Wagner's last chorus: Consecrating space and spectatorship in Parsifal

Abstract

In Opera and Drama Richard Wagner promised to abolish the opera chorus. Although the chorus's continued appearance in Wagner's later works seems to belie this pledge, this essay argues that Wagner symbolically made good on his promise in his treatment of the knights in Parsifal. For most of the drama, the knights serve as active, even demanding, participants. Yet as 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, the theatrical space that Parsifal -Wagner's Bühnenweihfestspiel -was written to consecrate. This dramaturgical transformation is matched by a musical one, in which the intense chromaticism marking much of the knights' earlier music is abandoned for a mediated yet insistent diatonicism far removed from the chromatic space of the principals. By eliminating the chorus from the active sphere of the drama, Wagner counteracted a Nietzschean ideal of communal authorship 'from below' that had previously dominated German theorising of the chorus.Thus Wagner created a phantasmal world of sounding space, of visible sound, of acting schemata, of singing concepts and conceptual tones. He called it Parsifal.

Voicing Le Neutre in the invisible choir in Richard Wagner’s Parsifal

“…Luke 22: 17-19; Mark 14: 22-24; Matthew 26: 26-28). The order was reversed in the sketches; first was blood and thereafter came the bread (Minor 2005: 5, fn 9; Kinderman 1995: 90). In the Gospels (except for Luke) and in St. Paul's account (1 Corinthians 11: 23-26) the bread is always the first, as it was to be also in Parsifal.…”

“…The next sung phrase in Parsifal with boy sopranos and female altos calls for another article. 17 Similarly, omitting all the tenors would destroy the chance for the vocal Neutrum, a point missed by Minor (2005: 4 fn 8) as he states that the "inclusion of Wagner employed the voices of female altos, he made a linguistic travesty by casting the women altos as males: they appear as Youths (Jünglinge) along with the tenors in the list of dramatis personae.…”

“…tenor voices in some of the treble chorus's music (at the same pitch level) is similarly unintelligible". 18 This applies also to the layering, which cannot be deciphered either visually or audibly (Minor 2005: 4 fn 8). 19 Gutman (1968: 403-404) points out that also Dresden's Frauenkirche may have served as a possible model for the Grail temple.…”