The Enigma of Parsifal by Brian Coghlan , Ralph Middenway (review)

Abstract

236 Reviews ultimately fashioned a novel; in the case of Holderlin, the competing claims of indi? viduality and community lead, on one level, to the death of Empedocles, or, in terms of 'the enterprise of writing', to what Alice Kuzniar calls 'the deferral of closure, the delaying of apocalyptic endings' (p. 205), the failure to complete the work. Although Schutjer reads Kant, Schiller, Goethe, and Holderlin in terms of the 'eighteenth-century project of aesthetic community' (p. 209), another connecting idea employed is the notion of 'intellectual intuition' (cf. pp. 99, 170, 240 n. 16), dismissed as impossible by Kant, but identified by Holderlin with aesthetic experience. The sensation of the sudden transition from pleasure to pain which is described in Goethe's essay on Laocoon (1798) as being 'wie ein elektrischer Schlag' recurs in the image used in the Lehrjahre to depict the effecton the audience of the performance of a troop of acrobats ('wenn man gute, edle, der Menschheit wiirdige Gefuhle ebenso schnell durch einen elektrischen Schlag ausbreiten [...] konnte') and is said to have its counterpart in Holderlin's employment in'Brot und Wein' (1801) of 'an electrical im? age to describe a human connection consistingin pure receptivity' (cited pp. 126,125, 170). (The reliance on Hamburger's translation of 'Wo ist das schnelle? Wo brichts, allgegenwartigen Gliiks voll | Donnernd aus heiterer Luft iiber die Augen herein?' as 'Where is the swift? And full of joy omnipresent, where does it | Flash upon dazzled eyes, thundering fall from clear skies?' perhaps exaggerates the strength of the link.) To put it another way: rather than the various left-wing conceptions of 'community' and 'communitarianism' (in however debased a form: 'it takes a village to raise a child [. . .]'), it is the right-wing fantasy of irrational and ecstatic union which inherits the legacy of the idea of das Ganze, and which explains why, as Schutjer's introduction reminds us, certain aspects of eighteenth-century aesthetics proved so susceptible to abuse by the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. Following the critiques of 'aesthetic ideology' offered by Paul de Man and, more recently, by Marc Redfield, Linda Schulte-Sasse, and others, Karin Schutjer's study offers a salutary reminder ofthe complexity of classical German aesthetics and of contemporary conceptions of social solidarity, at a time when both are showing signs of returning to the intellectual agenda. University of Glasgow Paul Bishop The Enigma ofParsifal. Ed. by Brian Coghlan and Ralph Middenway. Adelaide, South Australia: The Richard Wagner Society of South Australia Inc. 2001. vii + 2i4pp. AS31. ISBN 0-9579159-0-x(pbk). This collection of somewhat disparate essays on Wagner's last work attempts to avoid what Brian Coghlan terms 'over-simplifying popularisation'; but the co-editor also somewhat disarmingly expresses the hope that 'the heavy artillery of academe, musicology and high-octane Musikwissenschaft is well chained up farbehind the frontline' (p. xi). The general approach and the list of contributors to this volume suggest that it was conceived from the start primarily to communicate enthusiasm for Wagner's work; as such, it is an eminently serviceable introduction to what has traditionally been viewed as one of Wagner's more problematic productions. Andrew Riemer confronts the problems openly in his chapter, entitled 'Wagner's Misfortune', where he argues that 'the peculiar circumstances ofthe Bayreuth Festival encouraged Wagner and his associates to allow full scope to certain potentialities within his works [that are] inimical in many ways to the greatness of his art' (p. 193). In an opening chapter, Ralph Middenway introduces novices to the opera, while the next three contributions, by Marian Frost, Heath Lees, and Lewis Wickes, contain musicological analyses. Other chapters concentrate on Wagner's medieval sources, MLR, 98.1, 2003 237 staging and set designs, the religious and moral Problematik, and Wagner's con? nections with the near-contemporary literary trends of Symbolism and fin de siecle decadence. A particularly useful chapter is provided by Peter Russell on thematic links with other works, since it was Wagner's practice not only to conflate a num? ber of characters contained in his sources but also to rework themes found in earlier music-dramas, such as The Flying Dutchman, Tannhauser, and the...