Good Friday
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The Soul Silent
 Our
conversation leads us to the mystic Meister Eckhart; R. begins to read a
sermon by him, which fascinates us to the highest degree.
Everything turned inward, the soul silent, so that in it, God may
speak the hidden word! 
[Cosima's Diary, 26 October
1873]
The
absence of all ideality brings the soul blissful peace, says R., and the way to this peace
is through Jesus Christ.
[Cosima's Diary, 27 October
1873]
Talked
with R. about Buddhism and
Christianity. Perception of the world much greater in Buddhism,
which, however, has no monument like the Gospels, in which divinity
is conveyed to our consciousness in a truly historic form. The
advantage of Buddhism is that it derives from Brahmanism, whose
dogmas can be put to use where science reveals gaps, so
far-reaching are its symbols. The
Christian teaching is, however, derived
from the Jewish religion, and that is its dilemma. Christ's
suffering moves us more than Buddha's fellow-suffering, we suffer with him and
become Buddhas, through
contemplation. Christ wishes to suffer, suffers, and redeems us;
Buddha looks on commiserates, and
teaches us how to achieve redemption.
[Cosima's Diary, 28 October
1873]
Day of Redemption
Today is
Good Friday again! - O, blessed day! Most deeply portentous day in
the world! Day of redemption! God's
suffering! Who can grasp the enormity of it? And yet, this same
ineffable mystery - is it not the most familiar of mankind's
secrets? God, the Creator, - he must remain totally unintelligible
to the world: - God, the loving teacher, is dearly beloved, but not
understood:- but the God who suffers, - His name is inscribed in
our hearts in letters of fire; all the obstinacy of existence is
washed away by our immense pain at seeing God suffering! The
teaching which we could not comprehend, it now affects us: God is
within us, - the world has been overcome! Who created it? An idle
question! Who overcame it? God within our hearts, - God whom we
comprehend1 in the deepest anguish of
fellow-suffering! -
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A warm
and sunny Good Friday, with its mood of sacred solemnity, once
inspired me with the idea of writing Parsifal; since then
it has lived within me and prospered, like a child in its mother's
womb. With each Good Friday it grows a year older, and I then
celebrate the day of its conception, knowing that its birthday will
follow one day.
[Letter to King Ludwig, 14 April
1865]
 n Wagner's poem it is on Good Friday that Parsifal arrives at the edge of the forest
with the Spear and with a burden of guilt.
Here Wagner seems to be following his sources, in which Perceval or Parzival, who had
not been inside a church or made confession in several years, met
some pilgrims who were shocked to see him wearing armour on the
holiest of days, Good Friday. They directed him to an old hermit
whom they had just visited. In Wagner's drama the old hermit is
identified with the knight Gurnemanz. Parsifal's guilt is only increased when
Gurnemanz tells him of the death of Titurel and of the decay of the Grail community.
Und ich, ich bin's
der all dies Elend schuf!
Ha! Welcher Sünden,
welches Frevels Schuld
muss dieses Toren Haupt
seit Ewigkeit belasten.
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And I, it is I,
who brought this woe on all!
Ha! What transgression,
such a load of sin
must this my foolish head
bear from all eternity.
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| Soon after, however, Gurnemanz blesses the new Grail king and cries out to heaven: |
Du - Reiner!
Mitleidsvoll Duldender,
heiltatvoll Wissender!
Wie des Erlös'ten Leiden
du gelitten,
die letzte Last entnimm nun
seinem Haupt!
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O - Pure One!
Pitying sufferer,
all-wise deliverer!
As the redeeming torments
you once suffered,
now lift the last load
from his head!
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 Good
Friday Spell, orchestral version; Bayreuth Festival Orchestra
conducted by Siegfried Wagner; recorded in the Bayreuth
Festspielhaus in December 1926. Ogg format, mono, duration 11
min.
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Left: Kundry and Parsifal with the Holy Spear on Good Friday, Franz
Stassen, 1901. Above their scene in the meadow, the artist shows
angels collecting Christ's blood in the Holy Grail.
 bviously this is a reference to the sufferings of
Christ. Or is it? On closer examination it turns out that the Good
Friday morning scene is ambiguous from start to end. What at first
appear to be references to Christian doctrine can also be seen as
references to Buddhist doctrine. As Carl
Suneson has suggested, Wagner's spiritual hero Parsifal can be seen as a bodhisattva in
the Buddhist Maháyána tradition, as well as a Christ- figure. These
alternatives are not mutually exclusive, since some Buddhists have
accepted Christ as a bodhisattva and thus integrated Jesus into
their own belief-system. In the study of the bodhisattva-doctrine
by Har Dayal we can read the following:
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According
to the Sata-sáhasriká Prajñapáramitá, a bodhisattva shows
his karuná [usually translated as compassion or
fellow-suffering] chiefly by resolving to suffer the torments and
agonies of the dreadful purgatories during innumerable æons, if
need be, so that he may lead all beings to perfect Enlightenment.
He desires Enlightenment first for all beings and not for himself.
He is consumed with grief on account of the sufferings of others,
and does not care for his own happiness. He desires the good and
welfare of the world.
[Har Dayal, The Bodhisattva Doctrine
in Buddhist Sanskrit Literature, 1932]
It is
still Good Friday as the final curtain comes down on Wagner's
Bühnenweih- festspiel and Good Friday still symbolises
Christ's sacrificial act on behalf of humanity; and it is entirely
characteristic of Parsifal that he
effects the miracle of the return of the Spear on the holiest of all days, without knowing
it was that day until Gurnemanz
told him. There is thus a reciprocal, mutually interactive
connection between Parsifal and
the Grail (already observable in Act 1) and
between the Spear and the Blood in the Holy Chalice; and as
Parsifal prepares to ascend the
steps of the shrine to take the Chalice from the boys who have
already opened the Holy Shrine in preparation for this moment, the
point of the Spear glows red in mutual
attraction and empathy with the Blood in the cup.
[Ian Beresford Gleaves, in Wagner
News, July 1995]
Religion and Spirituality
 ichael Tanner, in his essay The
Total Work of Art, regards Parsifal as being a work
about religion, more precisely the psychopathology of religious
belief. He suggests that the words of Gurnemanz are addressed, not to Christ,
but to Parsifal as man redeemed
and transfigured. There is a certain tidiness about this view of
the text, in which Parsifal not
only restores the power of the Grail to
intervene in the human world, but becomes a new Christ, one that
does not die. This interpretation seems to be adopted in
productions in which Amfortas
shares the same fate as Kundry:
Wieland Wagner suggested that this was necessary for reasons of
symmetry. It is also consistent with some of the medieval sources, in which Anfortas is a symbol, or type, of Christ
and the unseen Titurel is a symbol
of the hidden Creator. In this symbolic interpretation of the
Grail legend, the Grail bearer (Wolfram's Repanse de
Schoye) is a symbol of the Virgin Mary, who bears the Grail, which represents the body of Christ.
 anner's interpretation seems to stretch the text too
far, however: Gurnemanz's words
are clearly about Parsifal but
addressed to the once-suffering Redeemer. Wagner's letter to King Ludwig of 7 September 1865 is
evidence that the composer related
Parsifal to Christ, but not that
he identified his hero with Christ;
Wagner repeatedly denied that Parsifal was a Christ figure. It is true
that the religious symbolism reinforces the relationship between
Parsifal and Christ: in the last
act, the episode of the Magdalen and
the dove descending, as at the baptism of Christ in St. John's Gospel. So it was
natural that Parsifal should be
represented as a Christ figure in the first productions outside
Bayreuth, productions which treated Parsifal as a
religious work rather than a work about religion or as a
non-religious work employing the symbols of religion. The composer's
instructions do not imply an identification between Parsifal and Christ, nor do they indicate
that Amfortas should die - as in
Wolfram, at the end of the opera he is
restored to health and lives on. To some extent the symbols have moved into the foreground,
obscuring the meanings that Wagner had intended to convey to the
audience. Therefore it would seem to be justified to reduce or
remove some of the religious
symbolism, as some recent productions
have done.
 nother view of the work is that it
is about spirituality rather than religion. The elements of
mystical Christianity and Buddhism
give the work its tension between redemption through the suffering of Christ and
redemption obtained by following the
Buddha down the path of
enlightenment. Wagner was also interested in oriental religion and
spirituality, for example in the poems of the Sufi mystic Hafiz. Parsifal's enlightenment seems to come
from within, from God within our hearts, - God whom we
comprehend in the deepest anguish of fellow-suffering speaking the
hidden word .
Spiritual Awakening
[Wagner
was] still convinced of the pain inherent in being alive, and of
the sovereign value of the identification of one's own sufferings
with those of others. It is only in terms of this ethic of compassion, founded on a metaphysic of
the unity of living things, that
Parsifal makes sense. As soon as one has grasped that, the
apparently Christian elements in the work, which can be
embarrassing or seem merely added for colour, function much more
actively as constituents in a profound drama of spiritual awakening
and fulfilment. New life is brought to the Grail community, and it will be able to
continue, invigorated, not through any injection of supernatural
energy-boosters, but through the radiant example of Parsifal, showing the possibility of
emerging triumphant from gruelling ordeals, neither complacent in
his achievement nor exhausted by it.
[Michael Tanner, Wagner, pp.198-199]
Footnote 1:
It might not be coindidental that Wagner makes a play on
begreifen, to take in, and ergreifen, to grasp,
which suggests Luther's translation of the first chapter of St.
John's Gospel:
Und das Licht scheint in der Finsternis, und die
Finsternis hat's nicht ergriffen. [Johannes
1:5]
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