Hermann Levi's shame and Parsifal's guilt: A critique of essentialism in biography and criticism

Abstract

Two dissimilar subjects – Hermann Levi (1839–1900), a Jewish Wagnerian who conducted the Bayreuth première of Parsifal, and Parsifal itself – can be seen in a critical discourse that binds them together in a paradoxical relationship. In accounts of both Levi and the opera he conducted, certain historians and critics have made a point of stripping away a supposed veneer of aesthetic deception in order to expose the raw underbelly of historical truth. In these revisionist readings, Levi's enthusiasm for Wagner and his music amounts to a shameful form of Jewish ‘self-hatred’, while Parsifal, far from espousing a message of compassion and redemption, propagates ideas of an solidarity and racial supremacy. To advance these arguments is tantamount to claiming that moral and psychological categories such as shame and guilt are appropriate ways to describe a musician's life or the historical legacy of an opera; and these are views I find difficult to share. The slogan in my title should thus be understood as an ironic commentary, as well as a call to formulate the questions in a new way. Although I can only sketch the outlines of an alternative approach, I will suggest that critical accounts shaming Hermann Levi for his Wagnerism, and damning Parsifal for its anti-Semitism, are cut from the same cloth; they need to be revalued by a musicology that traffics in both an aesthetic understanding of art works and a critical assessment of the cultural framework in which this understanding is produced.