The Parsifal Problem

Parsifal's ambiguous relationship with Christianity underlies not just this controversy, but its entire 140-year reception history. The question of its status a Christian drama still appears unsettled, and recent scholarship reflects a range of opinion. Michael Tanner is emphatic that it is not: he finds that it is neither a source of Christian edification, nor a potential vehicle for conversion.Footnote ³ While Ulrike Kienzle's study of Parsifal's source material and genesis finds that the drama lacks consonance with Protestant and Catholic dogma, it nevertheless reflects the thread of Christian mysticism stretching back to the Middle Ages, and in that sense, she argues, it may be understood as a kind of Christian drama.Footnote ⁴ Lucy Beckett also finds Parsifal ‘a knot we find hard to untie’: because the drama eludes clear categorization, it is better understood as a hybrid of not only the sacred and the secular, but of the Christian salvation story and Schopenhauerian thought.Footnote ⁵ Reaching the other end of the spectrum, a recent approach taken by theologian Richard H. Bell appears to echo Christian apologists of a century earlier, arguing that in Parsifal Wagner ‘does theology’ in a variety of ways. However, Bell is more systematic in approaching his subject, and makes a compelling case that despite the composer's unorthodoxy, Parsifal as an artwork ought at least to be studied for its Christian theological insights and valued for potential to promote a Christian holiness.Footnote ⁶

As a reception study, this paper takes an agnostic view regarding the Christian nature of Parsifal itself. Nevertheless, no such study can avoid the proverbial elephant in the room, and Beckett's excellent study of the drama's critical and scholarly assessment traces the range of Parsifal interpretation through the late twentieth century, though not in America. Two studies of Wagnerism in America have unfolded the events surrounding the 1903 Parsifal production in some detail. Anne Dzamba Sessa's 1985 study of American and British Wagnerism recounts the controversy and identifies many of the key voices involved. Sessa observes that in an era marked by significant cultural turmoil, some liberal American Christians found a message of spiritual comfort and Christian redemption in Wagner's drama, while some conservatives strenuously objected to Parsifal's perceived blasphemy.Footnote ⁷ (History has shown that a predilection for cultural conservatism or liberalism is not necessarily a predictor of Wagnerian affinity. As Large and Weber observed, just as the Bayreuth circle was promoting Wagner as exemplary of Wilhelmian conservatism, Jean Jaurès was calling Wagnerian drama ‘communist’.Footnote ⁸ The relationship of Wagnerism to the cultural left and right is thus every bit as complicated as its relationship to Christianity.)

Joseph Horowitz offers more thorough-going accounts of American Parsifal reception, further noting that late nineteenth-century American Christians viewed Parsifal at the intersection of declining establishment Protestantism and rising modernism. He argues that Parsifal's theme of redemption appealed to liberal Christians in their concern for America's moral and social decay.Footnote ⁹ Horowitz treats liberal Christian reception within the stream of larger Gilded Age culture (c. 1870–1900), in which progressive responses to high art culture were tied to potential for social uplift, meliorist readings that suggest a redemptive metaphor, and satisfaction of an appetite for ‘intense experience’ that works like Parsifal could furnish.Footnote ¹⁰ A more recent offering by Frederick Hale specifically addresses the 1903 controversy, coming some distance in viewing it as impinging on American religious history and recognizing the connection between the theological and cultural turmoil marking the era. Like Horowitz, Hale traces American Parsifal reception through the immediate aftermath of the 1903 production and presents the fullest range of Christian response to date.Footnote ¹¹

These surveys leave several stones unturned, however. All ignore the fact that contemporaries frequently cast Parsifal as a passion play, a politically fraught term among Gilded Age Protestants, and underplay (or completely overlook) the key role that The Musical Courier, a nationally circulated American periodical aligned with the pro-Wagner faction, played as provocateur in encouraging religious dissent. Most importantly, while these surveys document American Parsifal reception from the time of its 1882 premiere through the 1903 New York production, their failure to delve more deeply into the theological context of the early twentieth century leaves unanswered key questions surrounding American reception of Parsifal, and unaddressed the larger question of the engagement and influence of conservative and liberal Christians with the arts in fin de siècle America.

Protestants in Crisis

Over three centuries, Protestants had shaped the nation so profoundly that by 1900 the notion of a ‘Protestant nation’ may have seemed a foregone conclusion.Footnote ¹² The final decades of the nineteenth century were, in American religious historian Winthrop S. Hudson's words, the ‘halcyon years’ for American Protestantism, as churches grew in number, membership, and enthusiasm. This was the heyday of the great pulpiteers, nationally known preachers whose sermons commanded space on the front pages of major papers across the land. Traditional Protestantism was entrenched in the nation's foundation and its established order. However, American Protestantism was far from monolithic, and was on the brink of splintering under tensions embedded in the church since the colonial era.

Americans debated whether Christianity – or any other religion, for that matter – should receive legal preference (and tax revenue) well before the nation's founding. In 1791, the so-called ‘Establishment Clause’ of the first amendment largely settled the matter, disallowing any governmental support or interference in religion.Footnote ¹³ The dominant Protestant denominations of the colonial era (principally Presbyterians, Methodists, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Protestant Episcopalians) nevertheless retained a cultural empire, if not through constitutional endorsement, then through the force of tradition.Footnote ¹⁴ Moulded by the ethic of Calvinist New England Puritanism, inspired by the evangelical and pietistic spirit of the nineteenth-century Protestant rival movement known as the Second Great Awakening, and eventually adopting Victorian-era cultural mores, establishment Protestantism thrived throughout the nineteenth century as the nation's unofficial religious and moral compass, imprinting itself on both the public and private life of America.

Nevertheless, by mid-century, and particularly during the years following the Civil War, establishment Protestantism began to face serious challenges to its hold on American spiritual life.Footnote ¹⁵ For the first time, agnosticism, though never representing more than a small minority, became a tenable (if not acceptable) position, attracting many of America's new elite, new-money bourgeois and intellectuals, such as Charles Eliot Norton and Susan B. Anthony.Footnote ¹⁶ Free Religionists, many of whom still identified as Christians, untethered themselves from established faith traditions and developed their religious philosophies independently, often drawing on multiple traditions. This group included romantic Unitarians, Transcendentalists, Spiritualists, Theosophists, practitioners of New Thought, and other religious cosmopolitans who sought a universal religion that embodied and transcended established faith traditions. Several other home-grown religious movements, including Seventh Day Adventists, Christian Scientists and Latter-day Saints, added to the competition for American souls.

A greater threat came from within. Countering the traditional Protestant view that faith must be grounded in Scripture and that human experience is tainted by sin – therefore flawed and suspect – liberal Protestants valued a subjective spiritual experience flowing from an awareness of the beauty of God's daily presence.Footnote ¹⁷ Free religionists and liberal Protestants alike sought truth beyond revealed Scripture, in the workings of human reason and creativity, in the created world and in spirituality. Theological liberalism emerged from both the critical rationalism of eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought and the nineteenth-century appeal to religious experience, fuelled by a porridge of romanticism, pietism, and idealism, as well as social, ethical, and historical critical influences.Footnote ¹⁸ Although its intellectual progenitors, Immanuel Kant and German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), established liberal Protestantism's nineteenth-century framework, American liberals read Kant and Schleiermacher by way of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Aids to Reflection (1825), which posited an epistemology of ‘Understanding’ and ‘Reason’ that roughly paralleled Kant's Verstand and Vernunft. Understanding did the work of gathering sensory data for generalization and reflection – as Coleridge put it, ‘the Faculty judging according to Sense’ – while the higher-functioning Reason accessed intuition, and was the source of truth and morality: ‘Reason is the power of universal and necessary convictions, the source and substance of truths above sense, and having their evidence in themselves’.Footnote ¹⁹ In his autobiography, Unitarian minister and theologian James Freeman Clarke (1810–1888) described his first encounter with Coleridge as an outcome of his rejection of Locke, and his reaction exemplifies the response of other American liberals to the English poet-theologian in the first half of the century:

In addition to Coleridge's profound influence on Ralph Waldo Emerson and the American Transcendental movement (among which Clarke numbered himself), Aids to Reflection was a significant source of inspiration for the seminal theologian of American liberal Protestantism, Horace Bushnell (1802–1876). Bushnell's own influence extended to the post-Civil War titans of the movement, including the pulpiteer Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887), the theologian Charles A. Briggs (1841–1913), and the leading member of the Social Gospel movement, Washington Gladden (1836–1918). In Coleridge, Bushnell similarly heard a summons to develop a theology based upon spiritual experience, rather than external dogma and apologetics.Footnote ²¹ Thus, while nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism is frequently associated with application of the German higher critical method to the study of Scripture (a threat to conservative tenets regarding the authority and inerrancy of God's Word), the synchronizing of Christian theology with Charles Darwin's new theories of natural selection, and the ascendance of Gladden's Social Gospel movement, it was the experiential nature of faith was most central to the spirit of liberal Protestantism.

By the century's end, two signal occurrences brought an emerging crisis within American Protestantism to the public eye. The 1893 World's Parliament of Religion at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago attracted hundreds of American Protestants and Catholics together with representatives of many other world religions. The cosmopolitan liberals who organized this remarkable event viewed their work as essentially redemptive, seeking to change the world for the better through a more ecumenical, universal approach to faith and opposing what they regarded as conservative provincialism.Footnote ²² In the meantime, establishment Protestants were on the defensive. A series of heresy trials marked the 1890s, in which clergy and academic theologians appeared before church bodies to answer charges of preaching and teaching theological liberalism. The notorious 1891 trial of Charles A. Briggs, the noted Union Theological Seminary professor and the New York Presbytery's most prominent biblical scholar, played out before the PresbyteryFootnote ²³ and in the pages of the city's major papers, with reports often rating a two-page spread.Footnote ²⁴

Although the emerging crisis was grounded in theology, its battleground was American culture. In his classic analysis Christ and Culture, H. Richard Niebuhr observes that the relationship of Christianity to culture has presented a perennial problem that dates to the founding of the Church.Footnote ²⁵ Moreover, the debates arising from this tension are rarely those between believers and non-believers, but in and among believers themselves: ‘the wrestling and the reconciliation of faith with faith’.Footnote ²⁶ Niebuhr's typology seeks to categorize the range of historical Christian response to culture, and offers some perspective on both conservative and liberal Christian relationships with culture. Niebuhr's five categories (‘Christ against Culture’, ‘The Christ of culture’, ‘Christ above Culture’, ‘Christ and Culture in Paradox’, and ‘Christ the Transformer of Culture’) are not hard-and-fast pigeonholes, but represent a spectrum; individual Christian worldviews contain some blend of perspectives.Footnote ²⁷ Many nineteenth-century Christian conservatives and liberals adhered to the view of ‘Christ as Transformer of Culture’. While both groups affirmed a Christian imperative to address society's failings, their approaches differed, and those differences reflected the way that their transformational view interacted with a second category. According to Niebuhr's typology, transformational conservatives blended this view with that of ‘Christ against culture’ – that is, deeming culture as essentially fallen and hostile to the life of faith. Thus, conservatives considered the theatre a threat to the faith, and addressed that threat by both actively avoiding the theatre and working for its demise and by encouraging others to do the same. The conservative response to a culture that threatens holiness was not withdrawal, but action to change it by opposing and eliminating the threat.

Liberals blended their transforming view with that of ‘Christ of culture’.Footnote ²⁸ Rather than oppose culture, Christians in this category sought to convert it to, or harmonize it with, Christian faith. They understood the ‘Kingdom of God’ as a here-and-now proposition, rather than something to be revealed in the distant future. Therefore, transformational liberals, such as adherents to the Social Gospel movement, pursued society's transformation through the redemptive work of transforming, or assimilating, cultural institutions. While Christian conservatives, such as members of the Salvation Army, worked on behalf of the poor by addressing the needs of the individual next door, liberals worked on behalf of the poor by working to improve the institutions that made and kept them poor in the first place. It follows that while conservatives viewed redemption as operating on the personal, individual level, liberals placed more weight on its societal and cultural function. Rather than assessing the theatre as a threat, the liberal therefore might welcome it as something to be understood from the Christian perspective, and to be celebrated and encouraged, particularly as it resonated on the experiential and spiritual level.

These were the key points of theological and cultural tension laying beneath the surface of the 1903 Parsifal controversy. On one side, conservatives, historically privileged but also genuinely concerned for the personal salvation and holiness of their fellow citizens, sought to defend an objective, dogmatic orthodoxy in opposition to the currents of modernism and subjectivism. On the other, liberals loosened ties to this traditional theology, articulated a view of the Christian's broader redemptive role in the world, and pursued spiritual truth found in subjective religious experience. These were not simply two divergent, abstract theological opinions. Rather, they reflected strongly countering views of the Christian's relationship with the world, with culture, and with each other.

‘The Visible Parsifal, The Suggested Christ’: Pre-1903 Reception

In the two decades preceding the Metropolitan Opera's production, a series of published critical responses to the Bayreuth premier and to abridged New York concert performances shaped the American understanding of Parsifal as a Christian religious drama. While critics condemned the work as a sacrilegious parody of the Christian redemption story, proponents heard an overwhelming message of uplift engendered by same redemption theme. Both interpreted Parsifal in Christian terms, citing parallels between the dramatic personae and biblical figures (Parsifal as Christ, Kundry as Mary Magdalene, Gurnemanz as John the Baptist), as well as stage events that enacted Christian sacraments (baptism and the Eucharist).

The principal objections to Parsifal that American critics rehearsed over two decades were first articulated by the German Protestant Evangelical Church almost immediately following Parsifal's Bayreuth premier on 26 July 1882. Evangelical theologian and Wagner-critic Hermann Messner published his polemic in the Neue Evangelische Kirchenzeitung and in Berlin's theologically conservative Neue Preussische Kreuz-Zeitung. Messner argued that Wagner had used Christianity merely as a vehicle for aesthetic-dramatic effect, citing the portrayal of the Holy Supper in the guise of the Grail Ceremony, and contending that the removal of the Eucharist from the context of sacred worship onto the profane stage was pure blasphemy. In addition, Parsifal's message of redemption was not grounded in the Christian conception, but simply in resistance to sexual temptation. (If that was all it took to enter the Kingdom of God, Messner argued, there would certainly have been a great many more Grail Kings.) Messner interpreted the drama's final line, ‘Erlösung dem Erlöser’ (‘Redemption of the Redeemer’), as indicating that Parsifal had accomplished his own redemption, contrary to Christian teaching that Christ's crucifixion accomplished redemption for all who believe.Footnote ²⁹

The first printed American accounts of the premiere levelled similar charges of sacrilege. The normally pro-Wagner Musical Courier condemned the staging of thinly veiled gospel episodes: ‘The washing of Parsifal's feet by Kundry, and her subsequent anointing of the same and wiping them with the hairs of her head, together with the vivid picture of the “Last Supper”, are all calculated to shock the religious sensibilities of the Anglo-Saxon race.’Footnote ³⁰ Writing later that month in The Century, John R.G. Hassard encapsulated the fundamental objections:

Other American responses were more circumspect, lauding the music and the artistry of the production while skirting criticism of Christian symbolism. While Messner had protested the Wagnerian conception of redemption, this was the theme that most resonated with American respondents, feeding an evolving Christian reading of Parsifal over the next three years. Three major accounts went some distance toward bolstering the notion of the work as a drama of Christian redemption. The Atlantic Monthly printed ‘Wagner's Parsifal’ by Charles Dudley Warner (perhaps best known for his oft-quoted phrase, ‘Politics makes strange bedfellows’) in its January 1883 issue. Setting the work apart from a more traditional opera, Warner categorized Parsifal as a ‘sacred drama’ or a ‘miracle play’. Though he made limited effort to draw extensive parallels between Parsifal's dramatic content and Christian themes, Warner nevertheless referred to the character of Kundry as ‘the Magdalen’Footnote ³² (a term suggesting both the medieval composite view of Mary Magdalene as both temptress and penitent and an archaic reference to a reformed prostitute), described Amfortas as ‘stricken with disease and sin’, and recognized in the Grail Ceremony a re-enactment of the Holy Supper.

Mariana G. van Rensselaer's ‘Parsifal at Bayreuth’ in the March 1883 Harper's Magazine further explored the drama's Christian elements, arguing that Parsifal was not allegorical, but symbolic (‘Wagner writes no such inartistic things as “allegories”’.).Footnote ³³ Further, Parsifal transcended any specific creed; van Rensselaer described the ‘eternal law’ expressed in Parsifal as one ‘felt through all religions or in spite of none’. That ‘eternal law’ was itself a means, or hope, of redemption: ‘the law that evil bring a curse behind it; that remorse alone will not undo its work; that love and good deeds are the only salvation of a sinful world’. Van Rensselaer drew clear parallels between Kundry and Magdalen, and between Parsifal and Christ. ‘The visible Parsifal, the suggested Christ’, she wrote, ‘are alike types of redeeming love and goodness; the visible Kundry, the suggested Magdalen, of sin, suffering, and salvation’. Van Rensselaer praised the Act I Grail Ceremony as ‘no spectacle at all, but an actual, deeply solemn scene’.Footnote ³⁴ Her interpretation of Parsifal's religious message as a broadly universal concept of redemption, and her description of the solemnity of the performance experience, reflect positions later taken by the work's liberal Christian proponents.

The third major account, ‘Parsifal at Bayreuth’ by Marion Wilcox, appeared in the January 1885 New Englander and Yale Review. Footnote ³⁵ Wilcox took the most scholarly approach of the three, referencing Wagner's source material extensively. He drew freely on Christian thematic vocabulary, and while more guarded in his praise of Parsifal than Warner and van Rensselaer, he more overtly identified Parsifal as a Christ-type. When Parsifal enters in the third act, Wilcox said, ‘He is no longer a possible deliverer; he is the Savior, and golden hair and beard, costume, posture, serve to heighten the physical resemblance to the Christ of popular art’. Later critics would cite Parsifal's physical stage resemblance to popular images of Christ as evidence that Wagner intended a direct representation of Christ in the figure of Parsifal.

By the time of the first substantive American hearings of Parsifal (given as concert performances), critics regularly employed language reflecting the work's status as a Christian drama (of some kind). The first, performed by New York's Oratorio Society under the direction of Walter Damrosch, occurred on 3 March 1886 at the Metropolitan Opera House and was by most accounts flawed but nevertheless impressive. Of greater moment was the ‘Parsifal Entertainment’, presented on Palm Sunday, 30 March 1890, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music under the auspices of the Seidl Society. Although abridged from the full drama, the ‘Parsifal Entertainment’ was a tremendous success. The New York Sun reported that the sold-out audience included former President Grover Cleveland and his wife (guests of George Foster Peabody), Brooklyn mayor Alfred C. Chapin and his wife; the famed pulpiteer and pastor of Brooklyn's Plymouth Congregational Church Lyman Abbot and his wife; and Mr and Mrs J. Pierpont Morgan.Footnote ³⁶ A preview published in The New York Sunday World two weeks earlier, noting that the performance would take place without costumes and scenery, pointed out that ‘There are many scenes, too, that are too strikingly like the events of Christ's life to be treated in costume with us or in any other way except in oratorio fashion; especially the last supper, the descent of the Grail, the baptism, anointment and foot-washing of Parsifal by Gurnemanz and Kundry’.Footnote ³⁷ Nevertheless, the World questioned whether the drama, so movingly presented in Bayreuth, could even hope to attain such religious sublimity in New York. The only real criticism of the performance was not religious, but ethical, as the un-staged, abbreviated ‘Parsifal Entertainment’ did not fully realize the composer's intentions. The now pro-Wagner Musical Courier carried it further, condemning the efforts of the Seidl Society for violating the composer's stricture that Parsifal never leave Bayreuth, thus mounting a performance that was ‘harmful in the full sense of the word to the beautiful religious music drama itself’.Footnote ³⁸

These first American reviews and performances were critical in solidifying the American view that Parsifal was nothing less than a Christian drama. To those who read them, Parsifal was an expression of Christian religiosity, either as blasphemous parody or as sincere drama functioning as allegory, sacred play, or even Wagner's own authentic attempt to express faith. Without ever having seen (much less heard) the work, readers understood that it dramatized the Christian sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist; featured representations of the biblical figures of Christ, Mary Magdalene and John the Baptist (as well as a stand-in for all sinners in the character of Amfortas); and portrayed the gospel account of a woman anointing and washing Christ's feet with her hair.Footnote ³⁹ Ultimately, as a drama of redemption, it was difficult, if not impossible, to view Parsifal as anything but Christian.

Passion Plays and Presbyterians: Conservative Reaction

The affair triggered by the first fully staged performance of Parsifal outside of Bayreuth began as a legal dispute and snowballed into a religious uproar. Even as it received wide coverage in the New York City press, the drama also unfolded in newspapers throughout the nation. During the last four months of 1903, well over 100 newspapers nation-wide reported at least once on some aspect of the Parsifal production. Readers in major cities and small towns, up and down the Eastern Seaboard, throughout the upper Midwest and the Deep South, and as far west as the Hawaiian Islands knew something of the brewing controversy over an opera in New York. In some of the heaviest coverage, the Minneapolis Journal devoted space in 33 editions (not to mention the neighbouring St. Paul Globe with 26) to Parsifal from the beginning of September through the end of the year; in Indianapolis, items appeared in 37 editions of the Indianapolis Journal. Heinrich Conried's production and the ensuing religious furore spilled over the Hudson to engage national attention and discussion. That furore may not have been entirely spontaneous: at the encouragement of pro-Wagner interests, opponents of the production, including the nationally circulated Musical Courier, incited conservative establishment Protestants to action by explicitly linking the drama to the passion play and by summoning the outraged response of conservative New York clergy.

It began as a question of copyrights. Shortly after assuming the management of the Metropolitan Opera in February 1903, Heinrich Conried announced his intent to stage Parsifal the following season, contrary to the composer's wish that Parsifal never appear anywhere but the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth. (The earlier un-staged concert performances had fallen into a grey area, having received neither the approval nor disapproval of the Wagner estate.) Wagner's widow Cosima promptly threatened suit for copyright violation.Footnote ⁴⁰ Throughout the spring and summer, the New York papers covered the simmering conflict, as Conried travelled about Europe engaging singers and Bayreuth threatened to blackball any singer who signed on for the Met production. Ultimately, just days before the December opening, the lawsuit was dismissed. Despite the late composer's intentions, the legal reality was that the United States was not bound by the European copyright law set forth in the Berne Convention. Conried was free to put on the show.

Until August, the question of Parsifal's religious content was never at issue – and then suddenly it was. On 25 August, The Sun reported from Vienna that the Wagnerian conductor Hans Richter had called on Americans to boycott the Met's Parsifal: ‘the American people are a religious people, and the American clergy could do much by objecting to the performance of the religious features.’Footnote ⁴¹ A few days later, The Sun's the front page announced that the Wagner estate had engaged New York attorney Gilbert Ray Hawes to bring forward its lawsuit. Possibly Hawes saw the value continuing Richter's line of attack by raising the issue of sacrilege, because without question, he was the first to bring it into the present debate:

Raising the spectre of the passion play was likely a calculated move on Hawes's part, and not without precedent; the Musical Courier had made that connection after Parsifal's 1882 premier: ‘Perhaps the idea [of the drama] was suggested to Wagner by the “Passion Play” as represented at Ober-Ammergau.’Footnote ⁴³

Nineteenth-century Protestant objections to the passion play were not unusual and reflected the religious prejudices of the era. Through most of the century, theatre – both in the broadest concept of ‘drama’ and, more narrowly, in the culture of the theatre itself – was condemned by the Protestant mainstream. The cultural attitudes of establishment Protestantism emerged in part from Puritan Calvinism, a tradition which historically reviled the stage. Colonial-era Puritans viewed the theatre as the ‘devil's tool’ to draw Christians into sin, and in the middle of the nineteenth century, the powerful American Protestant spokesman Henry Ward Beecher pronounced, ‘It is notorious that the theatre is the door to all the sinks of iniquity’.Footnote ⁴⁴ On occasion, opera itself was a target, as when a group of St. Louis clergy objected to the sensuality of the ballet in productions of the touring American Opera Company in November 1886. While a relatively minor tussle, it forecast the events of 1903 by briefly garnering attention in the national press and almost certainly increasing the take at the box office.Footnote ⁴⁵ (It is worth noting that non-Calvinist denominations, such as Episcopalians and Unitarians, were more tolerant of the theatre.)

The dramatic genre that especially stoked the ire of Protestants was the passion play, the dramatic portrayals of the gospel narratives of Christ's betrayal, suffering and crucifixion. In fact, the first calls for a Christian boycott of a dramatic production were prompted by stagings of passion plays. In 1880, New York impresario Henry E. Abbey, later a co-founder of the Metropolitan Opera, cancelled a passion play at Booth's Theatre, after a firestorm of protest from Protestant clergy and laity.Footnote ⁴⁶ The 1883 attempt by impresario Salmi Morse referred to in Hawes's statement was also halted by protest and legal action. Protestants perceived a two-fold evil in passion plays. First, the thought of Christ's sufferings and death being played out on the ‘profane’ stage, not to mention the profits garnered by the play's non-Christian, and often Jewish, producers, offended Protestant sensibilities. Second, passion plays were also historically associated with Catholicism and frequently presented in Roman Catholic churches. (However, American Protestants harboured no objections to the Oberammergau passion play, and frequently praised it. A major reason was that Oberammergau lay on the other side of the Atlantic.Footnote ⁴⁷)

It is difficult to conclude that the knowledgeable editorship of The Musical Courier truly believed Parsifal to be a passion play. Nevertheless, the repeated branding of the drama as such throughout the fall of 1903 sounded a dog-whistle to conservative Protestants who both retained strong objections to the genre and knew little about Parsifal itself, suggesting that the epithet was intentional.

Hawes's opening gambit succeeded. Within days, the first formal objection to the Parsifal production was announced by The Passion Play Society of America, a hazy organization only recently incorporated by Dr Wolfgang Goetz, with the ostensible purpose of actually producing the Oberammergau play in New Jersey.Footnote ⁴⁸ The society promptly formed a committee to petition New York City Mayor Seth Low to stop the production.Footnote ⁴⁹

When The Musical Courier entered the fray on 16 September, it was not as a dispassionate observer; in the coming months, the Courier would spill more ink opposing the production than any other newspaper or periodical. Over 13 consecutive weeks, the Courier published a series of articles – frequently spreads of two or more pages – that argued against the production on legal, religious and ethical grounds. These exhaustive (and at times, exhausting) commentaries offer a glimpse of the national interest generated by the controversy, as it reprinted and responded to editorials from across the nation. The Courier objected to the production primarily on ethical grounds, arguing that if the copyright issue did not represent a violation of the letter of the law, Conried had certainly transgressed the spirit of the law and the composer's final wishes; moreover, Conried was committing an injustice by depriving Wagner's widow and children of their rightful income.

In its campaign against the production, the Courier repeated three themes like a drumbeat. It regularly deployed the passion play trope. Ostensibly recusing itself from evaluating the religious content of the work, it nevertheless maintained that Parsifal was indeed a religious drama based on Christian subject matter that required assessment by New York clergy. And it expressed indignation that any sort of profit should be made on the production, especially if the ones to gain were not the Wagners but the show's Jewish producers. (Without mentioning them by name, the Courier included among Parsifal's Jewish financial beneficiaries Conried himself, as well as the company's board president, ‘a good many employees in the opera house’, and the production's intended conductor, Felix Mottl.Footnote ⁵⁰) The Courier darkly hinted that Conried's insistence on pushing the production forward would reflect poorly on Jews everywhere:

Not everyone subscribed to the passion play link. In early September, The Sun had even distanced Parsifal from the prevailing Christian interpretation:

However, after the Courier had begun its campaign, this view was largely drowned out.

In November, the Rev Dr George L. Shearer, a Presbyterian minister and Secretary of the American Tract Society, took up the cause. Shearer was no stranger to the fin de siècle culture wars. While serving as chair of the New York Presbytery in the 1890s, he had established himself as an outspoken opponent of theological liberalism, having taken a leading role in prosecuting the Briggs heresy trial. Shearer was also a vocal opponent of passion plays. On 23 March 1902, members of the ‘Lambs Club’ successfully staged a new version of Clay M. Greene's ‘Nazareth’ at New York's Garrick Theatre. Spearheading an unsuccessful effort to stop the production, Shearer obtained from the New York Presbytery a resolution ‘through which the Presbytery went on record as … emphatically condemning any effort to produce on the public stage any scenes from the Saviour's life’.Footnote ⁵³ Turning his sights on Parsifal, Shearer employed that very resolution to bring the force of the New York Presbytery to bear. On 5 October, the Presbytery passed a resolution that applied the 1902 ‘Nazareth’ production to the current situation:

However, the objective of Shearer's crusade might be understood as not so much the interdiction of a passion play as the preservation of the Church's role in overseeing the broader culture. On 11 November, the New York papers reported that Shearer and a committee of other clergymen had mounted an ‘educational campaign’ against Parsifal. The only other committee member mentioned was the Rev Dr David J. Burrell, of the Marble Collegiate Church; Shearer declined to identify any others, simply asserting the support of ‘practically all the clergymen of the city, Catholic and Protestant’.Footnote ⁵⁵ After rehearsing the usual objections to the dramatic portrayals of Christ and the Eucharist (and calling Kundry ‘a more advanced member of the “red light” legion’), Shearer concluded with a telling statement that underscored the central cultural assumption of nineteenth-century American conservative Protestantism, going to the heart of the Parsifal controversy:

This was not an isolated position. Just a few weeks earlier, The Musical Courier had articulated a similar sentiment, striking even then for its explicitly sectarian language:

Taken together, these statements distilled the establishment Protestant position toward the Church's role in American culture. Equating Christian cultural and moral values with those of the nation presented a clear framework for judging, praising or condemning cultural artefacts. What threatened the Church, threatened the public at large. Christians must oppose whatever is at odds with the faith, both for the sake of the Church and for the sake of the public. Thus, Shearer called not just for a Christian boycott of Parsifal; he called for a general boycott by the entire city.

The response to Shearer's committee was swift. The following day, The New York Times reported the reactions of other clergy and persons connected with the Parsifal production. Rev. Robert S. MacArthur (Calvary Baptist Church), the Rev. Dr David G. Wylie (Scotch Presbyterian Church) and Dr Thomas O. Conant (editor of the Baptist Examiner) expressed support for Shearer; attorney Hawes denied any role in fomenting the clergy protest, and Conried suggested that Shearer was colluding with the Wagners.Footnote ⁵⁸ Most interesting, however, is that Conried objected to Parsifal's characterization as any kind of religious drama at all, arguing that it was ‘a profane work, intended for a profane stage, and not like the old mystery and miracle plays for interpretation in churches’, one of the rare attempts in the early history of American Parsifal reception to disconnect the work from a Christian interpretation. The Times noted the inconsistency of opposing a passion play in America while celebrating one in Europe, and observed that Shearer's objections were unheard-of among European clergy. The beneficiary of Shearer's efforts would be Heinrich Conried, who would ‘require the widest possible publicity to fill the Metropolitan Opera House on the occasion of the wrongful, inartistic, sacrilegious, and blasphemous production in question at ten dollars a seat’.Footnote ⁵⁹

Although Shearer fell silent after his short-lived media blitz, Burrell and others continued to speak out, even after Parsifal's Christmas Eve opening. Burrell published ‘Parsifal’: A Remonstrance, a brief pamphlet in which he called on the mayor to revoke the Metropolitan Opera's license. He also appealed to the Metropolitan Opera's management, the Jewish community, the general public and finally members of the Christian community who ‘furnish the substantial support of the Metropolitan Opera [and who] have it in their power either to prevent this sacrilegious performance or to make a signal failure of it’.Footnote ⁶⁰ A few high profile New York pulpiteers, including the Rev. Dr Charles Henry Parkhurst, pastor of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, and the Right Rev. Frederick Burgess, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island, also inveighed against Parsifal in the following weeks. Burgess directly linked Parsifal to liberal theology, offering that Parsifal was based on an idea of Christ as a great man, but which denied his divinity, a view he attributed to the liberal German theologian David Friedrich Strauss.Footnote ⁶¹

By the time Parsifal opened, it had become clear that the controversy had escalated beyond the ethics of copyrights. The forcing of Parsifal on New York's Christian community by, at best, Jews, and at worst, anti-Christians, had been cast as a battle in an ongoing culture war between Christians and secularists. There could be no mistaking the implication that advocates of the Parsifal production were not just misguided, but were endangered the fabric of the community. Moreover, they challenged the Church's role as cultural gatekeeper.

The anti-Parsifal campaign failed, of course. Not only was the house sold out for the opening performance (The New York Daily Tribune also reporting that there were priests in attendance ‘who did not condemn the production’Footnote ⁶²), the management announced shortly thereafter that it would double the number of performances to satisfy public demand. The following season, the Metropolitan Opera presented 27 performances of Parsifal, including tour performances.Footnote ⁶³ It was not lost that the religious controversy had only played into Conried's hands. As the The New York Evening World put it, ‘When ministers oppose, the box-office is all to the good’.Footnote ⁶⁴

The most obvious reason that the anti-Parsifal clergy campaign failed, that few believed that Parsifal was a passion play or was intentionally sacrilegious, or simply didn't care, conceals a crucial point. Many Protestants retained significant reservations regarding Wagner's thinly veiled portrayal of the Eucharist, baptism and foot washing, as well as the parallels between Parsifal and Christ, and between Kundry and Mary Magdalene. Still, this did not suffice to foment the kind of popular groundswell that would block the production, or even to dissuade the curious from attending. The evolution of American religious life over just the previous two decades had exerted a profound effect on the ways that Protestants responded to culture. George Shearer's and the New York Presbytery's failed 1902 attempt to block ‘Nazareth’ signalled the cultural shift that had occurred since the successful 1880 campaign against the passion play and prefigured the failed 1903 anti-Parsifal campaign. No longer could establishment Protestant clergy address culture with a single powerful voice that could halt artistic productions; with the rise of theological liberalism, no longer could a single view of the relationship between the church and culture prevail among Protestants. For the American Protestant in 1903, the relationship between theology and culture had become murky.

‘Not in the Least Offensive’: Liberal Reception

Of course, Parsifal had probably not polarized the entire city, and there were certainly moderating voices. The Independent observed that the religious debate was essentially fruitless: ‘Regarding the religious aspect of the case there seem to be as many opinions as there are minds … Obviously in matters of this kind it is in bad taste to express too positive opinions in too violent language.’Footnote ⁶⁵ There were also expressions of Parsifal-fatigue:

Nevertheless, following Parsifal's sold-out opening, its Christian proponents began speaking up. Their favourable reception sounded two key themes consistent in liberal commentary since Parsifal's 1882 premiere: Kunstreligion as a phenomenon of nineteenth-century liberal theology, and the centrality of redemption to religious understanding and experience.

Kunstreligion and liberal Protestantism shared a common origin in the writings of German romantic theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834). Often identified as the ‘father of liberal theology’, Schleiermacher's 1799 treatise Reden über die Religion established a theology characterized by an essential religious experience, as opposed to rationalist metaphysics or dogma: ‘Religion's essence is neither thinking nor acting, but intuition and feeling.’Footnote ⁶⁷ In the third speech of this treatise Schleiermacher coined the term Kunstreligion, positing the symbiotic relationship between art and religion (though not a religion of art) already being explored by the Jena Circle.Footnote ⁶⁸ As Kunstreligion evolved over the course of the century, one essential characteristic stands out: art and religion – specifically, the musical art and the Christian religion – were intrinsically linked by their experiential natures. Wagner's belief in the redemptive power of art in the realm of religion, unfolded in his 1880 essay Religion und Kunst, and the overt Christian source material and imagery of Parsifal added impetus to employing the language of Kunstreligion in responses to the music drama.

Carl Dahlhaus's concise description of nineteenth-century Kunstreligion as ‘the belief that art, though created by humans, is revelation’Footnote ⁶⁹ belies its fluidity and multi-dimensionality. Kunstreligion cannot be divorced from the concept of ‘religious experience’, a concept that encompasses a spectrum ranging from personal devotion to corporate worship, from intellectual theology to intuitive spirituality. Kunstreligion not only reflects a set of beliefs and attitudes about artwork and artist, but also suggests a relationship between artwork and audience.

Of several possible ramifications this relationship engenders, two in particular appear as recurrent themes in American Parsifal reception. First is the role that the audience member plays as disciple, pilgrim or congregant. As a component of Kunstreligion, the congregant/audience role emerges as early as Wilhelm Heinrich Wackeroder's 1797 essay ‘Das merkwürdige musikalische Leben des Tonkünstlers Joseph Berglinger’,Footnote ⁷⁰ which linked the experience of attending a concert performance to Gottesdienst, the Christian worship service. Following Parsifal's New York premier, commentary likening the performance experience to a worship atmosphere was commonplace. The New York Times opined that ‘it is certain that there were devout Christians in the audience of Christmas Even who found in “Parsifal” a true edification, a “means of grace”’.Footnote ⁷¹ Following the New York opening, the New York Sun offered readers a glimpse ‘Between Acts at “Parsifal”’ that described this exchange between ‘two clerics’:

An anonymous Episcopal rector offered that his experience hearing Parsifal at Bayreuth was ‘not in the least offensive, but rather full of a deep religious impressiveness’, and expressed the hope that the New York audience would approach the performance ‘in an attitude of reverence, at least, for the artistic, if not for the religious significance of the occasion’.Footnote ⁷³

The second theme addressed the disposition of the congregation/audience. The sanctified, prepared audience figured in Warner's 1883 Parsifal review: after likening Bayreuth visitors to ‘pilgrims’, Warner surmised that the failure of Wagner's operas in Paris owed not to the operas themselves but to the character of the audiences.Footnote ⁷⁴ The popular English music writer Rev. H.R. Haweis described the audience at the 1882 premier as a ‘throng of art pilgrims assembled in the dim musical sanctuary, for such it was to us … The people seemed spellbound. Some wept, some gazed entranced with wide-open eyes, some heads were bowed as in prayer.’Footnote ⁷⁵ Frederic Spotts cites a 1908 account in the Berlin Vossische Zeitung describing Bayreuth ‘as “the new temple of the grail”, “a holy place of the German soul”, a “centre of artistic religion” from which the “spiritually unworthy” were to be excluded”’.Footnote ⁷⁶ In similar fashion, some New York Wagnerians who might have been expected to support the production actually opposed it, fearing that the sacred experience would be debased by spectacle-seekers. The Outlook had praised Parsifal as ‘a great reality; not a vision of art, but a deep glimpse of life’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Nevertheless, its concerns rested not with the legality or the propriety of the production, but with the character of attendees, who might fail to appreciate both the artistic and religious importance if Parsifal: ‘To present such an opera to a fashionable audience who attend upon it performance as a society function would be to divest it of its artistic dignity and rob it of its religious significance.’Footnote ⁷⁸ (Following the premiere, The Outlook expressed relief that the audience comported itself in a manner appropriate to the occasion: ‘It is gratifying to record that the audience honored themselves by supplying that atmosphere of quiet seriousness that is as essential to a proper presentation of the work as the stage pictures or music.’Footnote ⁷⁹)

An additional dimension of the experiential nature of Kunstreligion is the role that the artwork itself plays as a vehicle for conveying essential truths. Liberal American Protestants singled out Parsifal's didactic qualities, particularly as they understood the work as a drama of Christian redemption. From the time of its 1882 premier, critics and proponents alike had identified spiritual redemption as a key theme – perhaps, the single key theme – of Parsifal. Though redemption is a central tenet of the Christian faith, its interpretation varies among traditions and denominations. Schleiermacher's view reflected the thinking of medieval scholastic Peter Abelard (1079–1142), holding that the cross of Christ is the ultimate demonstration of God's love; God does not need to be persuaded to save humans, but humans must be persuaded to accept salvation through changed hearts. Schleiermacher's view defined the liberal view, holding that the Redeemer's role was to inspire humans toward greater love for God and one other, and that Christ's work consists in elevating human consciousness, thereby freeing God's children for life in society.Footnote ⁸⁰ Religious historian Claude Welch observes that redemption was therefore fundamentally experiential:

For liberals, redemption operated on two levels: an individual spiritual redemption and a kind of collective societal redemption. Unlike conservatives, liberals preached an inclusive individual redemption, characterized by a broad definition of the Fatherhood of God. In this view, many roads lead to God, though many liberals still maintained that Christianity was nevertheless the best path. All people, not only the saved, were children of the Father, no matter that many may have strayed from, or not yet attained, that knowledge.Footnote ⁸² Washington Gladden, a leading light of the Social Gospel movement, emphasized humankind's kinship with God, and articulated Christianity's central point as the atonement, ‘the loving sacrifice of the “All-Father” to win back His erring children’.Footnote ⁸³ Thus Van Rensselaer's argument that the message of Parsifal embodied an ‘eternal law … felt through all religions or in spite of none’, reflects this universal, transcendent view of redemption, much in keeping with the spirit of the 1893 World's Parliament of Religion described above. This was also the premise of Parsifal: The Guileless Fool, by the Rev. Howard Duffield, pastor of New York's Old First Presbyterian Church. Duffield extolled Parsifal as a ‘parable of the Hurt and Healing of Humanity’ that ends with a confession of faith and a universal message of hope and triumph.Footnote ⁸⁴ (Duffield found a particularly American metaphor in the Parsifalian figure of the ‘guileless fool’, likening Parsifal variously to the Pilgrims, the early colonists, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.Footnote ⁸⁵)

The liberal understanding of redemption manifested a broad view of the Kingdom of God, a perspective that profoundly affected the liberal's relationship with culture. Whereas conservatives took an eschatological view the Kingdom of God, essentially synonymous with the Church and the Christian community, liberals held that the Kingdom included every facet of contemporary human society. Society and culture therefore also required redemption. Gladden wrote, ‘The kingdom of heaven is not an ecclesiastical establishment; it includes the whole of life – business, politics, art, education, philanthropy, society in the narrow sense, the family: when all these shall be pervaded and controlled by the law of love, then the kingdom of heaven will have fully come’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Christians therefore laboured not only for the redemption of individuals, but for all of human culture. In the case of Parsifal, the attempts by several writers to draw both work and composer into the fold of Christendom was just this kind of redemptive work.

Such was Albert Ross Parsons's purpose in Parsifal: The Finding of Christ through Art, or Richard Wagner as Theologian, a lecture which subsequently appeared in print just months before the 1890 Parsifal Entertainment. Despite the title, Parsons said little about the drama itself; he focused instead on the composer. Parsons argued that although early in life Wagner opposed Christianity, in this last work the composer demonstrated that he had become a deep thinker about the Christian faith. In fact, Wagner had come to an unconventional and untraditional faith through an unconventional and untraditional means, namely, his own art:

A more significant example of the ‘redemption of the artist’ came from the eminent liberal Rev. Washington Gladden himself. Gladden's 1903 William Belden Noble lectures at Harvard University, subsequently published in a single volume as Witnesses of the Light, profiled six influential personages (Dante, Michelangelo, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Victor Hugo, John Ruskin and Wagner) who, he argued, were ‘representatives of the truth that was in Jesus, as witnesses of the light that lighteth every man coming into the world’. In profiling figures from outside of the scope of orthodox Christianity, Gladden sought to demonstrate that ‘their lives illustrate the truth that the kingdom of heaven is larger than the visible church’.Footnote ⁸⁸

Gladden drew Wagner into the Christian fold by underscoring his Lutheran roots, suggesting that Wagner's passion as a musical and dramatic reformer found inspiration in Luther himself.Footnote ⁸⁹ Gladden's Wagner was thus a radical progressive combating stagnant conservatism, an artist of integrity and authenticity labouring in the face of ignorance. Addressing Parsifal, Gladden described it ‘in some respects the greatest, as it is far the most deeply religious of his dramas … In no other work of dramatic art has there been such a serious attempt to incarnate the Christ-idea as in “Parsifal”’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Gladden made no attempt to suggest that the inspiration for Parsifal lay anywhere but within Christianity: ‘The whole tragedy of sin and punishment and redemption is here.’Footnote ⁹¹

Gladden's Wagner lecture – in fact, the whole of the series – represents a diametrically opposed view of the relationship between Christianity and culture to that of the conservative mainstream. Whereas conservatives may have viewed secular cultural artefacts as potential threats, Gladden (and other liberal Protestants) sought out sources of light from outside of the church and acted ‘redemptively’ by bringing those artists and works into consonance with the faith. Hence, while Gladden may have been overly generous in his measure of Wagner the man and in his interpretation of his works, his approach is consistent with one that sought God's truth in all things.

The final period on the 1903 Parsifal controversy was placed nearly a year after the Met opening. In late 1904, the Rev. Richard Heber Newton, rector of New York's All Souls’ (Episcopal) Church, belatedly joined the chorus with Parsifal: An Ethical and Spiritual Interpretation. Newton also sought to redeem both artwork and artist, though by way of syncretizing Christian theology with home-grown American spirituality. No stranger to the theology of Parsifal, Newton had hosted Albert Ross Parsons when he presented his 1889 Parsifal lecture at All Souls’. Newton's pamphlet responded directly to the clergy protest of 1903, coming to aid ‘some genuine music-lovers and devout Christians, who were troubled by the denunciations of Parsifal on the part of eminent clergymen, to such an understanding of the music-drama as would enable them to enjoy it with “a conscience void of offense”’.Footnote ⁹²

A controversial figure among New York's liberal Protestants and a leader in the Social Gospel movement, Newton was also deeply engaged in the New Thought movement. One among several uniquely American nineteenth-century spiritual movements, New Thought belonged to the larger metaphysical movement also encompassing spiritualism and theosophy. William James characterized New Thought as a ‘mind-cure’ movement, akin to its contemporary Christian Science.Footnote ⁹³ An outgrowth of American Transcendentalism, New Thought emphasized the role of ‘intuition as a basic source of the knowledge of reality’,Footnote ⁹⁴ and offered up intuitive role models such as the ‘genius’ composer Richard Wagner.Footnote ⁹⁵ Unabashedly optimistic in its worldview, it asserted a belief in the oneness of human life and the mind of God.Footnote ⁹⁶ New Thought was non-creedal,Footnote ⁹⁷ attracting liberal Christians like the Episcopal Rev. Newton as well as unaffiliated freethinkers.

Newton interpreted Parsifal as a metaphor for God's redeeming work in the world: ‘Parsifal is, then, under the form of legend and myth, the story of the Spirit of Christ working in humanity, leading man up out of evil into purity and unselfishness, and thus redeeming the world unto God’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Newton built upon Parsons's lecture, characterizing Wagner's Christianity as unconventional or untraditional, calling him ‘instinctively Christian’, and he made the remarkable claim that Wagner was in communion with the Roman Catholic Church at his death.Footnote ⁹⁹ Where Newton drew in New Thought ideals was in his emphasis on Wagner's intuitive genius, elevating him beyond mere composer to a much higher vocation:

Wagner was the New Thought ideal of the genius: attuned to ‘the Infinite, Eternal Power above, around and within us’,Footnote ¹⁰¹ he was a kind of modern-day prophet, the ideal human – whole, unfettered and profoundly creative.

Viewed from this perspective, liberal affinity for Parsifal went beyond the work's potential for simply a sense of uplift. It grew from the soil of liberal theological heritage, as a work that found a natural consonance with the experiential nature of Kunstreligion, and as a drama that provided both means and metaphor for a liberal understanding of Christian redemption.

***

That Conried's Metropolitan Opera production of Parsifal during the 1903–04 season was a triumph, there can be no doubt. The following season, its 27 New York performances were augmented by a national tour, and aided by the wide, national press coverage throughout the fall of 1903, the drama took on a kind of life of its own. During the 1904–05 season, the Henry Savage English Grand Opera Company also successfully toured an English-language production throughout the country,Footnote ¹⁰² a production in Yiddish appeared on the Lower East Side, performances were given as spoken plays, and Thomas Edison even offered a number of scenes on film.Footnote ¹⁰³ The work has remained a staple of the Met's repertory: as of the 2017–18 season, Parsifal has been given 302 times.

The culture war among American Protestants moved on, though receding (for a time) in the 1920s when, following the outcome of the Scopes Trial and failed efforts to exert greater influence on the direction of mainline Protestant denominations, fundamentalist Christians largely disengaged with attempts to defend and mould culture for several decades. In the meantime, many positions and attitudes ascribed to the liberal faction at the turn of the century, such as experiential spirituality and the attitudes of Kunstreligion have since become an accepted part of mainstream American religious and concert life.

It may seem quaint today, after decades of Parsifal scholarship and interpretation, to read such strident binary oppositions: either Parsifal was a sacrilegious stage production of Christian sacred events, or it was an expression of sincere Christian faith. Either Wagner was a blasphemer, or he was a great, if unconventional, person of faith. Nevertheless, scrutinizing what may have been a passing moment in the larger story of Wagnerism and Wagner reception in America adds to a fuller understanding of the engagement and interaction of American religious culture with the broader culture at the dawn of the twentieth century, an era in which religious Americans would frequently be at odds with one another over matters of culture. The controversy that swirled when Parsifal and American Protestants collided in 1903 offers a fascinating insight into a time when opposing factions believed they were battling for the soul of the nation, and a Wagnerian music drama was the battleground of moment.