Even within Richard Wagner's singular œuvre, Parsifal has generally been accounted different or extreme. It is, of course, his final dramatic work. Successive attempts to avoid the pejorative – for Wagner, at least – ‘opera’ as a description of his later works may now provoke as much scepticism as approval; it would probably take a ‘Wagnerian’, in Nietzsche's pejorative sense, of unhealthy devotion not to raise a hint of a smile at the cumbersome Bühnenweihfestspiel, or ‘stage-festival-consecration-play’. And yet, Parsifal has always resisted assimilation to the typical opera house, whether in terms of repertory, audience, architecture or even acoustic; though it is of course performed there, it is not only ‘Wagnerians’ who find something of a mismatch, who perhaps even go so far as to wish they were hearing it at Bayreuth. Wagner wrote to Ludwig II that he wished to protect it from ‘a common operatic career’.Footnote ¹ Pierre Boulez, who conducted Parsifal as his first Wagner drama, in Wieland Wagner's Bayreuth production, wrote approvingly of the composer loathing a system in which ‘opera houses are … like cafés where … you can hear waiters calling out their orders: “One Carmen! And one Walküre! And one Rigoletto!”‘Footnote ² In a highly selective operatic career, Wagner has for Boulez featured more heavily than any other composer, and Parsifal more strongly than any other work. To an extent, all of Wagner's ‘canonical’ works – arguably even the monster Rienzi, the grand opéra which came closest to Meyerbeer, though that can readily be exaggerated – both angrily declared and have continued to declare their incompatibility with existing operatic conventions and norms. Parsifal, perhaps still more so than the Ring, remains the ne plus ultra.

William Kinderman's excellent new book draws upon decades of study, speaking and writing; long experience tells in mastery of multifarious sources, as indeed it did in Wagner's own case. An initial ‘Prelude’ examines ‘Parsifal as Art and Ideology,’ dealing with reception and in particular with the vexed period between the first performance at Bayreuth in 1882 and the Second World War. Nationalism and (proto-)Nazism naturally loom large, but equally valuable is as clear an account as I recall of the controversy over attempts to confine the work to Bayreuth and to extend its copyright. The intersection between those strands is especially revealing. For instance, we read the writer Michael Georg Conrad asking in 1906: ‘Do we Germans as a newly born people with Wagner's spirit and art and moral principles representing our nation wish with an iron will to achieve mastery in the world? … May the master's will and work remain holy: Bayreuth!’ (p. 17) Such rhetoric of Germany as a ‘young country’ – as cretinous and as disingenuous as that peddled by Tony Blair almost a century later – was typical of nationalist, imperialist groups in the later Second Reich; indeed, it might have been worth commenting upon tensions between conceptions of national ‘youth’ and those of a ‘late work’. Crucially, however, as Kinderman does point out, Conrad would be instrumental in introducing Hitler to the Bayreuth Circle after the First World War. For the most part, the author remains even-handed through such treacherous terrain, though maybe we need not hear quite so much from the thoroughly discredited Robert Gutman.Footnote ³ To take but one example, Gutman has continued to assert that Arthur Gobineau's racialist philosophy somehow ‘influenced’ Wagner's poem, even after publication of Cosima's Diaries put it beyond reasonable doubt that Wagner's acquaintance with Gobineau's work came later. Nevertheless, there is much to be learned from a survey of the critical landscape, which sets John Deathridge against Hermann Danuser, and intriguingly points to an approach that views Alfred Lorenz's interpretation as ‘kitsch’.

Critical response resurfaces, moreover, during the rest of the book, for instance in the final chapter's treatment of Parsifal's ever enigmatic ending. Performers’ voices as well as scholars’ are heard; we read Waltraud Meier argue against the recent directorial fashion to have Kundry ‘survive’: ‘Kundry yearns to be able to die, to escape from the vicious circle of unending reincarnations and at last find redemption. Consequently she should be able to die at the conclusion’ (p. 291). Given that various celebrated recent stagings are discussed – Harry Kupfer, Peter Konwitschny, Christoph Schlingensief, et al. – it is a little surprising to have no mention of Stefan Herheim's Bayreuth production, especially since its concerns are in some ways similar to Kinderman's. That omission may, however, simply reflect what the author has been able to see in the theatre and the frustrating non-appearance on DVD of Herheim's staging.

‘The work’, however stable or unstable a concept that may be, nevertheless remains the thing. Kinderman's two principal sections address: ‘The Process of Composition’ and ‘Musical Form and Dramatic Meaning’. There will always be something arbitrary about such clear distinctions, especially with Wagner, a composer and thinker whose method tended towards the synthetic rather than the analytical; one must start somewhere, however, whilst maintaining connections between different strands, and the general division of labour makes good sense. Moreover, as Kinderman points out (p. 4), there is an extraordinary wealth of documentation for the evolution of both words and music. The genesis, after all, extends for a longer, if less intensive, period even than that for the Ring.

Kinderman convincingly traces back that genesis before Wagner's initial encounter with Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival and other mediæval sources. Drawing upon Katherine Syer's invaluable work on Die Feen and Carlo Gozzi, Kinderman draws our attention to features of the second act in particular which have their roots not so much in ‘Wagner's modernistic originality’ as in the work of an eighteenth-century dramatist (p. 48).Footnote ⁴ Or, to put it another way, the one does not exclude and may well inform the other, just as inspiration in Attic tragedy may lead to hopes for renewal rather than restoration; indeed Sophocles's Oedipus is considered as precursor of a number of Wagner's dramatic themes. Treatment of other neglected sources, for instance Gluck's Armide – Wagner's 1865 prose draft echoes Gluck in referring to the Flowermaidens as demons, or ‘Teufelinnen’ – and Charles Theodor Ludwig Lucas's 1838 book, Ueber den Krieg von Wartburg, enriches rather than detracts from Wagner's engagement with Wolfram and our understanding of it.

‘The Genesis of the Music’ is a more complex matter still, and receives more space. Study of the sketches and subsequent analytical treatment are, in properly Wagnerian fashion, permitted truly to inform one another rather than simply coexisting. Not the least of this chapter's virtues is an admirably clear outline concerning the difficulties and opportunities presented by the disparate sketched fragments, many of them chronologically preceding the compositional and orchestral drafts. Drawing upon other sources – Cosima's Diaries are invaluable here, claims for their veracity tending also to be strengthened by the sketches – a fuller picture emerges of the compositional history, especially the evolution of particular motifs and indeed of intervallic relationships between them: for instance, the fourth, so prominent in the identity of both Grail and Faith motifs.

A detailed account of the writing of each act – and of the musicological process of discerning that history – is rounded off by fruitful treatment of Wagner's 1881 revision and expansion of the first act Transformation Music, a matter curiously neglected by other writers. Irritated though the composer was by the need to provide more music – Cosima (3 March 1881): ‘R. is angry that he has to write music for the stage painter!’ – the work was nevertheless ‘to benefit substantially from Wagner's inconvenience,’ for ‘it is precisely this revised passage whose expressive power is enhanced through its closer structural relationship to the whole’ (p. 185). As an exemplar of how the various strands of both Parsifal and Wagner's Parsifal come together, incite and strengthen one another, it could hardly be bettered. Gurnemanz's celebrated declaration that here time becomes space is, as Kinderman argues, better conveyed musically; moreover, ‘as so often in Wagner, the temporal unfolding embodied in the music already exposes dramatic elements that will be displayed visually on stage, or in “space”, at a later point’ (p. 188). Wagner's musico-dramatic theories in Oper und Drama, then, are far from dead; they are strengthened, even sublated, by experience even at this final stage in his œuvre. Likewise, we might say that his adoption of Schopenhauer's metaphysics of music is justified, instantiated, similarly sublated, as these ‘late additions to the transformation music made it into a centerpiece of the overall tonal structure, which can be heard in relationship to other passages over vast stretches of musical time by virtue of his control of the orchestration, tonality, and dramatic context of the recurring thematic material’(p. 192). That conflict between Hegelian and Schopenhauerian philosophies – historical/anti-historical, political/anti-political, as well as æsthetic – which proved so fundamental a driving force in Wagner's developmental self-criticism is well encapsulated here.Footnote ⁵

In the final section, the idea of ‘late style’ is considered with respect to the first act, following on, as Kinderman acknowledges, from Adorno's ‘Zur Partitur des “Parsifal”‘. In a letter to his son, Klaus, Thomas Mann intriguingly – and with typical ambivalence – referred to Doktor Faustus as ‘my “Parsifal”‘ (p. 224). Yet that guiding theme does not become a repressive, organising force; rather, it permits a more wide-ranging treatment than one might expect. Particularly interesting – and revealing – is the examination of associative tonality in Lohengrin as a potential model for Parsifal. Lohengrin, after all, ‘offered … a framework in which the dark chromaticism of a distinctive minor key could serve as the vehicle for a corrosive, manipulative force’ (p. 210). Ortrud, then, is likened to the second act Kundry, acting as Klingsor's proxy, whilst Amfortas takes on an Elsa-like role at the centre of the action.

Kinderman's discussion of the second act acknowledges what he dubs the ‘commonplace of criticism’ that the chromaticism of Klingsor's music ‘assumes dramatic importance’, going beyond that to highlight ‘the extent to which Wagner sets the music of the Grail and anti-Grail against one another, allowing the same underlying intervallic shapes to assume forms so strongly contrasting that they stand for antithetical perspectives’ (p. 227). What has previously been explained in terms of a history of composition now acquires a critical, hermeneutical element. Klingsor's summoning of Kundry at the opening of the act is tellingly analysed as ‘a complete chromaticism [Kinderman's italics] of the minor sixth spanned by the Zaubermotiv’ (p. 228), Liszt's Mephistophelian negation of the ‘Faust’ theme in his Symphony of that name rightly presented as an important predecessor. The collision between C major and B minor at the close of the act may similarly be understood. As Kinderman rightly argues against those writers sceptical of such tonal relationships, ‘the expressive force … is powerfully direct’ (p. 251). So it is in this analysis, considered cumulatively.

The work of analysts such as Warren Darcy, Robert Morgan and Kinderman himself is convincingly integrated and extended in the concluding discussion of the third act. Kinderman reiterates his previous reinstatement of dynamism in the Prelude against Morgan's claim of circularity; again, we may read or hear a musical confrontation between ‘Hegel’ and ‘Schopenhauer’. Indeed, Kinderman points out that Wagner's description, recorded by Cosima, of a Vernichtungsklang (‘sound of annihilation’) at Kundry's baptism is best understood with respect to Schopenhauer's conception of denial of the Will (pp. 274–7). Would that other commentators, intent on divining genocidal intent where there is none, had such ease of command with both the philosophical and musical sources (and his understanding of the German language). The author amply justifies his claim that the ‘primary means of conveying the integrative close is musical,’ and that such means retain – often, if not always – primacy elsewhere too. As in Herheim's staging of the work, redemption – ambiguous and multivalent, yet all the more intriguing and convincing for it – is effected and afforded meaning through Wagner's music.Footnote ⁶ Perhaps, then, we advance a little closer to understanding of that final line: Erlösung dem Erlöser!