The Wagnerian Fuhrer
By Michael Moriarty
web posted April 30, 2018
In light of last week’s return to Nazi Germany’s Holocaust and Reinhard Heydrich’s
villainy, my recent thoughts about Richard Wagner’s Parsifal and its climactic importance within my first opera, Wagner in Hell, demand to be shared.
Nothing has so perplexed me about my sworn-enemy, Richard
Wagner, as his final opera, Parsifal.
The four-hour pilgrimage of Parsifal that, in some ways, approaches being Wagner’s greatest
masterpiece, leaves too many questions open about Wagner’s final feelings about
anything?!
One is, I suspect deliberately, left in an intentional quandary!
How can this well-known and legendary, sexual seducer have
us believe that the ultimate and possibly celibate Yurodivy, Parsifal, becomes Wagner’s most
seriously considered role-model for the future?!
Again, rather like many villainous legends, the limitless
hypocrisy of Lucifer’s genius!
Wagner obviously and most heinously tries to paint himself
as ultimately a Yurodivy or “Sacred Fool”.
Wagner’s genius, however, had already told him the fate of
his own Nazi Soul and, with Siegfried and Gotterdammerung,
he declared himself an inevitably extinct species!
You cannot behave like a Fuhrer
of Music for all of your life and then, somehow, paint yourself as Parsifal!
Or can you?
Wagner certainly thought you could.
The opera, however, despite its pedantically Wagnerian
lectures, is musically one of his most ruthlessly ravishing; which makes me
feel that, on the face of it, Wagner is more Kundry than Parsifal.
It all fits with Wagner’s homophobic feelings around the
very pansexually self-conscious and infinitely complicated Friedrich Nietzsche.
If anyone should have
played the Yurodivy, it was Nietsche.
Yurodivys,
however, don’t fall as madly in love with anyone as the almost insanely
philosophic Friedrich Nietzsche fell dangerously in love with Richard Wagner.
Thank God, Nietzsche’s soul
saw more deeply into Richard Wagner
than anyone else has since then,
before-then
or even now.
I love Friedrich Nietzsche not because of his indisputably
intellectual genius but because of the profundity of his animal instincts about
Richard Wagner.
Only Nietzsche seemed to know the implications arising out
of Wagner’s record-setting gifts.
That no one listened seriously enough to Nietzsche’s
warnings?!
Hitler, with the Wagner family’s blessings and Richard
Wagner’s popularization of Anti-Semitism in Germany, not only brought us World
War II, but also made the whole world pay a price for falling in love with the
mythically hate-filled dramas of Richard Wagner!
Without the indisputable blessings of Wagnerians, Adolf
Hitler would have remained Germany’s version of America’s Louis Farrakhan.
Wagnerian scholars argue over the amount of Anti-Semitism
existing in Wagner’s final opera, Parsifal.
However, Parsifal
is anything and everything except Jewish!
Clearly, Wagner,
in his last opera, Parsifal,
did not mention the name of
either Jesus
or Christ
because he had never really
in his entire life,
acknowledged the Jewish Jesus
as Christ,
the savior.
Mythically Welsh in origin, Parsifal arises mysteriously out of nowhere within what reveals
itself as a Christian-like commune.
The names, Christ and Jesus, however, are never mentioned in
the opera.
Parsifal’s ascension
in the opera to the very leadership and heroic salvation of this commune actually
replaces what most audience members could, perhaps foolishly assume was Christ.
Here are portions of William Kinderman’s article
about the problems of Parsifal:
“Two centuries after Richard Wagner’s birth in 1813, his final music drama Parsifal continues to exert uncanny fascination, as Francois Girard’s new production at the Metropolitan Opera shows. For much of his life, Wagner was captivated by the legends of the Holy Grail; this “stage consecration festival play” is his culminating work. Dark episodes in Parsifal’s performance history display clearly the risks of its aesthetic treatment of redemption, which can project a hypnotic portrayal of collective identity. It was not without justification that Friedrich Nietzsche likened the exquisite music of Parsifal to the treacherous temptress Circe, claiming that ‘one must be a cynic in order not be seduced… and able to bite, in order not to adore.’
“The Bayreuth Circle regarded themselves as Knights of the Grail committed to promote a racist nationalist vision of Germanic self-realization. Decades after the composer’s death in 1883, the Wagner clan grouped itself around the propagandist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who had married Wagner’s daughter Eva. Chamberlain espoused a religiously oriented anti-Semitism, hailing Adolf Hitler in 1924 as a “god-sent benediction”. At the renewal of the Wagner Festival at Bayreuth that year, Wagner’s son Siegfried hoisted not the banner of the Weimar republic, whose black-red-gold tricolor his father had honored in 1849, but instead the imperial flag, a choice signaling his reactionary disdain for democracy and internationalism.
“At the outset of the Third Reich, Hitler was depicted as a Parsifal-like figure in a manner that absorbs the imagery from Wagner’s work.
Hitler as Holy Spear-holding,
Nazi Parsifal
“In 1933, the year Hitler rose to
power, a book on Parsifal was
published by Alfred Lorenz, who identified German’s new leader with Parsifal.
For Lorenz, the closing affirmative music of Wagner’s drama discloses Wagner’s
“prophetic thoughts” about a “new Parsifal religion,” enabling the listener to
experience through the music the following insight, which he highlights in
spaced-out print:
‘W e s h o u l d o v e r c o m e
d e c a y
a
n d a s a r a c i a l l y h i g h – b r e d p e o p l e
a d v a n c e t o v i c t o r
y.’”
Recent productions of Parsifal, as
the one discussed by William Kinderman, have attempted to soften the undeniably
racist inferences within it.
Indeed, and again, like Farrakhan’s Black
Panthers, the more complex Parsifal
becomes, due to apologists for Wagner’s racism, the more obvious is their undeniable
Evil. 
Michael Moriarty is a Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning actor who
starred in the landmark television series Law and Order from 1990 to 1994. His
recent film and TV credits include The Yellow Wallpaper, 12 Hours to Live,
Santa Baby and Deadly Skies. Contact Michael at rainbowfamily2008@yahoo.com.
He can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/@MGMoriarty.