat major tonic and the absence of itsLeid/t-Tonwechsel.16 The end of the phrase is salt in Amfortas’s wound – a fallingfifth, to be sure, but in the relative major. The knights acknowledge Amfortas’ssuffering, but they pay it little heed.

Moreover, the knights’ text suggests an entirely different conception of thecommunion rite:

Nehmet vom Brot,wandelt es kühnin Leibes Kraft und Stärke,treu bis zum Tod,fest jedem Müh’nzu wirken des Heilands Werke!Nehmet vom Wein,wandelt ihn neuzu Lebens feurigem Blute,froh im Verein,brudergetreuzu kämpfen mit seligem Mute!

[Take from the bread, / boldly change it / into bodily strength and power, / true untodeath, / firm in every labour / to do the work of Heaven! / Take from the wine, / changeit anew / into the fervent blood of life, / gleeful as one, / faithful as brothers / to fight withblessed courage!]

The treble chorus, as we have seen, repeated Christ’s words as it repeated thecommunion motif. By the knights’ second verse, however, their textual focuschanges from theological doctrine to communal celebration: ‘true unto death’;‘gleeful as one’; ‘faithful as brothers’. The references to brothers and associationallife ( ‘froh im Verein’ ), together with the martial imagery, march rhythms, andscoring for unison men’s chorus, conjure a very different image of the Grailbrotherhood: that of the Liedertafel, or the myriad other forms of men’s socialsinging clubs which so prospered in nineteenth-century Germany. Even thereference to the communion wine ( ‘the fervent blood of life’ ) seems to equivocate,evoking both religious doctrine and the sort of drinking songs popular forMännerchor.

16 It is true that this section is prepared by an intermediary one for the treble voices in bars1493–1526 ( immediately after the Grail is reveiled) that to some degree anticipates the toneof the knights’ music: the simple bass line, repeated orchestral chords (reminiscent of thePilgrims’ Chorus), and increased rhythmic regularity serve to leaven the communion themein a manner my reading of the work would associate more with the knights. But the treblemusic retains all the same the tell-tale ‘Schmerzensfigur’ in line with its earlier music, and ingeneral its increased liveliness can be associated with the ritual it is describing but nottaking part in – that is, the knights’ communion.

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If the treble voices issuing from the dome function as symbols of the fracturedGrail space, perhaps the knights on stage function as agents of time. Thecontemporary references in the knights’ text and music in Example 3 place themfirmly into historical time. And their lack of interest or sympathy concerningAmfortas and his wound suggest that the knights, though clearly importantmembers of the Grail community, have become disconnected from the Grail spaceand the affairs of its patriarch. Their only concern is that he continue to performcommunion. Though unsympathetic to the wound, they are themselves its mostdamning product: avatars of time, out-of-sync congregants who sing not theinfected, labile music of ruler and realm but their own transformation of it.Paradoxically, their lively march figures as the music of decay; its strong verve marksa communal vitality at odds with the prevailing sanctity – and sickness – definingMonsalvat. Without his spear, Amfortas can suture together neither his wound norhis knights.

After the march, the knights and the unseen choristers sing together the Grailmotif and the Dresden Amen. It is a rare moment, but one which prefigures the endof the work. The effect is one of elevation, symbolic of the uniting of earthly andheavenly spheres central to the act of communion: the knights begin the phrase andit slowly ascends through the treble voices – and within them, the dome itself –before ending on a prolonged cadence in the sopranos. But Amfortas’s wound hasbegun to bleed afresh as a result of the unveiling. The knights leave the templewithout comment. The dome chorus, however, continues its homily: ‘Selig imGlauben!’ ( ‘Blessed in faith!’ ).

What are we to make of these two choruses? Perhaps, as I have suggested, they canbe seen as the constitutive forces of time and space, those two categories which cometogether at the Grail temple. But more literally, we can see in them two models of thedramatic chorus, for they behave in very different ways. The knights act upon andsing about their own interests and needs. Their insistence upon a communion ritestressing communal bonds over religious doctrine; their minimal reliance upon, oreven concern for, their leader and his amorous foibles; and their strongly differen-tiated musical language, emphasising convivial marches over languorous decay – allthis points to the knights’ essential autonomy. Their function as an independentcharacter in the drama is highlighted by their radical alteration of the music otherwiseassociated with the Grail. Quite the opposite is the case with the treble choristers,who simply repeat text or music, such as the fool prophesy or the communion textand motifs. Their invisible, androgynous voice differs drastically from the humanknights on stage. Echoing prophecy or commentary on holy ritual, their contributionsclarify or accompany on-stage action but take no active part in it. Indeed, theirrecitation of religious dogma during the communion rite and their repetition of thephrase ‘Selig im Glauben’ at the end of the act, after all the characters have left thestage, have little effect on the drama’s participants. Yet it seems unlikely that theirutterances are directed towards the stage at all, but rather to the audience. The voicesfrom the temple dome function somewhat like the chorus in Greek tragedy, supplyingbackground information to the audience ( the doctrine behind communion) orreflecting on the message of the drama (the homily sung at the end of the act ).


One chorus acts, one recites; one sings of itself, one sings of others. That bothchoruses sing music based on the same theme underscores their essential unity andtheir essential difference: the knights make the communion motif their own,whereas the voices in the dome repeat it unchanged. In the dramatic work he knewwould be his last, Wagner presented two models of the chorus.17 And as we will seein the third act, it also seems that he felt compelled to make a decision between thetwo. Not surprisingly, Wagner published his thoughts on the proper use of a chorus,and it is to these ruminations and their fraught relationship to his music dramas thatI now turn. Seen from Wagner’s dramaturgical prescriptions, the question of whichchorus will be representative of the Grail at the end of Parsifal is ultimately aquestion of whether any chorus has a place in Wagner’s consecrated space – eitherthe Grail dome or the Bayreuth stage.

The chorus as visionary and as symptom

The question was not new, and to understand the stakes involved requires a briefsurvey of the form and function accorded to the dramatic chorus by some of thenumerous thinkers and dramatists in nineteenth-century Germany who contem-plated the issue. In 1803, for instance, when Schiller published Die Braut von Messina

(a work whose double chorus may have influenced Wagner’s dual processions forthe knights in Act III ), he prefaced the drama with a foreword explaining hisinclusion of a chorus in the work.18 Around the same time he wrote to a friend:‘Concerning the chorus, I see that I had to show in it a doubled character, namelya generally human one when it finds itself in quiet reflection and a specific one whenit gets passionate and becomes an acting person’.19 Schiller’s division of the chorus’scharacter into the spheres of reflection and passion maps onto the two choruses ofParsifal, whereby the voices ‘aus der Höhe’ primarily reflect on the drama, and theknights – particularly in the third act – function as a fully ‘passionate’, dramaticcharacter. The division also points to a separation of action and reflection whichWagner would later theorise in his writings on the role of the chorus and theorchestra in his music dramas.

Somewhat similar to Wagner’s ‘invisible orchestra’ – and the invisible treblechorus in Parsifal – Schiller’s use of choral reflection functions as a division of labourset up to aid the spectator. The chorus leaves the ‘narrow circle’ of the plot to focuson its reflective contribution, which ‘cleanses the tragic poem by detachingreflection from action’.20 Schiller’s reflective chorus thus enables the spectator tolose himself in the passions of the drama without letting those passions and their

17 Even as early as 1864 Wagner conceived of Parsifal as his last work, although at the time hethought Die Sieger might precede it. See the letter outlining his plans in Richard Wagner anMathilde Maier, ed. Hans Scholz (Leipzig, 1930), 159.

18 On the similarities between the two works, see Dieter Borchmeyer, Richard Wagner: Theoryand Theatre, trans. Stewart Spencer (Oxford, 1991), 384.

19 Letter to Christian Gottfried Körner, in Friedrich Schiller, Dramen IV, ed. Matthias Luserke,Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden (Frankfurt am Main, 1996), V, 693.

20 Schiller, ‘U}ber den Gebrauch des Chors in der Tragödie’, in Schiller, Dramen IV, 288.

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meaning go uncontemplated, which would effectively entail a surrender to thosepassions: ‘By keeping the parts separate and entering between the passions with itscalming meditation, the chorus gives us back our freedom, which would be lost inthe storm of affects’.21 But the reflective chorus not only gives back to the spectatora freedom from reflective duties; it also allows the drama itself a poetic freedom.Just as the chorus’s separation of reflection from the plot serves to cleanse thetragedy, so, too, will the chorus – a ‘living wall’ – allow a clean break from the realworld by ‘enclosing’ the tragedy and ‘openly and honestly declaring war onnaturalism in art’.22

Thus the reflective chorus was not simply an internal device serving the affectiveequilibrium of the spectator: it was also the final step in Schiller’s ‘war on naturalism’.Aiding both spectator and dramatist/polemicist, the chorus as theorised in Schiller’spreface comes to function, as Nietzsche later put it, as ‘the serving chorus’.23 YetSchiller also claimed that this utilitarian chorus was alive. And although his termsseem to accord the chorus a second-class status, placing its reflective function wellbelow the ‘freedom’ of the audience and its affective engagement with the drama, thechorus provided all the same a vision of collective humanity: ‘The chorus is itself notan individual, but rather a general concept; yet this concept is represented by asensually powerful mass which impresses itself onto the senses through its all-consuming presence’.24 Schiller’s contention that the massed chorus could also beunderstood as a singular entity – a ‘general concept’ – would find enthusiasticconfirmation throughout the century, as German enquiries into the nature of Greektragedy and its choruses sought to balance the claims of communal good andindividual rights as they played out in the chorus’s simultaneous multiplicity andsingularity.25 For example, Friedrich Heimsoeth, a musician and professor ofphilology in Bonn, wrote a book in 1841 dedicated almost entirely to the question ofwhether any distinction should be made between the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ with whichGreek choruses alternately spoke; he concluded that there was no distinction.26

Yet in many ways it was precisely this aspect of the chorus that Wagner criticised.The sight of an ‘impressive’ mass as Schiller conceived it was just the thing, Wagnerclaimed, that illustrated the inherent lack of drama in modern opera:

Even the chorus as it has been employed thus far in opera, and according to the importanceattached to it there in even the most favourable cases, will have to vanish from our drama;it, too, is only vital and convincing in drama when it is completely dispossessed of its trivial

21 Schiller, 289.22 Schiller, 285.23 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1967), 65.24 Schiller, ‘U}ber den Gebrauch’, 288.25 Contemporary studies on the matter include: Christain Muff, U} ber den Vortrag der chorischen

Partien bei Aristophanes (Halle, 1872); and Richard Arnoldt, Die Chorpartien bei Aristophanes(Leipzig, 1873) and Die chorische Technik des Euripides (Halle, 1878); for a recent perspectiveaddressing the chorus’s dual constitution as singular and plural voice, see Felix Budelmann,‘The Chorus: Shared Survival’, The Language of Sophocles: Communality, Communication andInvolvement (New York, 2000), 195–272.

26 Friedrich Heimsoeth, ‘Vom Vortrage des Chores in den griechischen Dramen’, Beiträge zurrichtigen Lectüre der griechischen Dramen (Bonn, 1841).


pronouncements en masse. A mass can never interest, only merely astound, us: only exactlydifferentiated individuals can captivate our sympathies.27

These are strong words coming from the creator of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg andits monolithic – and ( in)famous – chorus of the Volk. Despite Wagner’s apparentrelapse from his dramaturgical ideals, however, they do form an important part ofthe 1852 treatise Opera and Drama, in which he laid out his vision of the music dramaof the future. He wrote: ‘The massive chorus of our modern opera is nothing elsebut the decorative machinery of the theatre set up for moving and singing, the mutesplendor of scenery converted to moving noise’.28 The chorus was a symptom of allthat ailed modern opera: lacking any dramatic significance itself, the chorus simplyprovided local colour and contributed to the spectacle. But since Wagner sawmodern opera as consisting only of spectacle to start with – that is, scenic and vocalspectacle had long overtaken the drama – the chorus, initially employed to supportthe main characters, had paradoxically become constitutive of the entire work.Wagner’s ruminations are particularly fanciful:

Decoration, costume, and the moveable surroundings charged with filling them out – theopera chorus was finally the main thing, the opera itself. [. . .] Thus the circulation of thedrama was executed to its deadly ignominy: the individual personalities into which thechorus of the Volk had once compressed itself blurred into variegated, massive surround-ings without midpoint. As these surroundings, the entire massive scenic apparatus ofmachines, canvas, and bright clothing in the opera calls to us as voices of the chorus: ‘I amI, and there is no opera besides me!’29

What Wagner objects to above all is the chorus’s change in function, a changethat seems to extend beyond authorial control. In the absence of a composer ableor willing to replace scenic and virtuosic spectacle with true drama, the chorustransformed its naturally secondary role into ‘the main thing’, and this transforma-tion left it without a defining centre. In losing its ‘midpoint’, this ‘surroundingcapable of moving’ threatened to colonise the entire stage. It not only turnedindividuals into mass spectacle; it also turned spectacle into the chorus, as the scenicapparatus began to proclaim its autonomy ‘as voices of the chorus’. The modernchorus had swollen out of control: it was monstrous, indefinable and stubborn. Asfar as Wagner was concerned, there was only one solution, and that was thedissolution of the chorus. He was not interested in Schiller’s carefully balanceddialectic between the chorus and the audience, or between the chorus’s ‘impressive’mass and the singular voice with which it spoke. In other words, Wagner was notinterested in reviving the Greek chorus, but transforming it.

It is all the more striking, therefore, that he sought to ground the dramaturgicalprescriptions for his music drama in Attic tragedy and its use of the chorus, and thatthe unseen treble voices in Parsifal seem to function precisely as such a chorus. InWagner’s imaginings of ancient practice, the chorus stood essentially in the middleof the public in the Greek amphitheatres, where its songs and dances ‘rapt the

27 Richard Wagner, Oper und Drama, GS, IV, 162, and PW, II, 303–4.28 Wagner, GS, III, 270, and PW, II, 63.29 Wagner, GS, III, 269, and PW, II, 61–2.

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nation of spectators into a state of clairvoyance in which the hero [. . .] had all theimport of a ghostly vision’.30 For Wagner, this vision of the hero stemmed fromthe chorus itself – ‘the tragic hero of the Greeks stepped out of the chorus’ – andit was this element of self-generation that bound the artwork to its audience.31 Butin Wagner’s eyes it was also the reason the chorus was superfluous: if the trueartwork comes from the Volk as a collective vision of the spectators, why should theaudience have to cease being spectators and, in the form of the chorus, jointhe drama on stage? Eliminating the chorus, Wagner claimed, would not alienate theartwork from the spectators, but rather return it to them and them to it.

Although Wagner for his part was keen on transforming the chorus’s role ascreative visionary from an active to a symbolic one, the idea that the chorus couldproduce a communal vision in its performance of an artwork found resonance inwriters more sympathetic to the modern chorus.32 Friedrich Nietzsche, writingseveral years later under the influence of Opera and Drama, followed Wagner’sconception of the drama as a ‘vision’ of the choral spectator. For him, the chorusin Greek tragedy ‘is the only ‘‘reality’’ and generates the vision’, while it is itself, inturn, a vision of the spectators.33 Nietzsche takes as his starting point Schiller’sformulation of the chorus as the ‘living wall’ protecting tragedy from the realworld.34 But he goes further than Schiller and Wagner in his estimation of thechorus’s significance for the creation of Attic tragedy. For Nietzsche there wasultimately no dividing the chorus, the spectators and the work of art. The on-stagevision was nothing less than the fulfilment of the spectators’ communal rapture;tragedy was irreducibly rooted in ‘the Dionysian chorus which ever anew dischargesitself in an Apollinian world of images’.35

Yet where Nietzsche saw a closed economy, neatly ‘discharging’ Dionysianimpulse into Apollinian image, Wagner saw a leak. The chorus had become a figureof excess; communal vision failed to discharge completely into drama, leavingbehind traces of choral spectacle unhampered by a defining ‘midpoint’. No longerrepresentative of the Volk, to which every true work of art could trace its roots, theopera chorus had become a mass, ‘the material remains [U} berreste] of the Volk’.36 Incontrast to the modern opera chorus, Wagner applauded what he saw asShakespeare’s dissolution of the chorus into principal characters acting only inaccordance with their ‘individual necessity’.37 Since individual necessity was the onlynatural basis for drama, any attempt to reinstate the chorus – a group which by

30 Wagner, ‘U}ber Schauspieler und Sänger’, GS, IX, 197, and PW, V, 196.31 Wagner, Oper und Drama, GS, III, 268, and PW, II, 60.32 For a fascinating – if extremely disturbing – panegyric on Bayreuth’s relationship to a

mythical German Volk written during the Nazi years, see Grete Holle, ‘Wachsen undWerden der Bayreuther Idee: Nach Wagners Schriften und Briefen’, Diss. (WestfälischeWilhelms-Universität zu Münster, 1941).

33 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 63, 64. It is unfortunate that Nietzsche does not address thechorus in his later writings, particularly those after his ‘break’ with Wagner.

34 Nietzsche, 61.35 Nietzsche, 64.36 Wagner, Oper und Drama, GS, III, 270, and PW, II, 63.37 Wagner, GS, III, 268, and PW, II, 60–1.


definition could not represent just one individual – was a retrenchment whichthreatened the integrity of the (music) drama. In its place, Wagner saw the voice ofthe chorus naturally replaced by that constituent of modern opera which hadassumed the chorus’s literal position before the stage as well: the orchestra.38 Nowable to retreat into the Volk, the chorus could bequeath its ‘emotional significancefor the drama’ to the orchestra.39

This ‘development’ of the chorus can easily be understood within the context ofWagner’s revolutionary operatic reforms, to which it undoubtedly belongs andwhich Opera and Drama serves to announce. But these reforms do more thanprefigure the Ring cycle and the birth of the music drama: they also reflect back onWagner’s operatic output thus far. As Egon Voss has argued, the dramaturgicalprescriptions in Opera and Drama have as much to do with working through thelegacy of these earlier works as with making detailed predictions for those tocome.40 And this working-through may have required the sacrificial ( if onlytemporary) offering of those elements in the earlier operas that seemed toosymptomatic of the operatic tradition Wagner wanted to escape.

Despite the relatively traditional employment of the chorus in the three‘festival-worthy’ works which preceded the treatise, however, there is nonetheless awealth of dramatic material for the chorus which has very little to do with facelessmasses or scenic spectacle. It is difficult to conceive of the confrontation betweenthe Dutch and Norwegian ship crews in Act III of Der fliegende Holländer as anythingbut a (and perhaps the ) dramatic high-point of the work: composed before most ofthe opera, its battle between an emaciated, bourgeois diatonicism and the powerfuldraw of a phantasmic chromaticism demonstrates in starkly dramatic terms theimpulses underlying Senta’s coming sacrifice.41 The chorus in Lohengrin is frequentlyentrusted to assess the characters and events surrounding it.42 Indeed, in the originalending to his ‘Mitteilung an meine Freunde’, Wagner himself boasted that he hadtreated the chorus as real individuals in Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, and in 1871 hewrote that in Lohengrin ‘the choruses are not like those in most other operas [. . .]they act just like the principles’.43 Joachim Raff’s 1854 essay ‘Die Wagnerfrage’ wasextremely complimentary in its handling of the chorus in Lohengrin precisely for this

38 One of the few writers to take up Wagner’s choral dramaturgy was Karl Heckel; see his( largely derivative) ‘Der antike Chor und das moderne Orchester’, Richard Wagner-Jahrbuch, 3(Berlin, 1908), 61–73.

39 Wagner, Oper und Drama, GS, IV, 190–1, and PW, II, 335–6.40 Egon Voss, ‘Die Chöre im Lohengrin vor dem Hintergrund von Oper und Drama’, in ‘Wagner

und kein Ende’. Betrachtungen und Studien (Mainz, 1996), 82–90.41 On this moment, as well as for one of the few considerations of the Wagnerian chorus, see

Werner Breig, ‘Zur Geschichte des Chores im musikdramatischen Werk Wagners’, BayreutherFestspiele 1989. Programmheft VI. ‘Götterdämmerung’ (Bayreuth, 1989), 1–22. See also AnnaKaira, ‘Die Chöre in den frühen Opern von Richard Wagner’, Diss. (Universität Bayreuth,2002).

42 See Berthold Hoeckner, ‘Elsa Screams’, in Programming the Absolute: Nineteenth-Century GermanMusic and the Hermeneutics of the Moment (Princeton, 2002), 115–54.

43 Both documents are reproduced in Richard Wagner Sämtliche Werke Band 16. Chorwerke miteiner Dokumentation zum Thema: Wagner und der Chor und zu den Chorwerken Wagners, ed.Reinhard Kapp (Mainz, 1993), 88 and 129.

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reason.44 Furthermore, if one views the Valkyries in Die Walküre as a small chorus(aside from Brünnhilde, they lack any internal differentiation), only two of the sevenmusic dramas which followed the treatise – Das Rheingold and Siegfried – lack achorus. Perhaps the chorus’s reappearance in Wagner’s later works does notnecessarily signal a retrenchment as much as it points to elements of Wagner’sconception of the chorus in Opera and Drama which did not entirely compute, eitherinternally or with reference to his earlier works.45 Maybe only half rhetorically didHanslick, in his review of the Munich première of Das Rheingold, ask: ‘Would achorus of the Nibelungs schlepping gold or the gods finally, triumphantly movinginto Valhalla be undramatic?’46

It is thus tempting to read the return of the chorus in Wagner’s later musicdramas as a refutation of the programme he outlined in the treatise.47 The chorusserving as Hagen’s minions in Götterdämmerung differentiates itself in no way from ageneric chorus of vassals; at its first appearance, it has little else to do than singHagen’s name repeatedly.48 And, if anything, the imposing chorus of the Volk

closing Die Meistersinger seems to reinstate, rather than remove, the undifferentiatedmassed chorus. It is difficult to imagine a stronger contrast to the ‘individualnecessity’ Wagner claimed was the root of the Gesamtkunstwerk than the obedientchorus assembled on the festival meadow for Die Meistersinger ’s final scene – asArthur Groos sees it, a ‘Volk approvingly echoing whatever their [sic] prescientspokesman can be made to represent or oppose’.49

Yet if Wagner was unwilling or unable to follow the reforms as radically as he hadoutlined in Opera and Drama, the issues he grappled with – essentially thoseaddressed by Schiller and Nietzsche – continued to inform the choruses in hisworks. The question of how and whether a chorus could take part in the action, andthe related issue of whether the chorus spoke as one or as a multiplicity, lay at theheart of the choruses composed after the treatise. And perhaps the spectre of thechorus without a defining centre, which Wagner so memorably evoked in his image

44 Die Wagnerfrage. Kritisch beleuchtet von Joachim Raff. Erster Theil. Wagner’s letzte künstlerischeKundgebung im ‘Lohengrin’ (Braunschweig, 1854).

45 And even Siegfried, in which the absence of a chorus has been taken as a symbol of its‘advanced’ dramaturgical purity, contained choruses as late as 1852, after the publication ofOpera and Drama. See Breig, ‘Zur Geschichte des Chores’, 16–18. On Siegfried as Wagner’s‘most modern and advanced score’, partly due to its lack of a chorus, see John Deathridge,‘Wagner and the Post-Modern’, this journal, 4 (1992), 143–61, here 152.

46 Eduard Hanslick, Die moderne Oper – Kritiken und Studien (Berlin, 1875), 311.47 Such a claim would concur with John Deathridge’s argument that the later works call into

question Wagner’s earlier commitment to revolutionary progress. See Deathridge, ‘Wagnerand the Post-Modern’.

48 Wagner insisted to Cosima that Hagen’s chorus consisted of ‘individual vassals who appearfrom the farmsteads nearby’, but that detail is not evident in performance; nor does itchange the impression that Hagen has summoned a faceless group of yes-men to do hisbidding. See Borchmeyer, Richard Wagner, 166.

49 At the risk of dogmatism, it should be pointed out that ‘Volk’ is singular, not plural;indeed, the concept’s singularity – its refusal of multiplicity – was precisely its selling pointfor conservative Germans such as Wagner. Arthur Groos, ‘Constructing Nuremberg:Typological and Proleptic Communities in Die Meistersinger’, 19th-Century Music, 16 (1992),18–34, here 33.


of the stage sets turned into shouting choral spectacle, continued to haunt him; theworks that followed the treatise allow the chorus an increasingly diminishedsovereignty. Indeed, Wagner may never have made good on his claim to abolish theopera chorus entirely, but the increased choral presence in his later works,culminating in Parsifal, is also matched by a nearly stultifying grip on the chorus’smusical and dramatic autonomy.

From spectacle to spectatorship

Following the demise of Klingsor – and perhaps his small chorus of flower maidensas well – Act III of Parsifal returns to the Grail temple and with it the two chorusesfrom Act I. The differences between the two choruses grow even stronger in the lastact, as the knights become increasingly independent participants in the drama.Predictably, the mysterious treble voices have little role in most of the third act,since their earlier utterances were for the most part a function of the communionrite and the repetition of the prophecy: the Torenspruch is rendered unnecessary byParsifal’s arrival at the beginning of the act, and communion does not take placeuntil the very end. But if the dome chorus’s silence suggests some inside knowledge,the knights have not been privy to it. Parsifal’s eminent return and the redemptionof Monsalvat have been a foregone conclusion for some time, but, perhaps due toAmfortas’s inability to carry out his office (Gurnemanz refers to the ‘leaderlessknighthood’ ), the knights are the last to learn of it. Since Parsifal’s departure,their lot has worsened considerably; as Gurnemanz tells Parsifal, ‘anxiety grew todirest need’. In a sense, this ‘direst need’ is the very picture of a chorus without itscentre.

Example 4 shows the last half of the funeral march, in which two processions ofknights – one carrying Amfortas, the other the deceased Titurel – interrogate eachother, then lament that Amfortas’s weakness has killed Titurel and is harming themas well:

First procession

Wer wehrt’ ihm des Grales Huld zu erschauen?

Second procession

Den dort ihr geleitet, der sündige Hüter.

First procession

Wir geleiten ihn heut’, weil heut’ noch einmal,zum letzten Male,will des Amtes er walten.Ach, zum letzten Mal!

Second procession

Wehe! Wehe! Du Hüter des Grals,zum letzten Malsei des Amtes gemahnt!

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[Who prevented him from viewing the Grail’s grace? / The man you’re escorting, the sinfulguardian. / We escort him today, because today once more / for the last time / he will fulfilhis duties. / Ah, for the last time! / Woe! Woe! You guardian of the Grail / for the last time/ fulfil your duty!]

The double chorus presents two groups who know little of the happenings withintheir own lair or, indeed, of each other – even though, as the first two phrases show,they sing much the same music, separated only by a half-step. Far from the convivialMännerchor of Act I, this double chorus has finally come to suffer from Amfortas’swound and his inability to rule. Built on the tritone dissecting the middle of the‘wandering’ motif from the third act prelude (heard here most prominently in bars906-8), the passage is split between B flat minor and E minor; as the tritone pairingsuggests, there is little tonal stability to ‘centre’ the chorus. The first procession,starting at bar 896, sings in B flat minor, while the second, following immediately,ends by hinting at A minor. This move towards the sharp side is picked up by theentrance of the C major bells at bar 910, which in turn is incorporated into the Eminor of bars 914-19. Although neither procession can be aligned exclusively withB flat minor or E minor – the first procession introduces both of them – the splittonal focus is clearly evocative of the collective that has lost its way without a leader,the ‘despondent and leaderless knighthood’. When the bells begin to sound on Cmajor, the two processions can no longer coordinate themselves, even internally: inthe first procession, the tenors at bar 913 have modulated to E minor, while thebasses start off still in B flat minor, only adjusting to the new key signature on thelast beat. The knights sing four different texts. The C major bells remind us that weare in the Grail temple, but the contrast between the intense chromaticism of bar913 and the relatively untroubled C major of the first act’s communion sceneillustrates the severity of the community’s decline and disarray.

If, in the first act communion, the treble voices were representatives of a grailspace still proclaimed to be sanctified, and the knights that of an intrusive ‘time’ outof sync with that space, in Act III the knights and the decay from which they sufferhave now come to represent the space of the Grail. Their alternation of B flat minorand E minor repeats the tonal pairing of the Act III transformation music whichreintroduced the Grail temple, and without the occasional sounding of treble-voicepieties from the temple dome (the invisible chorus is notably silent until the end ofthe act ), the knights and the Grail realm have become coterminous. Amfortas’ssuffering has spread; the chorus of knights and the surroundings in which theyreside embody the uncontrollable seepage of sickness and decay caused by hisinability to perform the life-giving communion ritual.50 In many respects theknights’ procession and the weakened, amorphous space it represents are indicativeof the ‘surrounding without a centre’ that Wagner abhorred in the operatic chorus– and whose dramatic excess is heightened here by the superfluity of the entire

50 Although there is no evidence within the work that the knights themselves suffer fromAmfortas’s ‘disease’, Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon have persuasively argued thatAmfortas’s symptoms match those of syphilis, a ‘soldier’s disease’ to which a group of menmight fall prey. See Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, M.D., ‘Syphilis, Sin and theSocial Order: Richard Wagner’s Parsifal ’, this journal, 7 (1995), 261–75.



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Ex. 4: continued.


scene, since both audience and all the principals except Amfortas and his knightsalready know that redemption is on its way.

But the knights are also treated here much like an individual character, and in thisregard they are given a musical independence quite unlike the choral writingcharacteristic of Wagner’s other choruses. Whereas elsewhere Wagner assigned thechorus ‘melodic’ material – that is, either set pieces centred on a particular theme(the Pilgrims’ Chorus, Elsa’s bridal procession, the chorales in Die Meistersinger ) orshorter moments based on or simply repeating leitmotivic content (most of thechoral material in Parsifal ) – in Example 4 the knights’ music is virtually devoid ofdistinctive thematic material. Instead, it is rather like the speech-inflected vocal lineswhich the mature Wagner assigned to his principal characters, and which henormally kept separate from the leitmotivic music in the orchestra.51 Both the fallingsixths which end many of the knights’ phrases here and the contrast between thespeech-like, often syncopated vocal writing and the more rhythmically regularorchestral accompaniment are characteristic not of Wagner’s choral writing but ofthe solo vocal material from the Ring onwards. Particularly in light of the unitedfront the knights will show Amfortas after his initial refusal to perform his office,their procession can be seen not only as dispersed choral spectacle but also aspresenting a singular, if massed, body. Indeed, from bars 896–910 the knights singin unison rather than the traditional choral parts.52 More so than in Act I, theknights’ presence in this scene is not that of a chorus in the traditionally ‘choral’sense of other operas, nor one in the ‘choric’ sense of Greek tragedy and Schiller’sdramaturgy, but in fact one whose strong, unified will seems to transcend theboundaries of choral and choric self-determination altogether. Even if one does notfollow Lucy Beckett in viewing the severity of the knights’ demands as a misstep onWagner’s part, the knights’ procession is, perhaps, the furthest thing imaginablefrom Nietzsche’s idea of ‘the serving chorus’.53 And although the knights’ demandsare ultimately rendered harmless by the fact that Parsifal and his programme ofredemption have already been announced, their threat seems real enough – at leastto Amfortas, whose anguished prayer immediately following the processionaddresses their demands, and who notably begins to sing leitmotivic materialhimself (particularly the ‘Weihegruss’ at bars 943–5 and the communion motif atbars 971–2), almost as if to illustrate his own lack of strength and independence.

51 For a recent consideration of the leitmotif, its aesthetics and its reception, see ThomasGrey, Wagner’s Musical Prose: Texts and Contexts (London, 1995).

52 Wagner insisted on a unified effect for the procession: during the rehearsals, he instructedthat ‘the bearing of the corpse must have an extremely ceremonial and ritualistic character,and nothing individualistic at all’. See the ‘Zusammenstellung laut gewordenerBeobachtungen und Bemerkungen seitens beteiligter und zuschauender Zeugen derAufführung des Bühnenweihfestspiels Parsifal in den Jahren 1882 und 1883’, reprinted inRichard Wagner Sämtliche Werke Band 30. Dokumente zur Entstehung und ersten Aufführung desBühnenweihfestspiels Parsifal, ed. Martin Geck and Egon Voss (Mainz, 1970), 164.

53 Lucy Beckett, Richard Wagner: Parsifal, Cambridge Opera Handbooks (Cambridge, 1981), 56.Her statement that the knights’ chorus ‘is a dislocation of the emotional unity of the work’ignores the persona established by the knights in Act I. In light of their musical and textualdifferentiation in that earlier scene, their demands in Act III are a logical continuance, not a‘dislocation’.

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David Lewin has characterised the end of Amfortas’s prayer as a ‘spectacularlydeceptive cadence’, wherein Amfortas’s attempt to cadence in the D minor tonic isundone first by a mystic chord over C in the orchestra, the reintroduction of the Cmajor bells, and soon thereafter the knights. He writes of the disruption: ‘[T]heknights know better, as the deceptive cadence of m. 993 tells us, denying Amfortashis D cadence with a gruesome shock. For if Amfortas dies, cadentially tonicizingD P-or-D, who will be left to uncover the Grail, i.e., to execute the obligatory plagalcadence from D P-or-D to A P-as-tonic?’54 It is not the knights. In fact, theirinterruption (Ex. 5) only serves to retread familiar paths. They start in B flat minor,and they seem poised to cadence in E minor at bar 1000, where they are themselvesthe recipient of a deceptive cadence which lands them precisely on a diminishedseventh of – D minor. It is not clear that the knights ‘know better’ at all; they endup as close to D minor as Amfortas had, and their retraversal of B flat and E minorfollowing the bells’ C major has little in common with the path from D major to Aflat major which Lewin and others have persuasively identified as Parsifal’sredemptive mission.55

Indeed, as we shall soon see, it is fair to say that the knights have absolutelynothing to do with the structural cadences to A flat major, and their completepassivity at the climactic close of the work signals a noteworthy change in theknights’ relationship to the Grail space. After their emphatic response to Amfortasin Example 5, they are not to be heard again until the end of the work, as they joinin with the unseen treble chorus to comment upon the miracle they have justwitnessed. This response to Parsifal’s redemption of Kundry and Amfortas and hisassumption of the Grail leadership is given in Example 6. A stronger contrast withthe knights’ earlier material is difficult to imagine. Because they are no longer deniedthe sustenance of communion, it makes sense that the animus that generated theirdemands in the scene with Amfortas would diminish. Yet what replaces it seemsentirely out of keeping with the knights’ character. Here, after exclaiming ‘HöchstenHeiles Wunder!’ ( ‘highest holy wonder!’ ) to the prophecy motif, they simply singincipits of the communion theme in its ‘redeemed’ version – that is, withoutthe wound, and with the suture between the communion section proper and theDresden Amen – to the text ‘Erlösung dem Erlöser!’ ( ‘Redemption to theredeemer!’ ). If, as Carolyn Abbate has suggested, the capacity of the work’s finalchorus ‘to erase the memory of the funeral procession is uncertain’ because ‘thepresence of the very same knights’ voices helps to keep that memory alive’, it wouldseem that the persistence of the funeral procession in the audience’s memory is inno small part due to the extreme timidity which characterises the knights’subsequent and final utterance.56 The knights who have been granted thoughts andmusic of their own for virtually the entire work are suddenly reduced to approving

54 David Lewin, ‘Amfortas’s Prayer to Titurel and the Role of D in Parsifal: The Tonal Spacesof the Drama and the Enharmonic C P/B’, 19th-Century Music, 7 (1984), 336–49, here 336and 341.

55 See, for instance, Fred Lerdahl, Tonal Pitch Space (Oxford, 2001), 119–36.56 Carolyn Abbate, ‘Metempsychotic Wagner’, In Search of Opera (Princeton, 2001), 107–44,

here 137.



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spectators. For the first time in the entire work, they sing of redemption – althoughit is not their own (they did not sin), and at no previous point in the work did theysing of its necessity. The communion theme which in their hands had become ajovial march in Act I now returns with soft, floating reverence, ceding to a seeminglyendless cycle of plagal cadences.

To be sure, the knights now benefit from Parsifal’s healing of Amfortas, insofaras a healthy leader – either one would do – can ensure that the Grail is unveiled andcommunion is celebrated on a regular basis. But what emerges from Example 6 isnot so much a heart-felt reaction to Parsifal’s arrival as expressed from the vantagepoint of characters who may benefit from his redemptive promise, but rather thecomplete liquidation of that vantage point: the knights’ text and music have nothingto do with the persona they had established throughout the work. Instead, their

Ex. 6: continued.

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music issues from the same perspective as that of the treble choristers, who nowjoin the knights; Parsifal’s return of the spear has joined the two halves of thechorus just as it has sutured Amfortas’s wound. But if the chorus now sings as one,it is according to the terms of the voices from above. Parsifal closes with a chorusof spectators.

Where does this leave Wagner’s dramaturgy? Do these massed voices notrepresent Wagner’s affirmation of a chorus, rather than its promised elimination?Partly. But the knights’ dramatic change from participant to spectator within theGrail space cannot entirely be separated from the larger space in which this transferwas to take place: the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, the theatre Wagner hoped would helpnurture an elusive German Volk – in his words, ‘a kind of art-Washington’.57 Theabove-stage placement of the treble chorus to which the knights become grafted in

57 Quoted in Michael Karbaum, Studien zur Geschichte der Bayreuther Festspiele (1876–1976)(Regensburg, 1976), 29.

Ex. 6: continued.


Ex. 6: continued.

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the work’s final moments highlights a space of spectatorship beyond the strictconfines of the proscenium, and this representative joining of on-stage bodies withoff-stage voices in reverent reflection upon the drama provides a momentumdisplacing the stage as the sole place of spectatorship. As the entirety of the chorusadopts the passive, reflective stance associated with these unseen voices, thesymbolic motion of this adoption points towards an ultimate goal away from thestage and into the auditorium. This motion gives the impression of a communalvoice retreating into something like an invisible holding pen, from which it mightreturn ‘home’ to its rightful place in the Volk should the audience come to identifywith the voice and claim it as its own.

Just as the series of columns leading up to the Bayreuth stage and its famed tripleproscenium were intended as a trompe l’oeil to make the on-stage figures seem larger,and thus to facilitate the audience’s unmediated identification with the drama, so,too, does the espousal of a mass spectatorship by the partly invisible chorus servein the work consecrating this stage and its unique auditorium to provide the meansof an aural identification as well.58 The potential transfer of this reflective voicefrom the unseen space above the stage to the unseen (darkened) space of theaudience constitutes a tentative step in Wagner’s promised retreat of the chorusback into the Volk. Indeed, joining the knights’ adult male voices to the women’s

58 On the Bayreuth architecture and its forebears in the ‘theatrical church’ and the ‘sacredtheatre’, see Hans-Jürgen Fliedner, Architektur und Erlebnis. Das Festspielhaus Bayreuth (Diearchitektonische Schematisierung des Erlebnisses der Ideen ) (Coburg, 1999). See also FrederickSpotts, Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival (New Haven, 1994). Two post-warconsiderations of Bayreuth also provide interesting perspectives: Wieland Wagner, ed.,Richard Wagner und das neue Bayreuth (Munich, 1962), and Wolfgang Storch, ed., Der RaumBayreuth. Ein Auftrag aus der Zukunft (Frankfurt am Main, 2002).

Ex. 6: continued.


and boys’ voices of the dome chorus in collective spectatorship provides the firststep in an aural representation of such a communal voice. The Bühnenweihfestspiel

serves to consecrate the Bayreuth stage through its replacement of an ‘acting’chorus with a reflective one and the simultaneous offering of that reflective choralvoice to the audience as model. In Wagner’s writings the idea of the Bayreuththeatre was never divorced from a consideration of its audience; Parsifal consecratesBayreuth’s stage in its consecration of an administered spectatorship.59

Space and its residents

Such a spectatorship comes with strings attached. For one, Parsifal ’s tentativeenvoicing of an idealised theatrical public has little to do with the sort of communalvision Wagner (or Nietzsche) praised as a symbiotic relationship between ancientGreek drama and its spectators; there is little sense, even metaphorically, that thework ‘comes’ from a collective vision. The chorus at the end of Parsifal has no directeffect on the proceedings, and in fact seems to be increasingly set apart from them.In the chain of plagal cadences shown in Example 6, for instance, the chorus cedesto the orchestra the communion motif after the third repetition (bar 1115), as if toillustrate by the clearest means possible the replacement of the dramatic chorus bythe orchestra. Furthermore, the final cadence is taken from the chorus entirely andleft to the orchestra in bars 1126–27.

What immediately precedes that cadence is of particular interest. At bar 1123,Kundry sinks to the floor ‘entseelt’ ( ‘de-souled’ ), as a striking progression from Dflat major to A minor and back to D flat major sounds in the orchestra. At issue ismore than Kundry, though; at the same moment, the stage directions also instructParsifal to wave the Grail in blessing over the knights. What are the terms of ablessing whose music is also one of de-souling? The chord progression, which forease of reference I will call the ‘Entseelung’ chords, has not gone unnoticed. Abbatehears in it a ‘shudder’ reminding listeners of the price paid – Kundry’s seemingdeath – for the luxurious chain of plagal cadences, while Richard Cohn has relatedthe progression’s hexatonic poles to contemporary notions of the uncanny.60

Cohn’s invocation of the unheimlich is particularly apt in the present context, for theprogression’s defamiliarisation of tonal space has a dramatic correlate in thisBühnenweihfestspiel: the simultaneous ‘Entseelung’ and blessing that accompany thesechords are implicated in a long-reaching attempt to transform the space ofMonsalvat, to consecrate a radically new Heim ( ‘home’ ) for Parsifal on – andas – the Bayreuth stage.

59 In addition to Oper und Drama, which of course does not mention Bayreuth by name, seethe two ‘Bayreuth’ essays: ‘Schlussbericht über die Umstände und Schicksale. . . .’ and ‘DasBühnenfestspielhaus zu Bayreuth. Nebst einem Bericht über die Grundsteinlegungdesselben’, GS, IX, 311–44, and PW, V, 307–40.

60 Abbate, ‘Metempsyschotic Wagner’, 140; Richard Cohn, ‘Maximally Smooth Cycles,Hexatonic Systems, and the Analysis of Late-Romantic Music’, Music Analysis, 15 (1996),9–40, and his ‘Uncanny Resemblances: Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age’, Journal ofthe American Musicological Society, 57 (2004), 285–323.

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The connection between the ‘Entseelung’ progression and the resacralisation ofMonsalvat is carefully prepared throughout the work. The two chords are firstpaired in Gurnemanz’s Act I narration, shown in Example 7.

Hier lebt sie heut,vielleicht erneut,zu büssen Schuld aus früherem Leben,die dorten ihr noch nicht vergeben.U}bt sie nun Buss in solchen Thaten,die uns Ritterschaft zum Heil geraten. . . .

[Now she lives here, / perhaps renewed, / to atone for guilt from an earlier life, / for whichshe is still not forgiven. / Although she does such deeds as repentance, / they benefit ourknighthood. . . .]

As Gurnemanz explains that Kundry may have sinned in an earlier life, the D flatmajor communion theme enters at bar 436 over a B flat pedal.61 Gurnemanz’sstatement that Kundry’s sin may still need atonement is accompanied by thecommunion theme starting in A minor at bar 443, which leads to a statement of theprophecy motif. D flat major and A minor are thereby directly connected toKundry’s atonement and – importantly – to the prophesied arrival of the pure fool.Closely related is a progression from D flat major to A major at bars 723–5 in ActI, just before the first full statement of the Torenspruch and Parsifal’s subsequententrance. Here, Gurnemanz’s retelling of the dream-like vision that delivered theprophecy proceeds from a D flat major communion theme to the A major whichserves as the dominant to the Torenspruch. Example 7 contains an additionalconnection to the ‘Entseelung’ chords in Act III. Bars 440–1 include a germinalstatement of the ‘sorcery’ motif associated with Kundry, consisting of an A flatminor chord set over F leading to E major. A more complete statement of thesorcery motif from later in Gurnemanz’s narration (Ex. 8) highlights the implica-tions of the initial statement in Example 7. Here, the sorcery motif is emphasisedas Gurnemanz explains how Amfortas succumbed to Kundry’s temptations( though she is, as yet, unnamed): ‘Ein furchtbar schönes Weib / hat ihn entzückt;/ in seinen Armen liegt er trunken . . .’ ( ‘a terribly beautiful woman / has captivatedhim; / in her arms he lies drunken . . . )’. Although the low E Q/F in bars 440, 521and 525 clouds the relationship, the sorcery motif anticipates the ‘Entseelung’progression, with the modalities reversed. The similarity is especially clear inExample 8, as the repeated alternation in the viola, clarinet and flute of A flat minorand E major outlines the same major-third drop as the ‘Entseelung’ progressiondoes, as well as its signature half-step motion in the upper voice. Examples 7 and8 not only link Kundry to her sin; they also prepare her ‘Entseelung’, whichtransfigures the magic of her sorcery into the magic of a resanctified Grail.

Indeed, subsequent appearances of the ‘Entseelung’ chords solidify their associ-ation not only with Kundry’s redemption at Parsifal’s hands, but in fact the verysanctity of Monsalvat and all that its space contains. They are heard when Parsifal

61 This B flat, like the F often heard underneath statements of the communion theme in Aflat major, provides submediant colouring but little more.



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reflects on the Grail chalice after rejecting Kundry’s kiss; when Gurnemanz instructsthe as-yet-unidentified Parsifal at the beginning of Act III that he is in a ‘sacredspace’; as Parsifal expresses thanks that he has made his way back to Gurnemanzand the Grail; upon mention of ‘the Grail’s holy spear’; and as part of a Grail motifintroducing Parsifal’s healing of Amfortas’s wound. Seen in the context of theseother hearings, the ‘Entseelung’ chords accompanying Kundry’s ‘de-souling’indicate that more is at play than the redemption of a reluctant sorceress (or, inCižek’s memorable construction, a ‘Redemptrix’ ).62 The ‘Entseelung’ progression isconsistently employed to convey a sense of the Grail space’s sanctity. That itborrows its upper-neighbour figure and chromatic-third drop from the sorcerymotif is a further indication that the terms of Monsalvat’s potential as a consecratedplace are not unrelated to the unsanctified world outside, or even to certainunsanctified residents within. Lewin’s point that Parsifal serves to ‘bring the magicback’ to Monsalvat, to ‘repatriate’ the flexible chromaticism associated withKlingsor’s realm, is reflected in just this way.63 The ‘Entseelung’ appropriatesproperties of the sorcery motif ( the major-third drop and upper-neighbour motion)and re-forms them into the magic sanctity of the Grail.

One further instance of the progression bears directly on the ‘Entseelung’ properstarting at bar 1123. Example 9 shows an A flat statement of the communion motifleading in to the Dresden Amen. We have already seen how this suture over thewound motif and its C minor fall serves to illustrate the healing of Amfortas’swound. But one difficulty in grafting on the Amen figure in place of the

62 Slavoj Cižek and Mladen Dolar, Opera’s Second Death (London, 2002), 169.63 Lewin, ‘Amfortas’s Prayer’, 347–9.




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‘Schmerzensfigur’ is that it also replaces the sword motif, which provided thecommunion theme with a strong plagal element; and it is precisely this D flat-to-Aflat relationship which constitutes the structural cadence of the work. Thus the‘redeemed’ version of the communion theme in bars 1092–94 succeeds in removingthe wound, but it also leads to the dominant. The ‘Entseelung’ progression at bars1098–1100 provides a means of landing back on the subdominant. Its traversal ofa major-third chain leads directly back to E flat, but the alternating modalities of theprogression produce E flat minor, the supertonic of D flat. (Another way to rectifythe Amen’s dominant is provided in Example 6, in which the chorus and orchestrastart on the flat side of A flat with the chain of communion incipits. This lengthier,if simpler, method utilises the dominant thrust of the Amen figure. ) Just as the newversion of the communion theme announces Parsifal’s redemptive power via thetransformation of earlier leitmotivic material, the ‘Entseelung’ chords similarlytransform the Grail motif in bars 1098–1100. Though vertically diatonic, thehorizontal progression transports the chords to a thoroughly chromatic space. If, asLewin suggests, Parsifal’s redemption of the Grail transfers the magical propertiesof the ‘bad’ chromaticism associated with Klingsor onto the reconsecrated Grailspace, Example 9 illustrates this transfer in its sublimation of chordal diatonicism –embodied by the ‘Grail’ motif – into the redemptive chromatic space of the‘Entseelung’ progression. The Grail shines.

Yet this does not mark the end of the work, and the choral section and final‘Entseelung’ chords which follow (Ex. 6) serve not only to reiterate Monsalvat’snewly chromaticised sanctity, but also to suggest the limits of the chorus’srelationship to that space. As we have seen, its reflections offer little newdramatically. Nor do they cover new tonal ground. They are enclosed within D flatmajor, the global subdominant, but the tonic has already been reached twice: oncefrom its dominant (bar 1088) and, importantly, once from the subdominant (bar1102) following the chromaticisation of the Grail motif in bars 1098–1100. Anearlier pairing of the very ‘Entseelung’ chords functioning as bookends to thechorus’s D flat major – that is, G major to E flat minor, and D flat major to A minorand back, connected only by the Grail motif – was heard in the Act I communionwithout any lingering on D flat (bars 1480–85). And insofar as this earlierprogression offers a glimpse of the coming consecration, it, too, suggests that theextended choral reflections in D flat have little structural significance. The chorus’straversal of D-D flat through the plagal chain of communion incipits in Example 6is not only limited to the subdominant space already claimed by Parsifal, it is alsolimited in the means of its harmonic movement. The enharmonicism of the plagalchain is strictly notational – that is, what appears to be a chromatic seam betweenC flat and B in bar 1115 is simply correcting the change in notation at bar 1107. Thechorus’s plagal cadences are a low-tech impersonation of the chromatic space inwhich they are now encased: the ‘Entseelung’ chords in the orchestra associatedwith Parsifal’s redemptive arrival. Befitting its symbolic retreat away from the actionon stage and into the reflective audience, the chorus Parsifal blesses is now leftbehind, a relic of functional diatonic space – in Wagner’s terms quoted earlier,‘material remains’.


In the orchestral sketches, the last stage of Parsifal ’s drafting process prior to theStichvorlage, Wagner envisioned a whole chain of ‘Entseelung’ progressions at thispoint that would have reiterated even more forcefully the ascendance of theorchestra’s chromaticism following the chain of plagal cadences in the chorus.64 Theeffect of so many ‘Entseelung’ chords was repetitive, even ostentatious, and Wagnerremoved them. But the sentiment seems to have stayed. Kundry is ‘entseelt’. Mightnot something similar be said about the knights? The knights who once sang of theirown collective vision and made demands of their leader with the most advancedchromaticism now join the invisible chorus in cloying affirmation and outdatedharmony. Does the ‘blessing’ of these knights at these chords not suggest somethingakin to their ‘Entseelung’ as sovereign members of the Grail space? Their templehas been consecrated, and they have been, too, but the rules of membership seemto have changed in the process.65

Precedents and consequences

The moment was not unanticipated. Although no Wagner work comes close toproviding the chorus with the knights’ level of chromatic intensity in the third act,Parsifal ’s ultimate separation of the chorus into a diatonic realm cordoned off fromthe chromaticism of the orchestra and soloists resonates with earlier works.Tannhäuser, Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger all provide the chorus with a limitedharmonic ‘space’ quite distinct from the erotic yearnings and metaphysicalintrospection found in the principals’ chromaticism. Similarly, the unembellishedchoral repetition of previous melodic material characteristic of the unseen choristers– and ultimately the knights – in Parsifal has precedence in virtually every Wagnerianwork. The entrance of the guests at the Wartburg in Tannhäuser, Elsa’s bridalprocession in Lohengrin, and the ‘Wach auf’ chorus in Die Meistersinger are allexamples of choral exclamations which repeat, rather than generate, musicalcontent. This practice of faithful choral repetition is encapsulated in Parsifal ’s treblevoices, whose only ‘active’ or participatory role consists in repeating prophecies orinstructions at appropriate moments in the Grail’s ritual.

But Parsifal is alone in its alignment of these characterisations with a proposedspace the chorus was to inhabit. And it is precisely in this connection with theBayreuth theatre that Parsifal ’s treatment of the chorus must be viewed, for thework’s espousal of engaged mass spectatorship has its natural correlate in Wagner’splans for the festival theatre. He originally wanted to build it in the shape of a trueamphitheatre, just as he once expressed the desire of having the Missa Solemnis

64 A III n 3, III. 28, Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung Bayreuth. For a moredetailed consideration of the sketch, see Chapter Four of my ‘National Memory, PublicMusic’.

65 To this one might add the entirely practical point that physically Bayreuth is not conduciveto extended moments of choral participation; works such as Lohengrin present hugeproblems in coordinating the chorus and the orchestra that can only be partly solved by anarmy of assistant conductors off stage. In a very real sense Wagner’s demotion of thechorus was built into Bayreuth space.

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performed with the chorus and audience in a full circle.66 Wagner was worried,however, that audience members could not take in the sight both of themselves andof the stage. Since not even Bayreuth could be guaranteed an audience composedentirely of the Volk, in which class distinctions and societal display had no place,Wagner decided that the best course of action was to shield his audience membersentirely from the sight of each other.67 Thus the perfect sightlines, the hiddenorchestra pit, and the visual tricks rendering the stage an unidentifiable distanceaway serve the disciplinary function of diverting the audience’s attention away fromeach other and towards the stage. Wagner’s argument that the theatre’s value lay inits pedagogical persuasiveness certainly found supporters: in 1877 his friend MartinPlüddemann pleaded for, and received, state help for Bayreuth based on claims of‘the influence of art on the morals of the Volk’.68 Similarly, Houston StewartChamberlain suggested to his fellow Wagnerian exegete Hans von Wolzogen: ‘If wewant to preserve more from our master’s work in the soul of the Volk than fashion,there is only one thing to do: send hundreds and thousands of true German teachers

to Bayreuth’.69

As Dieter Borchmeyer has pointed out, Bayreuth’s metaphorical status as ‘place’was already established in its name alone, which translates roughly as ‘space clearedout’.70 And the well-publicised use of boys from local schools as part of the treblechorus for Parsifal ’s première furthered this sense that the happenings on the festivalstage had a rooted connection to the small Franconian town chosen preciselyfor its location outside of the opera industry.71 Yet if the physical remoteness ofBayreuth’s stage was intended to distance its performances from the usualaudiences, the theatre’s own physical layout sought to bridge, rather than distance,stage and ( idealised) audience. Adorno’s description of Wagner’s visual and auralphantasmagorias serves as a remarkably incisive analysis of the unseen treblechorus in Parsifal, its ‘spatial’ music, and its symbolic merger with the Bayreuthaudience:

[T]he Neo-German school remained loyal to the idea of ‘distant sound’ as the source ofacoustic delusion; in it music pauses and is made spatial, the near and the far are deceptivelymerged, like the comforting Fata Morgana that brings the mirage of cities and caravanswithin reach and makes social models appear magically rooted in nature.72

66 On the initial plans for the theatre, see Fliedner, Architektur und Erlebnis; on performingBeethoven’s mass in the round, as well as a sympathetic discussion of Wagner’s choralreforms, see Borchmeyer, Richard Wagner, 160–77.

67 Borchmeyer explains: ‘An audience bent on pleasure, and divided up into separate boxes[. . .] is no longer ‘‘public’’ in the classical sense of the word. [. . .] [O]nly when it isreintegrated into the Volk as a free community will the eye no longer be aestheticallyoffended when it takes in both stage and audience at a single glance’. Borchmeyer, 71.

68 Plüddemann’s broadsheet ‘Staatshülfe für Bayreuth’ is reprinted in Karbaum, Studien zurGeschichte der Bayreuther Festspiele, 13–19.

69 The letter is quoted in Karbaum, 50.70 Borchmeyer, Richard Wagner, 12.71 On the boy choir, see Engelbert Humperdinck, ‘Persönliche Erinnerungen an Richard

Wagner und die erste Aufführung des Bühnenweihfestspieles am 25. Juli 1882 in Bayreuth’,in Parsifal-Skizzen, ed. Eva Humperdinck and Sr. M. Evamaris (Koblenz, 2000).

72 Theodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London, 1991), 86.


Unto itself, the invisible chorus in Parsifal is not wholly unlike other supernaturalchoruses in nineteenth-century opera ( the spirits of wine and beer in Les Contes

d’Hoffmann; the wind in Rigoletto ); Nietzsche memorably characterised the domechoristers’ occasional soundings as a ‘telephone from beyond’.73 Generically, theunseen voices may indeed confer a mystical imprimatur on the temple proceedings.But Parsifal ’s more salient claim is not so much the quasi-numinous provenance ofthose voices themselves as it is the knights’ adoption of them as the proud emblemof their own ‘Entseelung’. The knights’ devolution from autonomous participant topowerless observer offers a fully sanctioned model of the kind of devotedspectatorship the space of the Bayreuth theatre was claimed to engender. If, asWagner feared, the contemporary artwork had been alienated from the audience inits own time and space, the Bühnenweihfestspiel offered its theatre both artwork andaudience bundled together: the knights’ adoption of the treble choristers’ devoutspectatorship points to the creation of a new, wholly impermeable time and spacein which audience reflection and composer intent are coterminous.74 Repeatedlyconsecrating the Bayreuth stage also consecrates a model of administered specta-torship which brooks no opposition. Wagner may never have abolished the operachorus entirely, but his treatment of the chorus in Parsifal comes close in its radicalrejection of collective sovereignty by the work’s end. Symbolically, Wagner’s choralreform turns out to have been more reaction than revolution.

73 Nietzsche, ‘On the Genealogy of Morals’, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. WalterKaufmann (New York, 1968), 539.

74 Wagner, ‘Das Publikum in Zeit und Raum’, GS, X, 91–102, and PW, VI, 83–94.

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wagner’s last chorus consecrating space and spectatorship

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