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Parsifal (Wagner, 1882)
“Putting aside all irrelevant questions (to what end such music can or should serve?), and speaking from a purely aesthetic point of view, has Wagner ever written anything better? The supreme psychological perception and precision as regards what can be said, expressed, communicated here, the extreme of concision and directness of form, every nuance of feeling conveyed epigrammatically; a clarity of musical description that reminds us of a shield of consummate workmanship; and finally an extraordinary sublimity of feeling, something experienced in the very depths of music, that does Wagner the highest honour; a synthesis of conditions which to many people — even ‘higher minds’ — will seem incompatible, of strict coherence, of ‘loftiness’ in the most startling sense of the word, of a cognisance and a penetration of vision that cuts through the soul as with a knife, of sympathy with what is seen and shown forth. We get something comparable to it in Dante, but nowhere else. Has any painter ever depicted so sorrowful a look of love as Wagner does in the final accents of his Prelude?”
Friedrich Nietzsche, January 1887 Letter to Peter GastWagner's Grail Quest
Wagner's final opera, Parsifal (1882) is also his most enigmatic, a singular and symbolically layered compression of parts of the Arthurian romance that was famously rejected by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1902) as a return to Christian Grail quests after the mythic mode of the Ring cycle. Although Wagner originally stipulated that Parsifal should only be performed at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, it has become part of the operatic repertoire and has inspired numerous filmmakers.
Edwin S. Porter made a one-reel adaptation for the Edison company in 1904, but the first and only complete film adaptation was completed by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg in 1982. Syberberg, who began his career by filming performances of Bertolt Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble with an 8mm camera, developed a conceptually rich system of front projection to highlight the psychological processes involved in film viewing. His Parsifal begins in post-apocalyptic ruins and includes numerous, deliberately kitschy images of Wagner and his nemeses (like Nietzsche), all linked to a quest not only for the Grail but also for a path through the complex and murky histories connected to Wagner's opera and its Nazi misappropriation.
To the Wonder
In To the Wonder (2012), Terrence Malick attempts a new, equally Wagnerian synthesis. He uses the Parsifal prelude to accompany a montage of American and European sensibilities, trees, and landscapes. By linking the movement of memory to the fundamental shot/countershot axis of cinema, Malick suggests an otherwise impossible fusion, in and through memory, of the New World and the Old (symbolized by Mont Saint-Michel, the "Wonder" of the title).
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Hans-Jürgen Syberberg
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John Boorman
