A Wagnerian Battle for Souls: Parsifal and the Crisis in American Protestantism, 1882–1904

Abstract

The Metropolitan Opera premiere of Richard Wagner's Parsifal in December 1903 stirred what was arguably the first American religious controversy over an artistic event to claim national attention in the twentieth century. Although the outcome was predictable – the protests appeared only to fuel box office success – the significance lies in what this controversy reveals about the music drama's most ardent opponents and supporters at a key moment in American religious history. The 1903 Parsifal controversy unfolded in the midst of a crisis in American Protestantism, as conservative establishment Protestants defended their weakening hold on American culture, and their theologically liberal brethren viewed that same culture as both a source of spiritual inspiration and a cause for redemption. Drawing primarily upon accounts published in the New York press, nationally circulated periodicals (including strongly partisan contributions to the debate by The Musical Courier), and the writings of several prominent Protestant clergy and lay leaders, this reception study argues that the religious controversy surrounding the 1903 Parsifal production was a substantive skirmish in this American Protestant crisis, and brought forward competing interpretations of the music drama which highlighted the cultural implications of what had been, until that point, largely a theological dispute. Conservative response fastened onto elements of the drama found to be sacrilegious, while liberal response was conditioned by its kinship to the nineteenth-century phenomenon of Kunstreligion, and a broad view of redemption that extended beyond the individual soul to the artwork and the artist, and to all of culture.