I bet some of you thought I'd never listened to a Wagner opera in my life.

I'd be very interested in comments.  (Bear in mind I am very au fait with the history and practice of the Christian Eucharist, and Christianity obviously plays a big part in Parsifal, but not in any conventional ways.)

The message seems to be that the only good woman is a dumb woman, who serves as much as she can and drops senseless.

There must be more to it than that.

I don't know anything about Parsifal.
Well that's not strictly true because I've read Malory (Sir Thomas, not Towers...) and I've heard bits of the opera from time to time, but I've never knowingly sat through the whole thing (and if I did unknowingly I was either in the car or doing something else - probably reading or composing).
But I feel that I should get to know it. I'm taking a whole bunch of 18-19 year olds up to a remote lodge in the Highlands after Easter to listen to the whole Ring which is probably enough Wagner for this year, but I'm aware of this gap in my knowledge like a missing tooth.
I know I've said this before, but it probably bears repeating... The section of Malory's Morte to do with the Grail turns the conventional chivalric laws on their head. Whereas in the rest of the book, appearances seem to be more highly valued than actual practice (so Lancelot can carry on with Guinevere, and everyone can know about it, as long as this isn't brought out into the open as Gawain finally does thus precipitating (hang on isn't that to do with rain?) the collapse of the Order of the Round Table), in the Grail stories, the knights (especially Lancelot) are shown up for their hypocrisy and the only ones considered worthy of finding the Grail (and therefore receiving communion from Joseph of Arimathea and subsequently dying of perfect happiness because their lives were fulfilled... Yes, great call chaps! No sex, and then you get to die at the tender age of - what was it? - 21?) are the virgins - the sinless.

A bit off-topic, but I did the Ring in a weekend with any students who had the guts/ curiosity etc. a few years ago, at my place (not in a remote Scottish lodge, which is surely more appropriate). Mixed results. It helped that I'd organised the food and drink (all German - pilsners, worsts, saurkraut, rye bread etc,  ), but I think 18/19 is maybe too young to 'get it'. The 50-year-old postgrad with a teenage daughter practically had to be hospitalised after Valkure, so devastated was he by the final scene... 

Thanks, Robert, for the considered view of an enthusiast. I'll certainly bear your words in mind whenever I get around to tackling Parsifal seriously.

It is the single work of art I most live by.

I wholeheartedly endorse the message of Parsifal - particularly that of Act 2 - and I will always be grateful to Wagner for giving the world this final product of his genius.

It is very difficult - though by no means impossible - to stage effectively.  I think it is one opera that should be protected from left of centre producers, who are psychologically/emotionally/culturally incapable of seeing it objectively.

Then again, the fact that the Left hate it (and Wagner) so much, only makes me love it (and him) more.

Parsifal is the single greatest work of music theatre ever composed.

Like many of the greatest masterpieces, you can take from it whatever you want to take from it.

I see the central message as being about the importance of maintaining ideals in a corrupt world. 

Other people will see other things.

But I find I can actually ignore the specifically Christian trappings: remember Wagner was not a Christian - he revered nothing but his mother and Nature.

Not quite.  Nietzsche detested the quasi-Christian setting of Parsifal - "Wagner slumped prostrate at the foot of the cross", as he put it - but believed that the music was among the greatest Wagner had ever written, which made the betrayal (as Nietzsche saw it) all the worse.

And in the latter view, Nietzsche was IMHO surely right.  But the charge sheet is well-known and much of it has already been set out on this thread - misogyny, especially in the glorification of chastity and the portrayal of Kundry ("half charlady, half vamp", as one critic put it), and the portrayal of a sort of quasi-Fascistic male brotherhood (Gutman draws the comparison with Rohm's stormtroopers, and one can see what he meant).  It's certainly not a Christian opera per se - as it happens the moments of pure Christian symbolism (the grasping of the spear at the end of Act 2, the dove floating over Parsifal's head at the end of Act 3 - you don't often see it but it's what Wagner specified) are frankly risible. 

It would need more time than I have at the moment to get stuck into a discussion of what goes on in this work (let alone mount any sort of defence - I may return to this), but here are a very few high-level pointers:

Parsifal is an outsider, a young man suffering a typically Wagnerian identity crisis, who wanders into a sick community - the origins of the sickness lying in the way in which that community's ideal has degenerated into, yes, misogyny and empty religious observance.  He is dismissed by that society but, unlike any of its initiates, confronts the causes of the ills (which is the infantile sensuality represented by the flower maidens and Kundry in vamp mode) and therefore acquires the maturity to redeem the community - precisely because he has gone outside it in a way that the Grail Knights cannot do, being totally dependent on the Grail fix.  It seem to me that Wagner is making a point about the need to move beyond that closed world, to gain real experience by wandering the world, before one can diagnose and deal with the sickness; far from glorifying the values of the closed world, one could argue that Parsifal is a critique of the values of closed, religious, misogynistic communities.  But the power of Wagner as an artist is, it seems to me, that he can voice the disastrous philosophy of the Grail community and even command sympathy for it, even when one knows intellectually (well, more than intellectually, actually) that is values are poisonous.

And the music is glorious.  There is an astonishing spareness, a luminous quality that one finds nowhere else in Wagner.  The conflict I mentioned above is voiced most powerfully, it seems to me, in the transformation music in Act I where the steady tread of the knights' music is combined with the music of Amfortas' anguish tearing through the texture; to my mind some of the most powerful music ever written.  Moreover, the first night audience may have been disappointed, but the music of the next thirty years is completely in thrall to it - even that of composers like Debussy who tried to get out of its grasp.



As a dedicated Wagnerian and old muesli-chewing leftie, I would dispute that, but that's another thread ....

The thing is, p_w, the Left generally don't just hate Wagner because they hold him responsible for the gas chambers and the Anschluss...they hate him because they find the concept of heroism expressed in his operas deeply offensive and antithetical to their most dearly cherished beliefs. 

I'm very glad that Jonathan Miller has never expressed a desire to produce Wagner: he's on record as saying he would only do them if he could 'send them up'.  And on the continent, that dreadful man Peter Konwitschny is funded by the State to desecrate these national treasures with his bespoke hammer and sickle.