The Parsifal of Richard Wagner was not only the last
and loftiest work of his genius, but it is also one
of the few great dramas of modern times,—a
drama which unfolds striking and impressive spiritual
teachings. Indeed, Parsifal may be called Richard
Wagner’s great confession of faith. He
takes the legend of the Holy Grail, and uses it to
portray wonderfully and thrillingly the Christian truths
of the beauty, the glory, and the inspiring power
of the Lord’s Supper, and the infinite meaning
of the redeeming love of the Cross. He reveals
in this drama by poetry and music, and with a marvellous
breadth and depth of spiritual conception, this theme
(in his own words): “The founder of the
Christian religion was not wise: He was divine.
To believe in Him is to imitate Him and to seek union
with Him.... In consequence of His atoning death,
everything which lives and breathes may know itself
redeemed.... Only love rooted in sympathy and
expressed in action to the point of a complete destruction
of self-will, is Christian love.” (Wagner’s
Letters, 1880, pages 270, 365, 339.)
The criticism has sometimes been made that the basic
religious idea of Parsifal is Buddhistic rather than
Christian; that it is taken directly from the philosophy
of Schopenhauer, who was perhaps as nearly a Buddhist
as was possible for an Occidental mind to be; that
the dominating idea in Parsifal is compassion as the
essence of sanctity, and that Wagner has merely clothed
this fundamental Buddhistic idea with the externals
of Christian form and symbolism. This criticism
is ingenious. It may also suggest that all great
religions in their essence have much which is akin.
But no one who reads carefully Wagner’s own
letters during the time that he was brooding over his
Parsifal can doubt that he was trying in this drama
to express in broadest and deepest way the essentials
of Christian truth. Christianity has no need to
go to Buddhism to find such a fundamental conception
as that of an infinite compassion as a revelation
of God.
The legend of the Grail, as Wagner uses it, has in
it the usual accompaniments of mediaeval tradition,—something
of paganism and magic. But these pagan elements
are only contrasts to the purity and splendor of the
simple Christian truth portrayed. The drama suggests
the early miracle and mystery plays of the Christian
Church; but more nearly, perhaps, it reminds one of
those great religious dramas, scenic and musical,
which were given at night at Eleusis, near Athens,
in the temple of the Mysteries, before the initiated
ones among the Greeks in the days of Pericles and
Plato. Here at Bayreuth the mystic drama is given
before its thousands of devout pilgrims and music-lovers
who gather to the little town as to a sacred spot
from all parts of the world,—from Russia,
Italy, France, England, and America,—and
who enter into the spirit of this noble drama and
feast of music as if it were a religious festival
in a temple of divine mysteries.
