score of 'parsifal

On the Score of 'Parsifal'

Theodor W. Adorno; Anthony Barone

Music & Letters, Vol. 76, No. 3. (Aug., 1995), pp. 384-397.

Stable URL:

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0027-4224%28199508%2976%3A3%3C384%3AOTSO%27%3E2.0.CO%3B2-0

Music & Letters is currently published by Oxford University Press.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtainedprior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content inthe JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/journals/oup.html.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academicjournals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers,and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community takeadvantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

http://www.jstor.orgSat Feb 2 14:58:37 2008


http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html

http://www.jstor.org/journals/oup.html

O N THE SCORE OF 'PARSIFAL'

Translated, with commentary, by Anthony Barone

OF ALL WAGNER'SMUSIC,that of Parsifal has entered least into the public's con- sciousness, and little that is penetrating has been said about its peculiar qualities, except perhaps the formal analyses of Alfred Lorenz. The lex Parsifal, which would have extended the performance rights beyond the usual thirty years, did not materialize. In lieu of this, a protective layer surrounds the Blihnenweihfestspiel, to which the veneration of the cultic aspect and the fear of boredom probably contribute equally. The fear of boredom, in any case, is groundless. Exactly in that ponderousness that frightens the innocent opera-goer is concealed the ever-astonishing new. Long-windedness was always characteristic of Wagner; it is associated with both his evocative use of gesture and an inclination to talk the listener to death. Got- terdammerung, with its expansive musical effluence, sometimes calls to mind the swimmer in Uhland's poem ['Die Rache'], whose own armour dragged him under. The armature of leitmotivs in the tetralogy as a whole-which the last piece drags along-paralyses development. In Parsifal, this is intensified and becomes turned over: the master of the art of transition ends up composing a static score. The requi- site art of hearing that must be learnt by whoever wants to understand the work is- as already the case in certain parts of Gotterdammerung-one of acquisitive listening [Nachhoren], of eavesdropping. He understands Parsifal who understands its excesses and extravagance, its peculiarity and mannerism, as already at the beginning of the prelude where in hovering woodwind chords, devoid of melody, the first strophe of the 'Last Supper' theme reverberates through the four bars that follow its actual termination. It is as though the style of Parsifal sought not merely to represent musical ideas, but to compose their aura as well, as this constructs itself not at the moment of execution, but rather during the music's subsequent decay. This intention can be understood only by whoever surrenders more to the echo of the music than to the music itself.

The static quality of Parsifal, which arises from the idea of an immutable, replic- able ritual in the first and third acts, has a compositional correlative in the renunciation of flowing progress and compelling dynamics for long stretches of the score, with the prominent exception of the second-act Kundry scene. The number of motifs in Parsifal is less than in the other works of Wagner's maturity. Most of them are incantations, signs of the 'Nie sollst du mich befragen' type in Lohengrin, back to which-in many respects and on account of the subject matter-the musical processes in Parsifal refer. As a consequence of their allegorical content, these motifs are as though consumed from within, ascetic, emaciated, desensualized; like the Parszfal idiom in general, they are all somewhat fractured and inessential; the music wears a black visor. From out of the waning of his original inventive powers, Wagner's force produces the virtue of a late style [Altersstil]; a style that, according to Goethe's

dictum, withdraws from appearance. A comparison of the gloomy, so to speak, muted fanfare motif of Parsifal with the Siegfried motif reveals the character of the former: the Parsifal motif seems as though it were already a quotation from memory. At the same time, the fragmentary motifs are much more exposed than those in, for instance, Tristan, much less interwoven, less implicated in the course of the composition, as well as less varied. Often they are just arranged one after another like little pictures with a kind of deliberate insouciance. The clear turning-point of the whole work-Kundry's call, 'Parsifal', emerges from the sound of the flower maiden ensemble-two middle voices are sustained-and in its identity with the preceding it reveals itself as non-identical. In general, the music renounces that 'coming to motion' quality that usually defines Wagner's forms.

A tendency towards simplification corresponds throughout the work to the mere juxtaposition of motifs, to the self-abnegating renunciation of recapitulation [<usam- menfassung] and free Abgesang. When towards the end of the second act the spear hovers over the head of the hero, this miracle is reflected in the music not by means of brilliance and richness of construction, but rather by an extreme reduction of means. The 'Faith' motif in the trumpets and tubas, a harp glissando, and an octave tremolo in the violins: that's all. Throughout Parszfal, the orchestral treatment avoids the dividing up of melody, division into solos, and the ideal of infinitesimal differentiation [das Idealder kleinsten Differenz]. The orchestration here depends more upon a choral treatment of instruments than in the preceding music dramas-one could describe it as Bruckneresque. Orchestral tuttis alternate with recitative-like passages that are given only an intimation of accompaniment. But the refinement of this simplicity is unexampled; the finesses are disposed sparingly, not forgotten. The choral treatment of the instruments is based on instrumental doubling, which allows hardly any instrument or even group of instruments to be recognized when heard. A blended sonority like that at the beginning [bars 9ff. of the score] is unique, when the 'Last Supper' motif returns accompanied, played by violins, oboes, and a trumpet; the last, playing 'very softly' [sehr zart], does not emerge as though it were playing a solo. The art of blending wind instruments, which in Lohengrin was restricted to the woodwinds, is now applied to the brass as well: trumpets as well as tubas are readily doubled by horns, these latter already employed to the utmost. This subdues the sharp clarity of the sound; it becomes at once fuller and darker, as consequently does overall the timbre of Parsifal; this dim orchestral sound of muted forti became very important for new music, through late Mahler to Schoenberg.

The tendency towards simplification became archaization in the compositional material: the liturgical modes are evoked. With his most advanced compositional praxis, Wagner seeks to mitigate the long-standing dichotomy in his work-fanfare- like diatonicism versus yearning chromaticism-by banishing chromaticism to hell: the Tristan chord, in the low registers of the woodwinds, now symbolizes Klingsor's realm, and diatonicism is meanwhile alienated and darkened by means of modal chord combinations and striking secondary scale-degrees in the minor. These bring about the often noted resemblance between the style of Parsifal and that of Brahms's music. Rut this resemblance is only one among the harmonic resources employed, and does not bear upon the fundamental structure of the composition. This structure scarcely uses polyphonic textures, except for a few motivic combinations, or the distribution of thematic material among different voices [durchgebrochene Arbeit]. Instead, the harmonic language deploys an extraordinarily advanced element, even by comparison with Goiterdammerung: the unresolved dissonance. The prelude ends

on a dominant-seventh chord in the key of A flat major. In accord with traditional harmonic theory, one would incline to interpret the F flat in the trombones' part, with which the first act begins, as a deceptive resolution of the preceding harmony. But because of the caesura created during the rise of the stage curtain, that seventh chord is rendered utterly absolute, questioning infinity.-Furthermore, the diminished-seventh chord with the minor ninth above its root (already used in the Ring) that resounds in the second act upon Parsifal's great outburst, 'Amfortas! Die Wunde!', has no harmonic consequence at all. Instead, the Kundry motif that accompanies the chord plummets downwards from it as a single, unaccompanied melodic line. The phenomenal decomposition of the musical language, which- analogous to the expressionistic stammer of Kundry-breaks up into unconnected elements of expression, threatens the traditional harmonic system. Parsifal marks that historical moment when, for the first time, a multi-layered, dissociated sound is emancipated and self-determinant.

The immediate impact of Parsifal upon composers was certainly far less than that of Tristan, Meistersinger, and the Ring. It suited least of all the New German school; ilan vital and affirmative gestures are so utterly lacking that one believes as little in the final deliverance as in a fairy tale. Especially in the third act a peremptory tone is predominant; in comparison, Parsifal's deed of redemption seems to be mere illusion and impotent; in the end, Wagner is more faithful to his Schopenhauer than those who reduce him to a mere spokesman for renewal would wish. Precisely on this account was the subliminal effect of Parsifal so much more enduring. Whatever has renounced false splendour was always first built upon it: the sacral opera is a harbinger of matter-of-factness [Sachlichkeit]. There is already an overt reminiscence of the funeral music of Titurel in the mournful bell choir passage in Mahler's Third Symphony, and Mahler's Ninth is inconceivable without the third act of Parsifal, especially the pale luminosity of the 'Good Friday Spell'. But the strongest influence was that upon Debussy's Pellkas et Milisande. The French anti-Wagnerite's opera is like a dreamy musical shadow of the music drama. The sparse outline, the static juxtaposition of sounds, the veiled timbres, the suffusion of archaic and modern- the Middle Ages as pre-history-all this comes from Parsifal, and the rhythm of Pars- ifal's motif haunts Debussy's work, which stands at the threshold of new Western music and already at that of neo-Classicism. Through Parsifal, Wagner's power pro- foundly influenced the generation that forswore him. With Parsifal, his school tran- scended them.

What Parsifal and Pelgas have in common are their Jugendstil characteristics, which Wagner inaugurated in Germany long before the movement received its name. The aura of the pure fool corresponds to that of the word 'youth' around 1900, the 'casually dropped' flower maidens to the first Jugendstil ornaments; in Mdisande such an ornament became a heroine. As in Jugendstil, the idea of the Buh- nenweihfestspiel is indeed one of Kunstreligion ('art-religion'). (The word long predates Wagner and is found in Hegel's writings). By means of the particular consequence of its style, the aesthetic creation is supposed to conjure a metaphysical meaning, the substance of which is lacking in the disenchanted world. Parsifal is charged with the production of this sort of 'consecration', to which the aura of the characters as well as the resounding music are dedicated. In Parsifal, the power of redemption is entrusted chimerically to the artistic expression of blind will (which according to Schopenhauerian dogma is the essence of the world), to the glorification of appease- ment, and to the denial of the will through pity. Out of the futility of this hope,

though, out of the falsehood of Parsgal, emerges its truth: the impossibility of conjur- ing lost meaning from spirit [Geist] alone. The redeemer of (and through) art [Kunsterloser] needs redemption himself, like a secret Klingsor. What endures in Parsifal is the expression of the frailty of conjuration itself.

COMMENTARY

I>er Knecht hat erstochen den edeln Herrn, Der Knecht war' selber ein Ritter gern. Er hat ihn erstochen im dunkeln Wain Und den 1,eib versenket im tiefen Rhein; Hat angeleget die Rustung blank, Auf des Herren ROBsich geschwungen frank. Und als er sprengen will uber die Bruck', I)a stutzet das ROB und baumt sich zuruck, und als er die guldnen Sporen ihm gab, Ila schleudert's ihn wild in den Strom hinab. blit Arm, mit FuB er rudert und ringt: Der schwere Panzer ihn niederzwingt.

Ludwig Uhland, 'Die Rache' ('Kevenge')'

'l'he srrvant stabbed the noble lord, I 'l'hr servant would himself qladly be a kniqht. / He stabbet1 him in the dark qrove / and sank the bod) in the derp Khine; i He put on the shining armour / and boldly mounted the lurd's horse. / And just as he determined to bound across the bridge, / the steed suddenly stopped and reared, . and as the servant prodded him with gilded spurb, I the horse llung him into the river below. 1With arm and foot the : rnan t thrashed and struggled: but thr heavy armour pulled him down.

Uhland's obscure poem obliquely reflects Adorno's suspicious gaze. The armour of the drowning swimmer is surely not only a metaphor for the cumbersome leitmotivs of Wagner's mature works; the swimmer himself resembles all too closely the composer as he sometimes appeared to Adorno: a usurper, a novice pretending to mastery, a fraudulent revolutionary who in truth merely envied his oppressors. It is characteristic that the resonances of Adorno's allusion should emerge only with a reading of the poem. 'On the Score of I'arsijal' has the gnomic, allusive and cryptic qualities of many of Adorno's essays on music, and a clear understanding of it demands a careful exegesis of its content and context. To understand the individual ideas in the essay, it is often also necessary to be acquainted with their appearances elsewhere in Adorno's writings. In many instances, especially for the reader less armed than Adorno from the arsenals of literature and philosophy, it is nearly impossible to draw any meaning at all from certain of his remarks before one discovers and reflects upon these additional sources.

'On the Score of I'arsijal' was first published in 1956 as a programme note.' It is

I am deeply indebted to Professor Susanne ['ill of the Theaterwissenschaftliche Fakultat der llniversitat Rayreuth, (k rman) : her profol~nd understanding oSAdorno's language was of invaluable assistance during the preparation of the present translation. I am also grateful to I'rofessors Edward Said. Daniel Purdy. Ll'alter Frisch and Edward L,ipp- man of C:olumbia L'niversity, New York, for their advire and comments.

' Uhlands Werke, ed. Ludwig Frankel, i (Leipzig, 1893), 221. Theaterzezt~chr$t der Ileulschen Oper am Hhezn, i/3 (1956-7). 'l'he essay ran be Ibund in Muszka6sche Schrqten, iv:

moments rnustcaux, Impromptus ('Theodor W. Adorno: C;esammelte Schriften'. xvii), Frankfurt, 1982, pp. 47-52; and Rzchard Wagner: 'Pars2fal'. Texte, Matenalen, hornmentare, ed. Attila C:sampai & Dietmar Holland. Keinbek, nr. Ifamburg, 1984, pp. lC)l-5.

one of numerous writings Adorno produced between 1933 and 1967 that form an evolving assessment of Wagner and his works. Of these writings, the most substan- tial and ambitious were gathered as a book, Versuch uber Wagner, written during 1937-8.3 During those years, Adorno's critique of the virulent elements of Wag- nerian ideology was especially urgent, given the triumphant ascent of National Socialism in Germany and the contemporary appropriation of Wagner as a Titurel- like ideologue of Fascism. In the post-war years, Adorno's Wagner studies acquired a more meditative, conciliatory tone that was perhaps more in harmony with the task of cultural and political reconstruction. The essay maintains several of the cate- gories that Adorno had used earlier to construct the Versuch. In fact, a good deal of the material in the essay is a restatement of the aesthetic and political positions and of music-analytic insights that Adorno offered in the Versuch, substantiating the defensive assertion he made during the 1960s that his fundamental attitude towards Wagner had never changed. This assertion, however, would be pointedly qualified by Adorno with regard to the Parsifal essay.

Even where Adorno has borrowed ideas whole or in part from the Versuch, the emphases of that study have been shifted; its sometimes condemnatory tone has been to some degree modulated in order to dwell soberly on specific compositional aspects of the Parsifal score and to illuminate and emphasize a latent emancipatory moment in it as well. This emancipatory moment had already been discovered in the Versuch; Adorno found it nascent in the third act of Tristan und Zsolde, wherein 'music, the most magic of all the arts, learns how to break the spell it casts over the character^'.^

Adorno plainly pursued the aesthetic reclamation and rehabilitation of Wagner in his 1963 lecture 'Wagners Akt~alitat ' .~ The publication of this lecture in Die zeit in 1964 occasioned an extended reaction to Adorno's remarks, which some found still too damning, others too revisionist and placatory. In a 'Nachschrift' to this debate,6 Adorno took considerable pains to clarify his position vis-a-vis Wagner. His final rejoinder was a cautious one. He made clear that the stern critical apercu that was the pre-eminent hallmark of the Versuch remained-some 30 years later-essentially unchanged. In particular, Adorno rejected as hermeneutically sterile any attempt to contemplate Wagner's works in isolation from the often deplorable reality of his per- sona, and vice versa: 'There is no "Wagner without music"'. Offering proof that he had in no way recanted any of his earlier positions or utterances on Wagner, he reminded readers that only one year earlier he had authorized the unaltered repub- lication of the chapter on orchestration ('Farbe') from the Versuch. But he carefully reserved to himself 'the right to further pursue what was at that time observed and conceived, to refine, to take cognizance of changes that arise in the inherent historical development of Wagner's works; it would be a poor dialectic that brought its own terms to a standstill. The essay on Parsifal . . . and the lecture on Wagner's relevance are stages of such a reflection."

Dte mustkalischen Monographten ("Theodor W .Adorno: Gesammelte Schriften', xiii), Frankfurt, 1977, pp. 7-148. Throughout the present commentary, references to 'Zur Partitur des Parsifal' are made to 'the Parsifal essay' or simply 'the essay', and references to the Versuch uber Wagner are made to 'the Versuch' rather than to the less abridge- able title of the published English translation. Rut for the convenience of the reader, passages from the Versuch are cited from that translation, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London, 1984). ' In Search of Wagner, p. 156. ' Musikahsche Schnften, i i i ("theodor W .Adorno: Gesammelte Schriften', xvi), Frankfurt, 1978, pp. 543-64. "bid., pp. 665-70.

Ibid., pp. 666-7. Furthermore, according to Susanne Vill, Adorno acknowledged publicly in 1968 that the Versuch wohd need to be revised.

The essay on Parsifal, then, is a peculiarly revealing portal on to Adorno's Wagner critique, and must not be overlooked simply because it is so brief and is derived in part from earlier writings. Indeed, the undertones of Adorno's fanfares for modernism are felt throughout the essay, and he gazes more resolutely on that horizon that he earlier glimpsed at the close of the Versuch, a horizon where a cultural 'salvation of Wagner' ('eine Rettung Wagners'" might be had.

The non-linear, fractured and abbreviated qualities of Adorno's prose are fully in evidence in the present case. Adorno does not ofler a comprehensive, coherent valuation of Parsifal, an overarching verdict on the whole work. He instead produces a force field of dialectically charged polarities, among which his thoughts rebound rather than progress in good order. Just as he repeatedly rejected 'wholeness' as an epistemological fraud (as were Wagner's various evocations of it), so he makes no attempt here to bind his thoughts with an illusory coherence or concord. For him, Parsifal manifests both regressive ideology and a content of epiphanic truth. His her- meneutic method was, with uncharacteristic clarity, explained in the 1952 'Selbstan-zeige des Essaybuches Versuch uber Wagner', where he comments on the 'micrological' method of the Versuch:

There is [in the Versuch] no fundamental principle, no comprehensive analysis of the works, no summarizing or conclusions, but the book rather proceeds immediately to the observation of individual elements and is committed to the close interpretation of details and minute characteristics, which is directed towards an understanding of the whole. In general, the part stands for the whole. . . I hoped to push from the innermost elements of the aesthetic structure outwards towards broad philosophical and social connections. which otherwise would remain cultural chatter without substance."

The ~rocedure lends Adorno's prose the character of a mosaic, reconstructed in part from the keen fragments of earlier mosaics; the reconfigured pieces yield new images. Adorno had at his disposal many models for the incompleteness andjagged- ness of the Parsifal essay-Wagner himself not least among them. Wagner's music, according to 'Wagners Aktualitat', is 'given into our hands unfinished, like something yet to be pursued. something unwhole'.'" Adorno's essay is composed of parts that decline to form a whole; it is an assemblage of the membra diyecta to which he was so heedful.

Unlike the Ring, whose vast trajectory-leading from the dire consequences of Alberich's forswearing of love through the submergence of reality in the lyrical clair- voyance of Briinnhilde's sacrifice-presents a comprehensive, if not always coherent ideology, Parsifal-beginning in medias res with a puzzling sibylline prophecy that leads finally to an equally puzzling, gnomic apotheosis-seems to suspend its own claims to truth: 'redemption to the Redeemer' ('Erlosung dem Erloser') mocks interpretation. The suspension of clear intentions has consequences for the work's exegesis. The ambivalent Christianity, the aggressive derogation of the senses, the shocking exploitation of the feminine, the dubious social configuration of the Grail Order, and more: all these elements contribute to problematizing Parsifal as an ideologically fradulent work. And it has been criticized as such in many quarters, often with gusto. Robert Gutman's well-known critique of Parsifal and its composer reaches dire conclusions, which have been amplified by Hartmut Zelinsky. In

i c Selbstanzeige dcs Essaybuches L2rsuch uber Cthgner', I ) IP muslkah~rhen :Mono~raphzen, p. 506.

" Ibid., p. 505. l o !iluszkahsche SchrGen, iii. 563

response to this, others, such as Lucy Beckett and Michael Tanner, have sought moderating positions vis-a-vis the ideological content of the work."

'On the Score of Parsifal' is the most extended set of reflections that Adorno offered on Wagner's last completed work. He certainly saw the ideological taint of his subject, pointing out in the Versuch several relevant aspects of the work; mention of them is conspicuously absent in the later essay. Such is his earlier analogy between the Grail knights of Parsifal and the elite paramilitary formations of National Socialism: in the Versuch he identified the 'glorified blood-brotherhood' of the Grail as the 'prototype of the sworn confraternities of the secret societies and Fiihrer-orders' of the Third Reich. (The connection between Wagnerian ideology as expressed in the composer's writings and operas, and political and social praxis 50 years after his death remains to this day a thorny historiographical problem. Adorno's treatment of it was never, I find, satisfactory or complete.) The subject is excluded from the Parslfal essay. In the Versuch, Adorno criticized the immutability and arbitrariness of ethical and moral judgements in Parsifal, particularly regarding sexual behaviour-he wrote of Wagner's equation of pleasure with sickness. He even cast a suspicious gaze on Wagner's motives for composing Parsifal, recalling the composer's baser pecuniary instincts as well as his relentless self-absorption. He is silent on these points as well in the later essay. In both the Versuch and the Parsifal essay, however, he decried Wagner's verbosity and ponderousness as well as the cultic, fetishistic character that Wagner conferred upon the Buhnenweihfestspiel, the festival drama for the dedication of a theatre.

The 'salvation of Wagner' finds its impetus in Adorno's hypothesis of a music- historical dialectic, through which, as he put it in the 'Selbstanzeige', 'the whole of modern music developed in resistance to Wagner's supremacy, and yet all its elements are already present in his work'.I2 Subsidiary antithetical and paradoxical relationships connected with the musical materials and procedures of Wagner's works stand as postulates to this basic hypothesis. In the Parsifal essay, these relationships play an important role in the critique, and a decisive one for Adorno's rescue of the work. It is finally the musical language of the work that defeats its master. As expressed in the 'Selbstanzeige', 'the claims of health, soundness, com- municativeness, and agreeableness' are rejected, and the musical language is wielded 'against the very power that it serves'.13

Those progressive elements of technique in Parsifal by which Adorno orientates his thoughts include the dearth of musical motifs in the opera (compared with the Ring), its fragmentary quality, and the rigorous economy of material means- instrumental means in particular; but also related to this notion are the unmediated juxtaposition of motifs and the renunciation of musical progress in favour of stasis. Other aspects of the work that have a dialectical function in Adorno's critique are the magic, ritualistic content, the preponderance of archaic musical materials and procedures, and the ornamental characteristics.

All these elements had already been treated by Adorno in some way in the Versuch, and a comparison of their appearances in the Parsifal essay with their

' I Robert W. Gutman, Rzchard Wagner: the Man, his Mtnd andhu Muszc, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1968, Chap. 16, 'Moral Collapse: "Heldentum" and Parslfal', 421-40; Hartmut Zelinsky, 'Rettung ins Ungenau. Zu Martin Gregor-Dellins Wagner-Riographie', Rzchard Wagner, 'ParslfalJ('Musik-Konzepte',xxv), ed. Heinz-Klaus Metzger & Rainer Riehn, Munich, 1982, pp. 74-115; Lucy Beckett, 'Wagner and his Critics', The Wagner Compan~on, ed. Peter Burbidge & Richard Sutton, London, 1979, pp. 371-2; Michael Tanner, 'The Total Work of Art', ibid., pp. 205-18.

l 2 'Selbstanzeige', p. 504. Ibid., p. 507.

appearances in the book is as instructive as it is indeed often necessary. In a description of Wagner's characteristic sonority in the Versuch, for example, Adorno described as 'crass' the linear dissipation of dissonant harmonies without their resolution, such as that of the chord associated with Kundry and its dissolution in arpeg- giation rather than its normative resolution to a consonant harmony.'4 But later in the book, the same phenomenon is celebrated as a virtue; precisely these moments in the music now have an emancipatory role: 'In Parszfal, which begins to subject all purely ornamental elements of music to criticism, the dissonances sometimes emerge openly as the victors, they burst the conventions of resolution and are "resolved" instead into bare single lines'.I5 It is the latter judgement that he sustains in the Parsifal essay. There, Adorno locates with Parszfal 'that historical moment when, for the first time, a multi-layered, dissociated sound is emancipated and self- determinant'. This claim smacks of hyperbole and is surely debatable, but it assigns to Parsifal an importance in the history of compositional technique whose magni- tude was usually reserved for Wagner's Tristan und Isolde-a radical gesture that has had wide repercussions in subsequent Wagner criticism.

In the essay, Adorno takes particular note of the orchestration of Parsifal, calling attention to its characteristic 'extreme reduction of means'. (I am not looking very closely here at the aptness of this description, which, on the whole, seems fair.) This stands in stark contrast to the orchestral extravagance that typically accompanies moments of heightened dramatic import in the earlier music dramas. Dramatic events comparable to Klingsor's perdition and the recovery of the Spear (in Parsifal) such as Siegfried's overcoming of Wotan and the awakening of Briinnhilde (in Sieg- fried) make for instructive comparisons. In the Parsifal essay, the compression of Adorno's views on Wagner's orchestration to a mere few sentences leads to opacity. A comparison of this treatment with the extended development of the same issues in the Versuch illustrates both the importance of a supra-contextual understanding of the essay, as well as the difference in emphases between it and the Versuch.

Basic to Adorno's treatment of orchestration is a dichotomy between progressive and regressive tendencies inherent in Wagner's development of orchestral technique. According to the Versuch, 'the discovery of the productive imaginative power of timbre is not without its negative effects on composition"%ecause it leads to a confusion of appearance with essence. Adorno reminds us in the essay of the 'many respects' in which Parsifal reaches back some 35 years to Lohengrin. In the Versuch, Adorno, too, looks back to Lohengrin for the exemplary instance of Wagner's orches- trational innovations.

The doubling of instruments is a central issue here. The Versuch criticizes '[Wagner's] idiosyncratic resistance to naked instrumental sound whose origins are readily discernible . . .Wagner doubles the instruments-and doubling in unison is the Ur-phenomenon of Wagner's blended timbres'.17 Adorno points out the result of this in Lohengrin : 'the specific sound of each instrument is lost; they can no longer be separated out, and the final sound gives no clue as to how it was created'."

In the Parslfal essay, Adorno similarly notes that 'the choral treatment of the instruments is based on instrumental doubling, which allows hardly any instrument or even group of instruments to be recognized when heard'. But his stricture against Wagner's 'resistance to naked instrumental sound' is not repeated there. Instead, it

I ' In Search o/ M;a(lcner,p. 64. I ' Ibid., p. 67. "' Ih~d . ,p. 79. I Lor. rit '* Ibid., p. 74.

is emphasized that the blending of instruments is a hallmark of the style of Parsifal; it is essential to the 'subdued' and 'darkened' timbre that predominates in the work. In the Versuch, Adorno might well have inclined to note (though he did not) that the Parsifal essay's 'ideal of infinitesimal differentiation' ('Ideal der kleinsten Differenz') is a symptom of Wagner's inclination to disguise the material nature of his creations and their production. Wagner's technique, according to the Versuch, is dedicated to the production of a seamless orchestral sound that masquerades as a naturally given continuum of orchestral colours, unfettered by human and material limitations. The technique is an element of the Wagnerian 'Kunst des ubergangs'. It leads Wagner naturally to the avoidance of even the intimation of an instrumental solo, and Adorno in the essay points to the Parsifal prelude by way of illustration. Wagner's totalizing impulse finally dominates not only the dramatic structure of his works but also the technical processes and materials of their production.

In the Parsifal essay, Adorno does not remind us that he attributed the reification suffered by the orchestra at Wagner's hands to the composer's suppression of the individuality of its instruments. According to the Versuch, although this suppression was one of Wagner's most impressive technical accomplishments, it was an ideologically fatal one. It seems to me, however, that Adorno overstates his case in the Versuch by writing of Wagner's 'idiosyncratic resistance to naked instrumental sound'. Wagner's 'resistance' was not 'idiosyncratic' but, rather, a trope of musical Romanticism: the material nature of sounds and their origins-both temporal and spatial-were to be obscured or entirely concealed from the listener. The hidden orchestra of the Festspielhaus is the entirely unsurprising result of compositional tendencies already evident in the early nineteenth century. For Adorno in the Versuch, Wagner's dissimulation of the origins of sounds and instrumental identity

was explicitly a function of his reification of the orchestra in the service of his own subjectivity; it also contributed to the ornamental aspect of Parsifal: 'the very fact of this doubling introduces something superfluous, false and dressed-up into the orchestration'."

According to the essay, 'the refinement of . . . simplicity [in Parsifal] is unexampled'; Adorno gives the example of the recovery of the Spear at the end of Act 11. Even in the Versuch, Adorno acknowledged the progressive moment of this simplicity:

the much lauded 'simplicity' of the orchestration in Parsifal is . . . not just reactionary or marked by a false religiosity, as compared with Tristan, Die Meistersinger and the Ring. The fact is rather that it carries out a legitimate critique of the ornamental components in Wagner's characteristic style of orchestration. Thus it contains not just the religiose brass choirs but also something of the bleak austerity of sound that was to become dominant in Mahler's last works and subsequently in the Viennese S~hool.~'

(It should be noted that Wagner himself regarded his most expansive orchestral con- ceptions as 'critiques of the ornamental'; according to his remarks in a letter to Theodor Uhlig of 31 May 1852,21the judicious disposal of orchestral sonority was as important an element of his compositional style beginning with the Ring as was harmony or any other parameter.) In the essay, Adorno confirms the continuity

"' Ibid., p. 79.'"Ibid., pp. 79-80. " Rrchard Wagner i Briefe an Theodor Uhlrg, Wrlhelm Fischer, Ferdinand Herne, Leipzig, 1888: 'Wer in einem Urtheil

iiber meine Musik die Harmonie von der lnstrumentation trennt, thut mir ein ebenso groBes Unrecht, wie der, der meine Musik vor meiner Dichtung, meinen Gesang vom Worte trennt!'

between Wagner's technique and modernism, focusing on the special importance of the 'dim orchestral sound of muted forti' for Mahler and Schoenberg.

Adorno was more expansive in his discussion of 'simplicity' in the Versuch, where he associated it with asceticism. 'In art the ascetic ideal is dialectical', and the essay's 'extreme reduction of means' must be so understood. How is asceticism dialectical? According to the Versuch, asceticism subverts 'aesthetic appearance. This helps to make good the promise of art by eliminating the illusory fulfillment in aesthetic form and enabling its own negativity to express the contradiction between the real and the possible.'22 This is but one more moment of the dialectic that Adorno proposes at the end of the Parsifal essay-the emergence of truth out of falsehood.

Among the most provocative ideas in the essay are those not found in the Versuch, two of which are especially noteworthy. First, Adorno proposes the need for a special kind of listening for Parsifal-das Nachhdi-en, which is associated with the limits of sonorous experience, das Verklingen (the fading-away of sounds or their reverberation as they die away). Das Nachhoi-en is Adorno's cognitive correlative for the 'auratic' quality of Parszjal; this is the Benjaminian 'aura', which was surely brought close to Adorno's thoughts during his labours on an edition of Benjamin's works in 1955, about a year before the Parsifal essay was published. Adorno expounded Benjamin's concept at length in his subsequent remarks on Krenek for the 1957-8 season of the Deutsche Oper am Rhein ('Zur Physiognomik K r e n e k ~ ' ) . ~ ~ His present application of the concept of aura is especially apt, as it explains the aesthetic mechanism that produces the 'cultic' aspect of Parszjal. Adorno's prescription of a peculiar, tempor- ally disphased hearing for Parsifal corresponds to Benjamin's formulation of a spatial metaphor of distance for the artwork's cultic quality. Adorno arrogates Ben- jamin's concept to music: according to 'Zur Physiognomik Kreneks', 'music [my emphasis] is the auratic art par excellen~e'.~~

A second such idea is Adorno's observation of the close relationship between Parszjal and Debussy's Pelleas et Me'lisande, both of which show the blemish of Jugendstil aesthetics. Adorno frequently alluded to Jugendstil and always did so with derogatory intent. One such reference in the Versuch is especially pertinent: 'Like Nietzsche and subsequently Art Nouveau [i.e., Jugendstil], which [Wagner] antici- pates in many respects, he would like single-handed to will, casting a magic spell, an aesthetic totality into being with defiant unconcern about the absence of social conditions necessary for its survival'.25 This reappears as a paraphrase in the Parsifal essay: 'By means of the particular consequences of its style, the aesthetic creation is supposed to conjure a metaphysical meaning, the substance of which is lacking in the disenchanted world'. Adorno thus sustains his earlier verdict on Wagner's totalizing impulse. But this charge, levelled here against Wagner, can be found in Adorno's more wide-ranging disputations, as in 'Biirgerliche Oper' (1955), where opera in general is identified as that specifically bourgeois form that 'strives paradox- ically to preserve the magical elements of art within and with recourse to the disenchanted ~ o r l d ' . ~ "

Parsifal not only demonstrates the ornamental quality that is the pre-eminent hallmark of Jugendstil aesthetics but also, through the gift of Adorno's modernist

" In Search of Wagner, p. 80. '' Muszkalzsche Schrz/lten, iv. 109- 13. '' Ibid., p. 100. " In Search of Wagner, p. 101.'"'Hiirgerliche Oper', Muszkalzsche Schr$en, iii. 27.

hindsight, undertakes its critique. In Adorno's own mythology, it is Schoenberg who critically engages the ornamentality of Jugendstil and who finally delivers music from it.

His late work remains a process, though not one of development, but one rather of an alternating polarity between two extremes, which tolerate no sure middle or spontaneous harmony. Between extremes in the most precise technical sense: here to monophony, to unison, to the significant flourish; there to suddenly arisen polyphony. It is subjectivity that forces the extremes together in a moment, subjectivity that summons compressed, tension-laden polyphony, subjectivity that shatters it into unison-and so escapes, leaving behind the denuded tone. The flourish is erected as a memorial to Being, into which the petrified subject itself enters. The caesuras, though, the sudden fragmenting, which more than everything else characterize late Beethoven, are those moments of escape; the work is silent as it is abandoned, and turns its emptiness outward^.^'

Adorno, 'Spatstil Beethovens'

The concept of late style ('S'atstil' or 'Altersstil') is thematic in Adorno's work. The metaphysic of this concept is most extensively developed in his work on Beethoven, especially in 'Spatstil Beethovens' (1937) and the essay on the Missa solemnis (1959). Several of the characteristics ascribed to Beethoven's late style are shared in a sub- stantial way by Parsifal. The above-quoted passage suggests the degree to which Adorno's 'diagnosis' of late Beethoven (Rose Rosengard Subotnik's evocative term for Adorno's Beethoven critique28) offers heuristic insight into the case of Parsifal. Polarization and extreme contrast underlie both the musical and dramatic content of Parsifal: polarization of 'fanfare-like diatonicism' and 'yearning chromaticism', of the ethical universes of the Grail and Klingsor. There are extremes in the most precise technical sense: the juxtaposition of archaic tonal materials and the projec- tion of the most advanced, dissonant musical language so far spoken; the crushing of complex polyphonic rhetoric into monophonic stutter. As for the caesuras: Adorno points to the Parsifal prelude, but no less important are those that periodically bring the work to still silence, such as the diminuendo that accompanies Gurnemanz's impotent sorrow at his recollection of the Spear (Act I) or the immeasurable fissure that opens between Kundry's taunt at Klingsor's castration and the wizard's impotent fury (Act 11).

The terms of Adorno's analysis of Beethoven's late style are not to be transposed whole to that of Parsifal; this simply doesn't work, and Adorno's final results for the two cases are not the same. Wagner differs from late Beethoven decisively and fatally in his attempt finally to resolve or at least to conceal the dichotomies and paradoxes that underlie his work. But the resonance of certain motifs of the discussion of Beethoven's late style in that of Parsifal is one of several indications of the importance of the concept of late style for Adorno's critique.

Adorno claims that the late-style quality of Parsifal compensates for the limitations-'the waning of his original inventive powers' ('das Nachlassen primarer Erfindungskraft')-imposed on creativity by Wagner's advancing years. As a gloss to this claim, Adorno alludes to a 'dictum' of Goethe's which is in fact drawn from the so-called Maximen und Reflexionen, the often obscure aphorisms that Goethe

" Mu~rkalr~cheSchrrften, iv. 16. '"Adorno's Diagnosis of Beethoven's Late Style: Early Symptom of a Fatal Condition', Journal of the Amerrcan

Muszcologrcal Socrety, x x ~ v( 1 976), 242-75.

collected late in his life. The significance of Goethe's dictum in the context of Adorno's essay is difficult to fathom, in part because of its inherently cryptic quality. Although it appears in the Parsifal essay only as a glimmer of a thought, it is certainly bound in a complex way to Adorno's understanding of Goethe and his extended meditation on the Altersstil problem, as witnessed by his much earlier efforts to come to terms with it in his studies of Beethoven. As in the Parsifal essay, Goethe dwells in Adorno's thoughts in 'Spatstil Beethovens', where Goethe's own late style is equated with the composer's on account of a shared intolerance of received conventions and their constant reinvention of conventions in response to the demands of expre~sion.~" Adorno's position is greatly clarified by an understanding of Goethe's idea, which rests amid a collection of fragmentary, yet related thoughts. The following are the relevant passages from the original sequence:

Die Manifestation der Idee als des Schonen ist ebenso fliichtig als die Manifestation des Erhabenen, des Geistreichen, des Lustigen, des Lacherlichen. Dies ist die Ursache. warum so schwer dariiber zu reden ist.

Zum Schonen wird erfordert ein Gesetz, das in die Erscheinung tritt. Beispiel von der Rose. In den Bliiten tritt das vegetabilische Gesetz in seine hochste Erscheinung, und die Rose ware nun wieder der Gipfel dieser Erscheinung. Perikarpien konnen noch schon sein. Die Frucht kann nie schon sein; denn da tritt das vegetabilische Gesetz in sich (ins blosse Gesetz) zuruck.

Das Gesetz, das in die Erscheinung tritt, in der groRten Freiheit, nach seinen eigensten Bedingungen, bringt das objektiv Schone hervor, welches freilich wurdige Subjekte finden muB, von denen es aufgefaRt wird.

Schonheit der Jugend aus obigem abzuleiten. Alter: stufenweises Zuriicktreten aus der Erscheinung. Inwiefern das Alternde schon genannt werden kann. Ewige Jugend der griechischen Getter.'"

The manifestation of the idea as beauty is just as transitory as the manifestation ol the exalted, the spirited, the merry, the comical. This is the reason why it is so difficult to discuss.

A principle must necessarily exist for beauty, which is manifest in the apprarance of beauty. Take the example of a rose. The veqetative principle is manifest in its most elevated apprarance in the bloom; the rose is as though the 'peak' of appearance. Even the rind of the fruit can be beautiful. 'l'he fruit can never be beautiful, because the veqetative principle resides within merely as principle.

The principle that emerges-in utmost freedom and in satislaction of its own requirements-in appearance brings forth objective beauty, which indeed must surely find worthy subjects who will apprehend it.

The beauty ol youth is derived from the above. Old age: the qradual withdrawal lrom appearance. That extent to which the aging can be rrqardrd as beautiful Eternal youth of the Greek gods.

Goethe's concept of late style is discussed in a monograph by Hans Joachim Schr im~f,who connects the 'stufenweises Zuriicktreten aus der Erscheinung' with phenomena of two general types: the biological and psychological events of the artist's aging; and a fundamentally mystical Weltanschauung, a spiritualization, a meditativeness and a tendency towards abstraction manifest in his artistic

" I Mu~zkahsche Schrt j~en, iv. 14. "' Schrtjten zur K u n ~ f , Schrt/len zur Lzleratur, Maxtmen und Heflexzonen ('Goethes Cl'erk', xii), Harnburq, 1053, p. 470.

product^.^' The concept of Altersstil is rooted in Goethe's own philosophy of nature, according to which the concealed laws of ontology are manifest in the matured organism, just as a rose is the manifestation of the natural laws inherent in the seed from which it grows. Adorno, with new intentions, has enriched Goethe's concept with post-Hegelian dichotomies of subject and object, essence and appearance. His own articulation of the concept may have been especially influenced by a peculiar book about Goethe by Georg Simme1.32 In the chapter of that book entitled 'Entwicklung', Adorno may well have discovered Simmel's highly articulated metaphysic of late style in a discussion that moves from a specialized consideration of Goethe's works to a transcendental concept of Spatstil. At the very climax of the argument, at the end of a catalogue of Spitstil icons, Simmel names Pa~s i fa l .~~

The Altersstil concept has a broad application, and indeed touches upon the fractured and unconsolidated characteristics of Parsijal. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno claims that a 'critical stance towards the notion of internal consistency' is a mark of a mature artist. Adorno there gives the example of late Beethoven as an artist who, having mastered the techniques of integration and cohesion, was 'able to mobilize disintegration eventually'. 'At this point in the career of an artist', Adorno continues, 'the truth content of art whose vehicle was integration turns against art.'34

The importance of the Goethe reference is made very plain by its appearance in a very different context: Adorno's 'Schoenberg and Progress' (1941).35In Goethe's concept of Altersstil, Adorno's meditations on late Wagner and the music of Schoen- berg momentarily converge. In Adorno's teleology of music history, this con-vergence is pivotal; Parsifal faces the threshold of modernism.

Adorno associates fragmentation-the idiom of Parsijal is 'fractured and un- essential' while that of Schoenberg's expressionist period is similarly dissociated 'into fragment~'~~--with the unmediated manifestation of the subject. Adorno is explicit in the Schoenberg essay: 'That which Goethe commended in his old age- the step-by-step withdrawal from the phenomenon-can be understood in artistic concepts as the process by which material becomes no more than a matter of indif- feren~e.'~'In the Parsifal essay, Adorno intends the same: 'a style [i.e., the manifestation of subjectivity] that . . . withdraws from appearance'. In fact, this process is adequately described in neither the Parsifal essay nor 'Schoenberg and Progress' but instead is expounded at length in 'Spatstil Beethovens', where Adorno lingers long on the subject of death. The late work lies about in fragments because of the indiffer- ence of the dying artist; the step-by-step withdrawal of the subject imagined by Goethe is, in Adorno's alternative imagery, an abrupt evacuation, an escape from disaster. The powerful, almost Miltonic allegory of the Beethoven essay was not forgotten: later, in the Schoenberg essay, as though he now sensed the affinities of the images, Adorno quoted in extenso from his own Beethoven essay as if to preface Goethe's dictum.

Goethe: Spiitzeit, Alterstil, Zeztkritik, Pfullingen, 1966, p. 7.'*Goethe, Leipzig, 1913. " The relationship of Simmel's to Adorno's metaphysics of Spiilsttl and the history of the concept are treated in

my dissertation 'Richard Wagner's Parsifal and the Hermeneutics of Late Style' (Columbia Univenity; in progress) and in my article 'Richard Wagner's Parsifal and the Theory of Late Style', Cambridge Opera Journal, vii (1995), 1-18.

34 Aesthetic Theory, trans. C . Lenhardt, ed. Gretel Adorno & Rolf Tiedemann, London, 1984, p. 67. " In The Philosophy oJModern Music, trans. Anne G .Mitchell &Wesley V. Blomster, New York, 1985, pp. 29-134. "'Ibid., p. 118. " Ibid., p. 120.

Adorno's 'On the Score of Parsifal' is among the briefest of his Wagner critiques, but it is not less important to our reading of the Adorno ca.non than the much more extended Venuch. Apart from its purely practical function as a performance note (one wonders what his audience of opera-goers could have thought of it), the essay is a gesture of reconciliation, not only towards Wagner's work but to Adorno's own as well. The edifice of his earlier Wagner critique is revisited, and much of it lies in the essay as rubble. It is less assertive, more ambivalent than the Versuch. Many fragments of his earlier image of Wagner remain, but they lie scattered, some still sharp and glittering, others dulled.

You have printed the following article:

On the Score of 'Parsifal'Theodor W. Adorno; Anthony BaroneMusic & Letters, Vol. 76, No. 3. (Aug., 1995), pp. 384-397.Stable URL:


This article references the following linked citations. If you are trying to access articles from anoff-campus location, you may be required to first logon via your library web site to access JSTOR. Pleasevisit your library's website or contact a librarian to learn about options for remote access to JSTOR.

[Footnotes]

28 Adorno's Diagnosis of Beethoven's Late Style: Early Symptom of a Fatal ConditionRose Rosengard SubotnikJournal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 29, No. 2. (Summer, 1976), pp. 242-275.Stable URL:

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-0139%28197622%2929%3A2%3C242%3AADOBLS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-T

http://www.jstor.org

LINKED CITATIONS- Page 1 of 1 -

NOTE: The reference numbering from the original has been maintained in this citation list.

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0027-4224%28199508%2976%3A3%3C384%3AOTSO%27%3E2.0.CO%3B2-0&origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-0139%28197622%2929%3A2%3C242%3AADOBLS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-T&origin=JSTOR-pdf

score of 'parsifal

Documents