Dominique Pagani sees Parsifal as the "pure fool", the idiot ("der reine Tor") whom Wagner places at the centre of the Grail quest1. He contrasts him with Siegfried: he is a hero of pity and compassion, a sick and stammering figure, whom Nietzsche regards as a decline and compares to Dostoevsky's Idiot23. He often returns to Nietzsche's reaction: this idiot who turns the other cheek and is supposed to be the agent of salvation drives Nietzsche mad, and Nietzsche mocks him before hearing the music4. He dwells on the question of the name: Parsifal does not know his own and remembers none of the names he has had, until Kundry speaks it, and Pagani links this scene to the unnamed5. He also comments on the slain swan, the bow broken out of guilt, Kundry's kiss that reminds him of the Fisher King's wound, and the upbringing away from the world he received from his mother. Finally, he compares Parsifal's path to that of Proust's narrator.
Summary produced automatically from 21 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.
Who is this?
Parsifal (WWV 111) is a music drama in three acts by the German composer Richard Wagner and his last composition. Wagner's own libretto for the work is freely based on the 13th-century Middle High German chivalric romance Parzival of the Minnesänger Wolfram von Eschenbach and the Old French chivalric romance Perceval ou le Conte du Graal by the 12th-century trouvère Chrétien de Troyes, recounting different accounts of the story of the Arthurian knight Parzival (Percival) and his spiritual quest for the Holy Grail. […]
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Season 12 · 4 Jun 2024The matrix of all illusion: the past lived as present
