parsifal aura

Parsifal 's AuraAuthor(s): Stephen C. MeyerSource: 19th-Century Music, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Fall 2009), pp. 151-172Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/ncm.2009.33.2.151 .Accessed: 25/03/2015 10:17

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STEPHEN C.MEYERParsifalsAura

19th-Century Music, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 151172. ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN 1533-8606. 2009 by the Regents ofthe University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce articlecontent through the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions Web site, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ncm.2009.33.2.151.

1Description and quotation from Richard Barber, The HolyGrail: Imagination and Belief (Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press), p. 100. The Lancelot-Grail is also re-ferred to as the Vulgate cycle, the Prose Lancelot, andthe Pseudo-Map Cycle. It was probably written around121020, thirty years after Chrtiens original version ofthe story.

Parsifals Aura

STEPHEN C. MEYER

The recorded legacy of Parsifal stretches backmore than a century, to the very earliest yearsof commercial sound recording. In many ways,this recorded legacy is quite similar to that ofother operatic works. Specific highlightssuchas Kundrys Ich sah das Kind or ParsifalsNur eine Waffe taugtwere selected for re-cording, and various kinds of arrangements weremade in order to adapt the opera to the particu-lar limitations of recording technology and tomeet the demands of the market. In other ways,however, the early sound recording profile ofParsifal was unique. Semisacralized not onlyin its subject matter but also in its standing asthe Masters Last Work, Parsifal was investedwith a character similar to the sense of embod-ied distance that Walter Benjamin called aura.This article will investigate ways in which theearly recorded legacy of Parsifal was partly de-termined and complicated by this character,and ways in which this legacy documents theunique position that Parsifal held in the oper-atic repertoire.

In the medieval sources in which stories aboutParsifal and the Grail first appear, the Grail isclearly an aura-saturated object, a supernatu-ral presence in the quotidian world. In theLancelot-Grail, to take one example, the fourthappearance of the Grail is heralded by a violentstorm and is accompanied by sweet odors andvoices which [sing] together more sweetly thana human heart can imagine, or earthly languagedescribe.1 In the Quest for the Holy Grail, theholy relic appears at Arthurs court during thefeast of Pentecost, where it is surrounded by abrilliant radiance. The people inside [the hall],the text relates, seemed to have been illumi-nated by the grace of the Holy Spirit. The Grail


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fills the room with fragrance, as if all the spicesof the earth had been spilled abroad.2 Theemphasis in these romances on the pleasingodors that emanate from the Grail resonateswith the original meaning of aura, and also,perhaps, with the paranormal associations thatthe term acquired during the late nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries. Other medieval writ-ers placed emphasis on the relationship betweenthe Grail and Christian liturgy. In Wolfram vonEschenbachs Parzifal, for instance (the versionof the story that most directly inspired Wagner),the Grail appears as part of a ritualistic proces-sion whose meaning is shrouded in mystery.Wolframs text also articulates another key fea-ture of the Grail: its power to hold decay anddegeneration at bay, or even to heal the woundedand the sick. This aspect of the Grail receivesextensive attention in Wagners Parsifal. TheGrail is a central symbol in the complex scenesthat end the first and third acts, scenes that arecharacterized in part through unusual auratictextures like the special bells and the Voice fromHeaven. Throughout the work, the power of theGrail to stave off the process of decay isthematized in various ways. For Titurel, thispreservative power is a singular grace, a mark ofthe Saviors redemptive power. But for Amfortas,the Grail merely prolongs the suffering causedby his incurable wound, a suffering from whichhe can be delivered only by death. The tensionbetween these two figurations of the Grails aurastands at the center of Parsifals plot.

IIDuring the late nineteenth and early twenti-

eth centuries, the reception of this plot wasbound up with its relationship to religion ingeneral, and particularly to Christianity. Inso-far as we understand the opening sentence ofWagners Religion and Art essay (1880) as ap-plying specifically to Parsifal, we could saythat the origins of this relationship predate thepremiere of the work: It could be said thatwhen religion becomes artificial, Wagnerwrote, it is the preserve of art to rescue its

essence by apprehending the mythical sym-bolswhich religion wishes to be believed truein a literal senseaccording to their symbolicvalue, in order to reveal the profound truthhidden in them by representing them ideally.3Although Wagner is speaking here in generalterms about all works of art, his words clearlyhave special applicability to Parsifal, for noneof his other stage works are so deeply saturatedwith religious symbols. Discussion of these re-ligious symbols played a large role in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century recep-tion of the work. They occupy a prominentplace, for instance, in Hans von Wolzogensinfluential Thematischer Leitfaden durch dieMusik des Parsifal.4 Although Wolzogens prin-cipal interest is in the thematic material of thework, he prefaces his theoretical discussion withcomments about the primary symbols ofParsifal. The Grail, he writes in this section,

refers to that holy vessel spoken of in the oldestlegends of the Aryan people wherein was containedthe divine drink, that intoxicating result of ancientculture, that spiritualized product of nature. Theybelieved that by partaking of Soma, Haoma, Wine,Mead they received the spirit of God. Inward eleva-tion, purification, and strength to serve their Godbound the partakers together in a mysterious holybrotherhood: especially so in Eleusis, where Demeterand Dionysos were partaken of in bread and wine.This is the prototype of the Christian sacrament.5

Wolzogens comments can be seen in the con-text of the late-nineteenth and early-twenti-eth-century interest in comparative religion,

2Described and quoted by Barber, The Holy Grail, p. 102.The Quest for the Holy Grail was written around 122030as the continuation of the Lancelot Grail.

3Translated by Simon Nye in Jrgen Khnel, The ProseWorks, in Wagner Handbook, ed. Ulrich Mller and Pe-ter Wapnewski, trans. ed. John Deathridge (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 615. Religionund Kunst first appeared in the Bayreuther Bltter. For adiscussion of this specific passage in relationship to Parsifal,see Lawrence Kramer, The Talking Wound and the Fool-ish Question: Symbolization in Parsifal, Opera Quar-terly 22/2 (2006), 20829.4Hans von Wolzogen, Thematischer Leitfaden durch dieMusik des Parsifal; nebst einem Vorworte ber denSagenstoff des Wagnerschen Dramas (8th edn. Leipzig:Feodor Reinboth, 1889). Wolzogens book was translatedinto English as Thematic Guide through the Music ofParsifal; with a Preface Concerning the Traditional Mate-rial of the Wagnerian Drama, trans. J. H. Cornell (6th edn.New York: G. Schirmer, ca. 1891).5Wolzogen, Thematic Guide, p. 8.



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manifest in works such as Sir James Frazers1890 study The Golden Bough. Indeed, his de-scription of the holy vessel anticipates some ofthe connections explored by Jessie Weston inher famous investigation of the Grail legend inFrom Ritual to Romance.6 Other writers madea more explicit connection between Wagnersfinal work and Christianity. In his ambitiousParsifal and Wagners Christianity (1899),for instance, David Irvine presents the Bhnen-weihfestspiel as the embodiment of Christiantruth.7 Other works, for example, A. R. Parsonsspopularizing text Parsifal: The Finding of Christthrough Art (1893), are even more direct: Par-sons straightforwardly presents WagnersBhnenweihfestspiel as a theological work.8 Theidea reaches its apogee (or becomes ridiculous)in C. R. S. Joness book The Chalice of Ecstasy(1923), which is described on the title page asa Magical and Qabalistic Interpretation of theDrama of Parzifal by A Companion of the HolyGrail.9

This focus on the religious or quasi-religiouscontent of Parsifal intersected with anotherimportant strand in the works reception his-tory, namely, a focus on the sacramental orsemisacramental character of its performance.

This idea, of course, is reflected in Wagnerschoice to call Parsifal a Bhnenweihfestspielrather than a music drama, and it figures promi-nently in nearly every account of the Bayreuthperformances from the summer of 1882. H. R.Haweis, to take just one example, wrote thatduring the performance of the Grail scene:

The whole assembly was motionless; all seemed tobe solemnized by the august spectacleseemed al-most to share in the devout contemplation andtrance-like worship of the holy knights. Everythought of the stage had vanished. Nothing was fur-ther from my own thoughts than play-acting. I wassitting in devout and rapt contemplation. Before myeyes had passed a symbolic vision of prayer andecstasy, flooding the soul with overpoweringthoughts of the divine sacrifice and the mystery ofunfathomable love.

The people seemed spellbound. Some wept, somegazed entranced with wide-open eyes, some headswere bowed in prayer.10

For Haweis, the performance of Parsifal ismesmerizing in part because of the ways inwhich it departs from conventional theatricalpresentation and approaches the character of areligious service. But during the last decades ofthe nineteenth century, some critics were quiteuncomfortable with the staging of Christianrituals (or at least, very close facsimiles of theserituals) on the operatic stage. In 1886, for in-stance, the New York critic Frederick Archerwrote that the presentation of some of [theincidents of Parsifal] on the stage, notably thecelebration of the Eucharist, is particularly opento objection. The age of miracle plays haspassed, and their revival for the mere purposeof providing entertainment for the cultured op-era habitu is both unjustifiable and offen-sive.11 In his review of an unstaged 1891 per-

6Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance (New York:Dover, 1997; rpt. London: Cambridge University Press,1920). Lawrence Kramer speaks about the connection be-tween Parsifal and what he calls ethnographic quest ro-mances (such as The Golden Bough) in his article TheTalking Wound, p. 225.7David Irvine, Parsifal and Wagners Christianity (Lon-don: H. Grevel, 1899). Irvines work is full of quotationsfrom Schopenhauer and other philosophers. For more onIrvine, see Gulliver Ralston, David Irvine: The Case of aBritish Wagnerian, Wagner 24/1 (2003), 2343.8Albert Ross Parsons, Parsifal: The Finding of Christthrough Art (New York: Metaphysical Publishing Com-pany, 1893). Parsonss text is referenced in Horowitz,Wagner Nights, p. 182 and in Roger Allen, Die Weihe desHauses (The Consecration of the House): Houston StewartChamberlain and the Early Reception of Parsifal, in ACompanion to Wagners Parsifal, ed. William Kindermanand Katherine R. Syer (Rochester: Camden House, 2005),p. 252 (24576).9Charles Robert Stansfeld Jones (Frater Achad), The Chal-ice of Ecstasy (Chicago: Yogi Publication Society, 1923).Despite the orthography, Joness work is a singular inter-pretation of Wagners work (not Wolframs). Jones uses thez in place of the s so that his numerological interpre-tations of the characters names will work out. By usingHebrew equivalents of the letters, Jones finds that thenames of the principal characters in Parsifal add up tometaphysically significant sums such as 666 and 418.

10H. R. Haweis, My Musical Life (London: W. H. Allen,1884). Quoted by Joseph Horowitz, Wagner Nights: AnAmerican History (Berkeley: University of California Press,1994), p. 183.11Keynote 10 (13 March 1886), p. 3. Quoted by MichaelSaffle in Parsifal Performances in America, 18861903:Changing Taste and the Popular Press, in Opera and theGolden West: The Past, Present, and Future of Opera inthe U.S.A., ed. John Louis DiGaetani and Josef P. Sirefman(London: Associated University Presses 1994), p. 164.



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formance of Parsifal, Louis Henry Elson usedmore measured tones. Parsifal, he wrote:

is a peculiar work and requires peculiar surround-ings; although written as a sacred opera . . . it is, incertain parts, suitable for concert performance as anoratorio. . . . The loss of stage accessories was notwithout some small gain, for the presentation of theepisode of Mary Magdalen at the feet of the Savior,even though disguised under the veil of an action ofKundry and Parsifal, could not have failed to shockthose who revere the scene; even in Beyreuth [sic]this has seemed a defect to many, although there thewhole musical drama has taken on the character of amemorial service and has become to some degree acult.12

Late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-centurywriters, in short, held a variety of opinionsabout the religiosity of Parsifal, but theyagreed that it was absolutely essential to theworks meaning. Parsifal, we might say, inhab-ited a highly charged space between the sacredand the sacrilegious and was seen as eithertranscendent or transgressive.

Elsons description of Parsifal performancesas taking on the character of a memorial ser-vice doubtless refers to the late Wagners wishthat performances of his final work should takeplace only at Bayreuth. Through Cosimas ef-forts, this wish was given the force of law: aconvention, signed by representatives from tenEuropean countries (but not the United States),that guaranteed sole performance rights toBayreuth for a period of thirty years, i.e., until1913.13 The issue of whether or not this so-called Schutzfrist was justified (or whether ornot it should be extended past thirty years)provoked a great deal of journalistic activity,much of it centering on the semisacred, cer-emonial nature of Wagners last work. Stand-

ing apart from the rest of the operatic reper-toire, Parsifal became the focal point of a dis-cussion about the cultural function of art. TheGerman critic Leo Hirschfeld gives us an ideaof what was at stake:

The ugly squabble [between those in favor of theSchutzfrist and those opposed to it] doesnt have todo with Bayreuth, but with us. It doesnt have to dowith the opinion, put forward by the Wagnerians,that Parsifal would be ineffective in any other placeI dont believe this to be true. It doesnt even ulti-mately have to do with Parsifal at all. What is atstake here is a cultural principle. The wonderfulidea of Bayreuthof a great performing art provingits power in the mood of a ceremony, far from theeveryday business of the theatershould not passany further out of our artistic life.14

Hirschfields comments frame the idea of theSchutzfrist in terms of the same topics of lossand decay prominent in the Grail legends andin the plot of Parsifal. His words imply that thewonderful idea of Bayreuth is in the processof passing away. The Schutzfrist provides atleast the possibility that this process might bestopped. In this sense, the justification for therestrictions placed on performances of Parsifaltouches upon some of the same ideas aboutaura and reproducibility that are central toBenjamins essay. Of course, operatic stagingsare not the same as mechanical reproductions.But for those who adhered to official Bayreuthpolicy in this matter, performances of Parsifaloutside of the Festspielhaus took on the statusof copies, copies that threatened the authorityand even the ontology of the original.

The issue of the Schutzfrist obviously didnot affect Parsifal reception in all other coun-tries in the same manner. The United States,after all, did not participate in the copyrightconvention governing Parsifal performances,which allowed the work to be legally (if contro-versially) staged in 1903 at the Metropolitan

12Louis Henry Elson, Parsifal in Boston, Boston Adver-tiser, 16 April 1891. Reprinted under the title Parsifal asConcert Music, [Boston] Musical Herald 12 (May 1891),pp. 8182. Quoted by Saffle, Parsifal in America, pp.16465. Elson is describing a performance that took placeon 15 April 1891.13For more on the Berne Convention and on the early re-ception of Parsifal generally, see Katherine R. Syer,Parsifal on Stage, in A Companion to Wagners Parsifal,ed. William Kinderman and Katherine R. Syer (Rochester:Camden House, 2005), pp. 277338.

14Leo Feld [pseudonym for Leo Hirschfeld], Festspiele inDie Schaubhne, 21 December 1905, 445ff.; quoted inViktor Otto, Der Kampf gegen Wagner ist in Wahrheitein Kulturkampf: Die Wagner-Rezeption in derWochenschrift Die Schaubhne/Die Weltbhne (19051933), Archiv fr Musikwissenschaft 56/1 (1999), 13 (928) (my trans.).



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Opera.15 In spite of this exception, however,and regardless of the wide range of critical re-sponses to the Schutzfrist, the restriction onstaged performances of Parsifal may have hadan effect on the way in which the work wasrecorded. In his authoritative discography ofParsifal, Jonathan Brown notes that the em-bargo was largely effective in the case of re-cordings of the work as well. From the earliestyears of recording, there are fewer excerpts ofParsifal than any of Wagners other works onrecord.16 Browns comments are borne out bythe history of The Victor Book of the Opera,the preeminent marketing tool for Victors pres-tigious Red Seal recordings of operatic musicduring the first part of the century. The firstedition of The Victor Book of the Opera ap-peared in 1912; it contained summaries of sev-enty operas and mentions about 700 individualrecordings. All of the canonical (i.e., post-Rienzi)Wagnerian works are among the group of sev-enty, with the exception of Parsifal (Parsifalwas added in the next edition, when the rosterof operas was expanded from 70 to 100).17

For my purposes, the practical effects of theSchutzfrist on the quantity of Parsifal record-ings that were produced during the first yearsof the twentieth century are less importantthan the relationship between legal justifica-tions of performance restriction and ways inwhich early recordings were marketed. Wemight understand the advertising rhetoric ofcompanies such as Victor and Columbia duringthis period as an inversion of the arguments

defending the special status of the Bhnen-weihfestspiel. The idea of the Schutzfrist waspredicated on the assumption that the copyin this case, the unauthorized production ofParsifalcould potentially destroy the specialaura of the original that properly belonged onlyon the stage of the Festspielhaus. Advertise-ments for both gramophones and sound record-ings, on the other hand, highlighted preciselythe ability of the new technology to captureand preserve the special aura of unique liveperformances. They are dominated by the claimof exact reproduction, a claim that was enactedin the numerous tone tests sponsored by pho-nograph companies during the first decades ofthe twentieth century. In these performances,the audience was challenged to tell the differ-ence between a recording and a soloist (both ofwhom were occasionally concealed fromview).18 The claim is presented iconically notonly in the famous His Masters Voice trade-mark, but also in images including the 1908Victor advertisement How did they all get inthere? in which a drum major, opera singers,and a minstrel performer march out of theVictrolas horn as if they were brought to lifeby the sonic magic of the machine (see plate 1).

The medium of sound recording, we mightsay, seemed to yearn for the preservative pow-ers of the Grailfor a defense against the inevi-table process of loss that afflicted acoustic andeven early electronic sound recording. This ideagoes back to the very first years of the medium.

15The Metropolitan Opera premiere, as Syer points out,was followed by a touring production of Parsifal by theHenry Savage Opera Company. See Syer, Parsifal onStage, pp. 28283. Another interesting aspect of the un-usual reception history of Parsifal may be found inCatharine Macedo, Between Opera and Reality: TheBarcelona Parsifal, Cambridge Opera Journal 10/1 (1998),97109. A more general overview of Parsifals stage his-tory may be found in Lucy Beckett, Richard Wagner,Parsifal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981),pp. 87102.16Jonathan Brown, Parsifal on Record: A Discography ofComplete Recordings, Selections, and Excerpts of WagnersMusic Drama (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992),p. vii.17Samuel Holland Rous, The Victor Book of the Opera,rev. edn. (Camden, N.J.: Victor Talking Machine Com-pany, 1913). In this edition, Parsifal appears in its rightfulplace between I Pagliacci and Patience, an opera just likeany other.

18For a detailed description of these tone tests, see EmilyThompson, Machines, Music, and the Quest for Fidelity:Marketing the Edison Phonograph in America, 18771925,Musical Quarterly 79/1 (1995), 13171. These tone tests,as Thompson points out, were particularly common dur-ing the second decade of the twentieth century. Anotherexample of the tone test is described by Walter L. Welchand Leah Brodbeck Stenzel Burt in their well-known bookFrom Tinfoil to Stereo: The Acoustic Years of the Record-ing Industry, 18791929 (Gainesville: University Press ofFlorida, 1994), p. 146. In 1915, according to Welch andBurt, Edison sponsored a trial in which Anna Case andChristine Miller (stars at the Metropolitan Opera) sangarias before an assembled audience, who then comparedtheir performances with recordings. The audience was ap-parently unable to detect any difference between live per-formance and recording. Since these tone tests were spon-sored by the recording companies themselves, it is hardlysurprising that surviving accounts of them are almost uni-versally positive, i.e., that they show no perceptual dif-ference between recording and live performance.



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19Thomas A. Edison, The Phonograph and Its Future,North American Review 126 (MayJune 1878), 533. Quotedby Emily Thompson, Machines, Music, and the Quest forFidelity, p. 135.

Plate 1: 1908 advertisement.

In a frequently quoted passage from an 1878article, for example, Edison himself predictedthat for the purpose of preserving the sayings,the voices, and the last words of the dyingmember of the familyas of great menthephonograph will unquestionably outrank thephotograph.19 Edisonto adapt the metaphorfrom Benjamins essaypromises a future inwhich the phonograph will ameliorate the in-evitability of loss. The phonographto pushthis metaphor even furthertakes on the sta-tus of the Grail.

IIIIt is hardly surprising that Edison and the

Victors advertising executives should depictsound recording so positively. In their rhetoric,the capability of the new technology to repro-duce live performance (of speech or music) isonly salutary. This capability plays a very dif-ferent role in the early essays of Theodor W.Adorno. Adornos interest in sound recordingharks back to his involvement with theMusikbltter des Anbruch in the mid 1920s.20

20For an overview of Adornos writings on the gramophoneand the phonograph record, see Thomas Y. Levin, For theRecord: Adorno on Music in the Age of Its TechnologicalReproducibility, October 55 (1990), 2347. TheMusikbltter des Anbruch (later simply Anbruch) wasfounded in 1919; Adorno started to contribute essays in1925 and became a part of the editorial board in 1929.


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During the late 1920s and 1930s, in the essaysThe Curves of the Needle (1927/1965), TheForm of the Phonograph Record (1934), andOn the Fetish-Character in Music and the Re-gression of Listening (1938) sound recordingcomes directly to the fore.21 The last of theseessays, as Richard Leppert points out, emergedfrom the correspondence between Benjamin andAdorno following the publication of BenjaminsWork of Art essay.22 This 1938 essay takesissue with what Adorno understands as thecentral idea of Benjamins essay, namely, thatreproducibility will erode the aura, enablingthe proletariat to envision and produce newforms of socially engaged art (such as film).Adorno mobilizes his argument by turning tomusic, the very field Benjamin had neglectedin the Work of Art essay. Musically, Adornoclaims, the effects of technological reproduc-tion have been regressive rather than liberat-ing. The aura has not been eroded, but merelytransferred from the work of art to star per-formers. Its effects are more insidious than ever.According to Adorno, technological reproduc-ibility limits music, first by reducing the num-ber of works in the repertoire, but also by re-ducing the structural complexity of art musicto a few beautiful passages and highlights thatmay readily be excerpted and thus commodified.

Vulgarization and enchantment, hostile sis-ters, writes Adorno,

dwell together in the arrangements which have colo-nized large areas of music. The practice of arrange-ment extends to the most diverse dimensions. Some-times it seizes on the time. It blatantly snatches thereified bits and pieces out of their context and setsthem up as a potpourri. It destroys the multilevelunity of the whole work and brings forward onlyisolated popular passages. . . . Above all, arrangingseeks to make the great distant sound, which alwayshas aspects of the public and unprivate, assimilable.

The tired businessman can clap arranged classics onthe shoulder and fondle the progeny of their muse.. . . Radical reification produces its own pretense ofimmediacy and intimacy.23

Although complete recordings of some op-eras had been made in the prewar period, theoverwhelming majority of operatic recordingsduring the first three decades of the twentiethcentury consisted of excerpts. For Adorno, im-perialism of the arrangement resulted in partfrom the temporal limitations imposed by therecording media: two- and four-minute wax cyl-inders or ten-inch or twelve-inch discs. Theresulting compression of supposed wholes intoisolated passages creates a false sense of au-thenticity by blending effects of ownership anderoticism in the listeners sense of possessingboth fondling and owninga favorite theme,which thus comes to occlude the great distantwhole that it is supposed to represent. Borrow-ing a phrase from Homi Bhabha, we might speakabout this relationship between source mate-rial and its arrangement or recorded selectionas one of metonymic fragmentation, in orderto ask the question of how, if, or in what waythe excerpt relates to the meaning of the origi-nal.24 Metonym (signification by association)implies both displacement and desire, both sig-nification and the unchecked flow of significa-tion; we will want to ask about how early re-cording technology managed these effects andwhether their management was inevitably asregressive as Adorno supposed. We will alsowant to ask particularly how the effect of met-onymic fragmentation changes in the auraticcontext of Parsifal in particular, and whether ithas substantial effects on that context itself.

21All three of these essays are collected in Theodor W.Adorno, Essays on Music, selected, with intro., comm.,and notes Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of Cali-fornia Press, 2002), pp. 27176, 27782, and 288317 re-spectively. The original German texts may be found inTheodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. RolfTiedemann et al., 20 vols. in 23 (Frankfurt am Main:Suhrkamp, 197086), 19: 52529; 19: 53034; 14: 1450.22See Lepperts commentary in Adorno, Essays on Music,p. 240.

23Adorno, Essays on Music, pp. 29899.24Bhabha uses the term metonymic fragmentation inThe Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), pp.22728, in a discussion of the work of Paul De Man andJacques Derrida. Presumably, Bhabha is referencing DeMans Messenger Lecture, Conclusions: Walter BenjaminsThe Task of the Translator, delivered 4 March 1983 atCornell University, published as The Lesson of Paul DeMan, Yale French Studies 69 (1985), 2546. In this essay,De Man critiques Zohns translation of Benjamins essay,particularly with reference to a passage in which Benjamincompares the translation and the original from which itderives, as fragments of a broken vessel. The idea ofmetonymic fragmentation thus emergesalbeit at onceor twice removeultimately from Benjamins text.



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The process of metonymic fragmentation,obviously, was conditioned by many differentfactors and did not affect all operas in the sameway. Number operas, for instance, could betreated very differently than the through-composed works Parsifal or Tristan und Isolde.Metonymic fragmentation also served manydifferent functions: piano-vocal excerpts werebound to be different than arrangements forflute or violin or guitar. Insofar as early soundrecording built upon these traditions, it wasalso similarly diverse. The products of met-onymic fragmentation were also directed at dif-ferent audiences. Liszts Marche solennelle versle Saint Graal (to limit ourselves to Parsifalarrangements) is a concert piece, with impor-tant virtuosic passages; while Hans Seiferts farless technically demanding Fantasie Transcrip-tion of the work is clearly designed for amateuruse.25 Early operatic sound recordingsalthoughperhaps to a lesser degree than piano arrange-mentswere also directed at different audi-ences. Finally, the metonymic fragmentationof an operatic work, as well as the way inwhich it passed over into early sound record-ing, was conditioned by time. Performers andproducers interested in recording arias fromMozarts Le nozze di Figaro, to take just oneexample, were in a certain sense merely con-tinuing a tradition of performing excerpts fromthe work that was over a century old.

The metonymic fragmentation of Parsifal didnot have this tradition to build upon, and itwas mediated almost from the very beginningby new technologies of sound recording and (toa much lesser degree) of film.26 It was also sub-

stantially mediated by the attributions of auraattending both the operas plot and its earlyreception. The result was to make the met-onymic fragmentation of Parsifal extraordinar-ily diffuse and in a certain sense non-oper-atic. Parsifals resistance and opennessto the possibilities of metonymic fragmenta-tion offered by the new technologies of soundrecording affected all types of early recordings:aria-like excerpts in which the solo singer isforegrounded; band arrangementsAdornowould call them potpourrisnewly com-posed from Parsifal motives; and orchestral ex-cerpts drawn directly from the Parsifal score.Limitations of space prohibit me from examin-ing the ways in which the recording profileof Parsifal differed from country to country.The focus of my remarks will therefore be onthe sound recording reception of Parsifal in theUnited States, the country that constituted thelargest market for music recordings during thefirst half of the twentieth century.

IVIn its early period, sound recording was dis-

cussed and advertised primarily as a technol-ogy for the reproduction of the human voice,and acoustic recording techniques were moresuccessful with individual voices or solo in-struments than with large ensembles. It is there-fore hardly surprising that arias should consti-tute the overwhelming majority of operatic re-cordings during the first decades of the twenti-eth century. Moreover, executives of recordcompanies also quickly discovered that theycould sell more records by signing big-namestars such as Enrico Caruso to exclusive con-tracts. What emerged during the first two de-cades of the twentieth century, then, was asinger-centered, four-minute aria template foroperatic recording, the logical result of star-power popularity and the constraints of tech-nological reproducibility. The melody-domi-

25Franz Liszt, Marche solennelle vers le Saint Graal: Frag-ment du Drame-Mystre Parsifal de Richard Wagner pourpiano par Franois Liszt (Mainz: B. Schott, 1884); Hans T.Seifert, Parsifal; Fantasie Transcription (New York: C.Fischer, ca. 1904).26Edison, copyright H51619-51626, camera man Edwin S.Porter, filmed in October 1904. See Evan Baker, Parsifalfor Stage and Screen in New York City, 1904, publishedtogether with German and French translations in theBayreuther Festspiele Programmheft 1996, pp. 14461. Ac-cording to Katherine Syer (Parsifal on Stage, p. 332, n.88), the film was sold together with a musical score forthe piano, although in her brief discussion of the film inOpera on Screen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000),p. 26, Marcia Citron suggests that the film was designedto be accompanied by phonograph recordings. The factthat both Seiferts arrangement (and another for piano four-

hands by Engelbert Humperdinck) as well as Edisons filmdate from 1904 is hardly accidental. The 190304 Parsifalperformances at the Metropolitan Opera (and the contro-versy surrounding them) created a great deal of interest inWagners final work, and these various arrangements canbe seen as efforts to capitalize on its temporarily height-ened popularity.



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nated, abbreviated nature of this template,as Adorno realized, brought it quite close to thehit tunes of the emerging popular music in-dustry, changing the legacy of European artmusic into a pantheon of best-sellers.27

The singer-centered, four-minute templateseems to have functioned quite smoothly forthe bulk of the operatic repertoire. Operas likeIl trovatore and Gounods Faust were quicklydistilled down to a fairly stable set of four-minute excerpts (frequently arias) that wererecorded and sold in great numbers. Wagnersworks were also treated in this manner. As wasthe case with Wagners other mature works,sections of Parsifal were excerpted and recordedby star singers more or less as arias. Recordingsof the Habaera, the Flower Song, and theSeguidilla outnumbered those from other partsof Carmen, just as those of Elsas Dream andthe Grail Narration appeared more frequentlythan other excerpts from Lohengrin. These sec-tionsjust like those from other Germanworkswere occasionally recorded in Englishor Italian: the tenor Edward Johnson made someexcellent Italian recordings of selections forColumbia in October of 1914: Es starrt derBlick from the second act appearing as Ilsanto Gral and Nur eine Waffe taugt fromthe very end of the third act as Soltanto unarmo val. In addition to these two excerpts fortenor, the final section of Gurnemanzs narra-tion from the first act (Titurel, der frommeHeld) and Amfortass prayer (Mein Vater)also appeared in early catalogues. Compared toother operas, however, sound recordings ofParsifal contained proportionally fewer aria-likeexcerpts.28 These excerpts, moreover, tended to

be from many different sections of the score.There were no real counterparts to greatesthits in the recorded legacy of Parsifal. Themetonymic fragmentation of Wagners finalworkto put this another waytook a differ-ent path than that of other operas.

The relative paucity of Parsifal aria re-cordings can be partially attributed to the factthat Parsifal, even in comparison to Tristan orthe Ring, contains very few readily excerptablevocal sections. This dearth of anything resem-bling an aria, however, is itself deeply enmeshedwith the particular reception history of thework. The resistance that Parsifal offers tosound recording, then, comes not just from thestructure of the score but also from the prac-tices and values that guided its early reception.This sort of resistance emerges most clearly,perhaps, with regard to Ich sah das Kindfrom the second-act duet between Parsifal andKundryone of the most frequently recordedparts of the score.29 The fact that Kundry isdirecting her wordsor should we say singingher ariato Parsifal makes the presence ofIch sah das Kind as a prominent part of early

27Adorno, Essays on Music, p. 294.28Any discussion about the nature of these types of record-ings, or (especially) about the relative importance of them,is fraught with methodological difficulties. First, it is no-toriously difficult to recover the complete catalogs andsales figures for all record labels during this period. Even ifit were possible to compile this data, it would not give usa quantifiable sense of the relative importance or influ-ence of different recordings. Sales figures would not tell usvery much about how often a particular recording wasplayed, or about how profoundly it influenced the inter-pretation of a particular opera. Ultimately, the social sig-nificance of a particular recording, or group of recordings,is not susceptible to statistical analysis. We can, however,get a general sense of the comparative profile of indi-vidual works by comparing their legacies in certain large

archives of recorded sound materials. My own commentsare drawn from an analysis of the Rigler & Deutsch Indexof Pre-LP Commercial Discs Held by the Associated Au-dio Archives, which contains approximately 615,000 soundrecordings of music, speech, instructional materials, andsound effects, from ca. 1895 to mid-1950s, held in thearchives of the New York Public Library, Stanford Univer-sity, Yale University, the Library of Congress, and Syra-cuse University. These archives, of course, never present aneutral cross-section of musical taste in the UnitedStates. Like all collections of this type, they are built upby myriad individual donations and acquisitions and maycertainly reflect the tastes and peculiarities of a particularlibrarian, curator, or donor. Despite these caveats, how-ever, we may use archives of recorded sound to under-stand differences in the ways in which various operaticworks were recorded, sold, and disseminated during theearly years of sound recording.29Ich sah das Kind was recorded as a four-minute ex-cerpt twice by Frida Leider (the second time in 1931, re-leased as Victor 7523-A), as well as by Kerstin Thorborgwith the Victor Symphony Orchestra under Karl Rudel(Victor 17223-A) from 1940. Ich sah das Kind was alsoincluded in recordings of the entire Kundry/Parsifal duet,such as those made in 1940 by Lauritz Melchior and KirstinFlagstad (Victor 17782-85-S).



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recording catalogues deeply ironic. Indeed, themarketing of Ich sah das Kind crystallizes acentral issue in the twentieth-century recep-tion history of Parsifal. The very qualities thatno doubt made this excerpt popular with bothsingers and consumersits lyricism and lull-ing rhythmare central to the depiction of thematernal eroticism that Parsifal must resist inorder to escape damnation and take his properplace as the new King of the Grail brotherhood.To put it in the language of contemporary con-sumer culture, the plot of the opera demandsthat Parsifal must refuse to buy the sensuousbeauty of Kundrys voice, even though in recordstores it was precisely that sensuous beautythat was put up for sale. This ideological disso-nance may at least partly explain why neitherIch sah das Kind nor any of the other solovocal excerpts from Parsifal attained the statusof Wagnerian chestnuts like the individual ariasfrom the Romantic operas, or even Der MnnerSippe or Winterstrme from Die Walkre.The reception of Parsifal as a semisacramentalwork compromised the ability of ariaspar-ticularly alluring songlike selections such asIch sah das Kindto serve as metonymicfragments of the transcendent whole.

Producers and performers found other ways,in addition to the aria template, to adapt theWagnerian music drama to the technology ofearly sound recording. One procedure was totreat Wagners score as source material for anewly composed work that was more germaneto the new medium. Written for more easilyrecorded concert band (instead of for orchestra),these pieces could be perfectly crafted to fit thetemporal limitations of the four-minute disc.Like the aria template described above, the re-cording of concert-band arrangements may beseen as a direct response to the limitations oftechnology. These limitations, however, werenot merely temporal. Before the electrical revo-lution of the 1920s, performers had to directtheir voices or instruments into a recordinghorn in order to generate sound waves thatwere clear and powerful enough to engrave therecording medium. Many early-twentieth-cen-tury recordings of operatic and symphonic mu-sic, therefore, were created with small cham-ber groups who could cluster around the re-cording horn, often using specially constructed

instruments such as the Stroh violin to con-centrate and amplify their sound.30

Under these conditions, it was very difficultto capture many of the complex textures thatwere so important to operatic and symphonicmusic. Because wind and brass players couldeasily direct their sound into the acoustic horn,these instruments were often more effectivethan strings in early recording sessions. It ishardly accidental, then, that there were so manyband arrangements of operatic material, andParsifal is hardly the only one of Wagners worksto be adapted in this way.31 Lohengrin andTannhuser were far more frequently subjectedto this kind of treatment. That band arrange-ments of the Pilgrims Chorus and the BridalProcession seem to outnumber those assembledfrom the Parsifal score, of course, testifies tothe enormous popularity that Tannhuser andLohengrin enjoyed during the early twentiethcentury, and unlike Parsifal, the music fromthese earlier operas had been an important partof the repertoire for several decades. Like thedearth of aria recordings, however, the rela-tively small number of band arrangement re-cordings of Wagners last work may also indi-cate a certain resistance from Parsifal itself,or rather, from the traditions of interpretationthat surrounded the work.

Kundrys Ich sah das Kind is susceptibleto the imperialism of the arrangement be-cause it is a narration: set apart from the sur-

30In the Stroh violin, introduced by the inventor AugustusStroh in 1904, the soundbox was replaced by a diaphragmthat was attached to a small metal horn, allowing theviolinist to direct his/her sound directly into the recordinghorn. Some reviewers claimed that recordings made withthe Stroh violin sounded tinny or harsh. After 1914 per-formers tended to use regular violins. A detailed descrip-tion of the Stroh violin may be found in Cary Clements,Augustus Stroh and the Famous Stroh Violin, Experi-mental Musical Instruments 10 (June 1995), 815; 11 (Sept.1995), 3839. See also Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: HowTechnology Has Changed Music (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 2004), p. 39.31Another example of this kind of arrangement is theMarch of the Nibelungs by Gottfried Sonntag. The mu-sic forms the soundtrack for one of the final sections ofLeni Riefenstahls notorious 1935 film Triumph desWillens. For more on these kinds of adaptations, see EugenBrixel, Richard Wagners Beziehung zur Militrmusik, inBlserklang und Blasinstrumente im Schaffen RichardWagners, ed. Wolfgang Suppan (Tutzing: H. Schneider,1985), pp. 17787.



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rounding text by its retrospective quality andfunctioning as a closed dramatic unit.32 Herariaif we can call it thatis also set apartfrom the surrounding material by purely musi-cal means: most especially by its lilting, triple-time meter. This clear metrical pulse differen-tiates the aria from much of the score, whichis characterized precisely by rhythmic ambigu-ity and displacement. It was surely one of thequalities that led to the selection of Ich sahdas Kind as one of Parsifals hit tunes.

In a similar way, the first-act Grail scene(Zum letzten Liebesmahle), with its march-like rhythms and prominent brass, was predis-posed for inclusion in concert-band arrange-ments. It is hardly surprising, then, that inpieces including the Parsifal Fantasia byTheodor Moses Tobani (recorded in 1904 onthe Columbia label by Arthur Pryors Band) orthe March of the Knights of the Holy Grail(recorded for Victor in 1930 by the Band of theH.M. Grenadier Guards) material from this partof Wagners score should play such a large role.33The relationship between the Grail-scene mu-sic and the rest of Parsifal, however, is differ-ent than that which obtains between thePilgrims Chorus and the rest of Tannhuser,or the Bridal March and the rest of Lohengrin.Like the Bridal March and the Pilgrims Cho-rus, the music for the Grail procession is char-acterized by the metrical regularity and thesymmetrical phrase structures. In the generalfluidic rhythmic context of Parsifal, however,these features sound unusual and distinct in away that they do not in the earlier Romanticoperas.

In Lohengrin, the Bridal Procession might beseen as the moment in the opera in which thehero is most closely integrated into the life ofthe community. In Parsifal, however, the marchfunctionsat least in partto mark the psy-

chological distance that separates the heroin this case, the failed hero Amfortasfromthe community of the Grail brotherhood. Us-ing the Grail-scene march music as the back-bone of a Parsifal arrangement, then, poten-tially sets up a certain metonymical disso-nance between excerpt, or, in this case, thearrangement, and the score as a whole. We maymeasure this distance by comparing the Marchof the Knights of the Holy Grail to a workthat might be regarded as its ancestor: theMarche solennelle vers le Saint Graal by FranzLiszt mentioned above. Both works are not re-ductions or arrangements of the Grail scene,but rather free compositions based on selectedGrail-scene motives. In the March of theKnights of the Holy Grail the four-note bellmotive is played by the tuba, which providesthe steady anchor for the entire piece. In accor-dance with the conventions of much concertband music, the march rhythm continues untilthe final triumphant fanfare. In Liszts Marchesolennelle vers le Saint Graal, by contrast, themarchlike processional motives are repeatedlyinterrupted by the Pure Fool motive (DurchMitleid wissend). The March of the Knightsof the Holy Grail features relatively few dy-namic shifts and only moderate changes in in-strumental timbre (partly because of the limi-tations of early electrical recording). LisztsMarche solennelle, on the other hand, is full ofuna corda markings and unusual chord voicings,sudden variations of texture that reproduce, atleast to some extent, the textural contrasts ofWagners score. The chords with which thepenultimate section of the Marche solennelleends, for example, contain close-spaced thirdsand doubled thirds and fifths, even though theyare placed at the lower extreme of the keyboard(ex. 1). It is difficult to hear these notes asprecise pitches; instead, they generate strangeovertones that mimicin a remarkable waythe shimmering resonance of bells.34

Although the structural logic of LisztsMarche solennelle is only tangentially relatedto the drama of the first-act finale, we may

32Kundry, we might say, is already making an arrangementfrom the material of Parsifals past: in this sense she takeson the function (within the plot of Parsifal) comparable tothe position that sound recording occupies in AdornosOn the Fetish-Character in Music essay. Just as soundrecording (in Adornos essay) captures only isolated pas-sages and suppresses others, so is Kundry selecting ele-ments from Parsifals biography to create a regressive ver-sion of his past.33See Brown, Parsifal Discography, p. 87.

34The specific overtone combinations generated by thesechords, of course, vary from performance to performanceand from piano to piano.



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longa

bassaExample 1: Excerpt from Liszt, Marche solennelle, mm. 11117.

nevertheless regard it as a metonym of Parsifal,reproducing, in the terms of Liszts pianisticstyle, the interpretation of the workso impor-tant in its early reception historyas asemisacred ceremony. Liszts arrangement,moreover, points to one of the crucial ways inwhich the March of the Knights of the HolyGrail does not bear this same metonymic rela-tionship to its source material. If the pianochords of the Marche solennelle do not repro-duce the sound of the special Montsalvat bells,they are at least similarly poetic. Texturallydistinct from the rest of the score, they repre-sent a kind of aural halo conveyingasWagners bells dida sense of divine presence.The sonority of the brass bandand in particu-lar that of the tuba, which plays the bell ostinatoin the March of the Knights of the HolyGrailwas by comparison much more pro-saic.

Neither the four-minute aria template northe concert-band arrangement, in sum, seemedparticularly well adapted to the musical anddramatic material of Parsifal, and each plays aproportionately smaller role in the early soundrecording legacy of Parsifal than in Wagnersother operas. Instead, industry executivesseemed to favor a third way of representingParsifal: namely, through orchestral music ex-cerpted directly from the score, subjected onlyto minimal changes in instrumentation. Instru-mental music from all of Wagners works, ofcourse, formed an important part of the orches-tral repertoire in the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries, and it is hardly surprisingthat these selections should also be frequentlyrecorded. The first and third-act preludes toLohengrin, the overture to Die Meistersinger,and the prelude from Tristan und Isolde wereparticularly prominent on late-nineteenth and

early-twentieth-century programs. Despitethese numerous examples, however, no otherWagnerian work presents such a thoroughlyinstrumental sound recording profile asParsifal.35 In the early recording companies,Tannhuser and Lohengrin appear largely asoperas of arias; Parsifal, more often than not,was distilled down to the voice of the or-chestra.36 The preludes to both the first andthird acts, as we might expect, are among themost frequently recorded sections of Parsifal.But other parts of the score that include vocalpartsmost notably the Good Friday Spellfrom the third act, and the Transformation scenefrom the first actwere also recorded withoutvoices, as purely orchestral works. With theexception of the Liebestod from Tristan undIsolde, no other Wagnerian excerpts were socommonly treated in this manner. The prac-tice of presenting Parsifal as a purely symphonicwork reaches its apogeeat least with respectto sound recordingwith the Symphonic Syn-

35A search for pre-1948 (i.e., pre-LP) recordings of Parsifalin the Belfer Archive at Syracuse University, to take oneexample, will yield nearly 250 entries of 92 individualrecords (not including multiple holdings of the same re-lease). Well over half of these are of purely instrumentalmusic. The Belfer archive holds 186 individual recordingsof Lohengrin; 52 of these, or 28 percent, by contrast are oforchestral music. For other Wagner works, instrumentalmusic constitutes between 15 and 30 percent of the hold-ings. A quick glance at the catalogs of other large archivesof early sound recordings (such as those housed at Stanfordand the Library of Congress) reveals similar proportions.36One index of this distinction is the presence of Wagne-rian excerpts in two cheapie series that RCA recordedin the late 1930s and early 1940s. The first of these, en-titled Worlds Greatest Music, included the prelude toParsifal and the overture to Die Meistersinger. The secondof these, entitled Worlds Greatest Opera, included vo-cal excerpts from Tannhuser, Lohengrin, and Tristan undIsolde. The rest of the Wagnerian uvre was not a part ofeither series.



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thesis of the third act that Leopold Stokowskiprepared for concerts and subsequently recordedin 1934.37

For this work, Stokowski bypassed the GoodFriday music and chose six excerpts from otherparts of the third act (the Good Friday musicdrawn more or less directly from the scorewas often paired with the Synthesis). For themost part, Stokowskis arrangement simplyomits the vocal parts that were originally a partof these excerpts. The only addition to Wagnersoriginal music for the third act comes at thevery beginning of the Symphonic Synthesis,where Stokowski places the Abendmahl mo-tive, played in unison by the trombones andhorns. In technical terms, the piece is thereforemore of an abridgement than a synthesis: theexcerpts appear in the same order as they do inWagners original score. Skillfully using pivotharmonies and blended orchestral timbres,Stokowski stitches the excerpts together intoan apparently seamless whole.

We may see an example of Stokowskisabridgement technique by looking at theseam between the second and third sectionsof his Synthesis. The second section of theSynthesis is an excerpt from the Parsifal/Gurnemanz scene near the beginning of theact. Stokowski begins this part of his workwith the wind melody that precedes Gurne-manzs line O, Herr! War es ein Fluch, derdich vom rechten Pfad vertrieb (almost imme-diately after Parsifal reveals to Gurnemanz thathe carries the holy lance of the Grail). Theharmonic impetus of this brief section is to-ward the G-major cadence that occurs asGurnemanz sings Hier bist du, diess des GralsGebiet, a point of arrival punctuated by theentrance of the brass. In place of this cadence,Stokowski moves immediately to the begin-ning of the third-act transformation (set off inWagners score by a double bar and the expres-

sive marking: Immer sehr feierlich dasZeitmass zurckhaltend), a passage that be-gins with a B/G harmonic nexus. His abridge-ment creates a kind of deceptive cadence thateffectively leaps over all of the Good Fridaymusic.

For the next seam (i.e., between the thirdand fourth sections of his Synthesis, see ex. 2)Stokowski uses a different procedure. Ratherthan continuing into the second part of the trans-formation scene, in which the knights of theGrail enter carrying Amfortas (Geleiten wirim bergenden Schrein), Stokowski uses the bellmotive to leap directly to the music that imme-diately precedes Amfortass vocal entrance (JaWehe!). In both of these instances (as with theother seams), it is paradoxically the very qual-ity of Parsifal that supposedly makes it so or-ganically cohesivenamely, the way in whichit is built up from a fairly limited number ofmotives that are continually transformedthatmakes abridgement so successful.

In structural terms, Stokowskis SymphonicSynthesis of the third act is similar to the pair-ing of the prelude and Liebestod from Tristanund Isoldea pairing already common by the1930s. Linking the prelude and Liebestod hasthe effect of telescoping one of the most well-known musicodramatic gestures of the score,namely, the way in which the orchestralpostlude to the Liebestod resolves the har-monic tension generated by the famous Desiremotive with which the work begins. By prefac-ing his third-act abridgement with the samemotive with which Parsifal begins, Stokowskicreates a similar relationship.38 In this respect,both Symphonic Synthesis and the prelude andLiebestod from Tristan conform to a modelenshrined in the symphonic repertoire, mostnotably, perhaps, in the first movement ofBeethovens Eroica Symphony. Here, as in thequasi-symphonic Wagnerian works, our atten-tion is drawn to a transformation of the initialtheme that (in the critical reception of theseworks) comes to stand for myriad other trans-formative impulses: of form, content, and mean-37Stokowski made many of these symphonic syntheses. In

addition to the synthesis of the third act of Parsifal, herecorded symphonic syntheses of the second act of Tristan,of Die Meistersinger, Das Rheingold, and Boris Godunov.Joseph Horowitz discusses some of these symphonic syn-theses in Classical Music in America: A History of ItsRise and Fall (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), pp. 29394.

38It should be noted that Stokowskis instrumentation atthe beginning of the synthesis is drawn from the first-actGrail scene, not the beginning of the prelude.



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ff

Mal sei des Am - tes ge - mahnt! Zum letz - ten Mal!

Grals, zum letz - ten Mal sei des Am - tes ge - mahnt! Zum letz - ten Mal!

Sei des Am - tes ge - mahnt zum letz - ten Mal!

mahnt, zum letz - ten Mal sei des Am - tes ge - mahnt! Zum letz - ten Mal!

ff

Ja We - he! We - he! Weh - ber

dim.

dim.poco molto cresc.

(entfernter) (abmehmend)

(hier ffnen sich die Felsenwnde)(Hn. Trpt. Ww.)

und die grosse Grals-Halle, wie im ersten Aufzuge, nur ohne Speisetafeln, stellt sich wieder dar. Dstere Beleuchtung. Von der einen

pi

(Hn.)

dim.

dim. dim.

Amfortas (sich matt ein wenig aufrichtend)

(Alt. Ob.) (ausdrucksvoll) (Vn.)

(verhallend)

bassa

End of choral music (beginning of Amfortass Ja Wehe!):

End of the third-act Transformation Scene (immediately before the choir sings Geleiten wir . . . ):

Example 2: Musical seam in Stokowskis Symphonic Synthesis.



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ing. Stokowskis Symphonic Synthesis thus si-multaneously foregrounds and distorts whatmight be regarded as the central plot elementof Parsifal. In Wagners libretto, the focus is onthe transformation of Parsifal himself, and byextension, of the Grail brotherhood he is calledto lead. In Stokowskis arrangement (as in early-twentieth-century descriptions of the firstmovement of the Eroica), the musical theme tosome extent usurps this heroic role.39 The sym-phonic abridgements of Tristan and Parsifalthus signify transcendence by conforming to ageneric pattern, or, to put this more provoca-tively, by mechanically reproducing a preexis-tent symphonic gesture.

VStokowskis Symphonic Synthesis, particu-

larly when paired with the Good Friday music,epitomizes a particular development in the his-tory of Parsifals metonymic fragmentation, onethat became especially important during the1920s, 30s, and 40s. The tendency during theseyears was to record longer and longer excerptsof the work, which could lay greater claim bothto completeness and to organic unity. The1927 Parsifal recordings from Bayreuth (con-ducted by Karl Muck and Siegfried Wagner) andthe 1928 recordings from the Berlin State Op-era (with Karl Muck again), for example, pre-serve large sections of the score: the 1928 setincludes well over half of the third act.40 Thistreatment of Parsifal is similar to that of otherWagnerian works, as well as of other large-scale pieces of serious music. Developmentsin the history of recording paralleled certainaspects of these works critical reception. In hisessay The Radio Symphony: An Experimentin Theory, for instance, Adorno speaks of theBeethoven symphony as characterized by: aparticular intensity and concentration. This in-tensity rests musically upon the incomparably

greater density and concision of thematic rela-tionships of the symphonic as against otherforms. . . . A truly symphonic movement con-tains nothing fortuitous, every bit is ultimatelytraceable to very small basic elements, and isdeduced from them and not introduced, as itwere, from outside.41 Adornos comments re-semble organicist interpretations of Wagnersworksnotably Alfred Lorenzs study DasGeheimnis der Form bei Richard Wagner.42 Oneis reminded of the words Telramund repeats toElsa in the second-act finale to Lohengrin: ifthe heroor, in this case, the music dramawere to suffer even the slightest cut to hisfinger, his magical powers would be lost.43 Thistendency toward unity and completeness inrecordings from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s may beseen as an effort to overcome the metonymicfragmentation imposed by early sound record-ing technology that inevitably sliced into thebody of the artwork and threatened to destroyits magic powerits aura if you will. Howmuch that mattered depends on how muchaura the abridged works still possessed, sothat with Parsifal one might plausibly suggestthat both the loss and the gain were magnified,as if the stakes with this work were higherthan usual.

The measure of this magnification, again sug-gested by Stokowskis Symphonic Synthesis, isthe partial migration of Parsifal from the cat-egory of opera to that of symphonic work.To some degree, this symphonic profile re-flects the operas early performance history.The American public first came to knowParsifal not through stage performances, butthrough concerts and quasi-staged productionssuch as the Parsifal Entertainments thatAnton Seidl conducted during the 1890s.44 Dur-ing the period of early sound recording, thestage action of the opera provoked a great deal

39See, for example, the description of the Eroica in PaulBekker, Beethoven, trans. and adapted M. M. Bozman, rev.edn. (London: J. M. Dent & Sons; New York: E. P. Dutton,1925), pp. 15960. The first German edition of this influ-ential work dates from 1912.40For a description of these recordings, see Brown, ParsifalDiscography, pp. 4951. The first nearly complete record-ing of the opera was made from a live performance at theMetropolitan in 1938.

41Adorno, Essays on Music, pp. 25455.42Alfred Lorenz, Das Geheimnis der Form bei RichardWagner, 4 vols. (Tutzing: H. Schneider, 1966.; rpt. Berlin:M. Hesse, 192433). The fourth volume concerns Parsifal.43Berthold Hoeckner explores this allegory in Elsa Screams,or The Birth of Music Drama, Cambridge Opera Journal9/2 (1997), 97132.44The first Parsifal Entertainment took place on 31 March1890. See Horowitz, Wagner Nights, pp. 18189, as well asSyer, Parsifal on Stage, p. 280.



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of uneasiness. Treating Parsifal as an orches-tral work had the effect of attenuating, general-izing, or idealizing the specifics of the plot andmaking the work more palatable to some. Butthis impulse to reclassify and reconstructParsifal as a symphonic work (as distinct froman opera) during the early era of recorded soundalso resonates with Wagners own anxiety con-cerning the production of the work. The mostfrequently quoted example of this anxiety comesfrom the 23 September 1878 entry in CosimaWagners diary, which reports Wagner as say-ing about Parsifal: Oh, I hate the thought ofall those costumes and grease paint! When Ithink that characters like Kundry will now haveto be dressed up, those dreadful artists ballsimmediately spring to mind. Having createdthe invisible orchestra, I now feel like invent-ing the invisible theatre! And the inaudibleorchestra, he adds, concluding his dismal re-flections in humorous vein.45

These comments are only some of the bestknown of many similar complaints by Wagnerabout the inevitability of production. To-gether with his comments from the beginningof the Religion and Art essay, they help toexpose a paradox at the very heart of theBhnenweihfestspiel. Even as Parsifal revealsthe deep and hidden truth of Christianitythrough the ideal presentation of its symbols(the Grail, the Spear, the Eucharist etc.), it iscontinually being made literal, or drawn backto earth by the inevitable banalities of con-ventional opera. In this sense, the problem ofParsifal became a focal point for the dialecticbetween materiality and transcendence that in-forms both Wagners prose and the late-nine-teenth- and twentieth-century reception of hisworks.46

This dialectic is also central to the history ofsound recording. Recorded sound, on the onehand, might appear as the way to eliminate themateriality of live performance. In a far morethorough way than the recessed orchestra pit ofthe Bayreuth Festspielhaus, sound recording cre-ates the invisible orchestra. One might eventake the radical position and regard the play-back of a recorded Parsifal as the ideal stagingof the work, which bypasses the anxieties ofconservative critics while fulfilling the com-posers desire to escape the materiality of oper-atic production. It was more or less this posi-tion on recordings (not just of Parsifal, but ofopera in general) at which Adorno arrived, morethan three decades after his Fetish-Characteressay. In Opera and the Long-Playing Record,one of the last essays he published, Adornodescribed the operatic recording in surprisinglyidealized terms (though it should be noted thathe is talking about the LP, the technologicalmedium that superseded the four-minute 78rpm record of the early sound era):

Shorn of phony hoopla, the LP simultaneously freesitself from the capriciousness of fake opera festivals.It allows for the optimal presentation of music, en-abling it to recapture some of the force and intensitythat been worn threadbare in the opera houses. Ob-jectification, that is, a concentration on music as thetrue object of opera, may be linked to a perceptionthat is comparable to reading, to the immersion in atext . . . LPs provide the opportunitymore per-fectly than the supposedly live performanceto re-create without disturbance the temporal dimensionessential to operas.47

45Cosima Wagners Diaries: An Abridgement, intro.Geoffrey Skelton and abridged by him from his translationof the complete Diaries, ed. and ann. Martin Gregor-Dell2inand Dietrich Mack (New Haven: Yale University Press,1994), p. 324.46For an extensive discussion of precisely this issue inrelationship to performance practice (and recording), seeLydia Goehr, The Quest for Voice: On Music, Politics,and the Limits of Philosophy (Berkeley: University of Cali-fornia Press, 1998), pp. 13273. Goehr prefaces her chapterwith a quotation from Thomas Manns Doctor Faustusthat carries this tension between materiality and transcen-dence to its logical end. In this passage, Mann is describ-

ing the lectures of Professor Kretschmar: Perhaps, saidKretschmar, it was musics deepest wish not to be heardat all, nor even seen, nor yet felt: but onlyif that werepossiblein some Beyond, the other side of sense andsentiment, to be perceived and contemplated as pure mind,pure spirit (Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus: The Life ofthe Composer Adrian Leverkhn as Told by His Friend,trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter [New York: A. A. Knopf, 1948], p.63; quoted by Goehr on p. 132). See also Lawrence Kramer,The Talking Wound, in which he explores the possibil-ity of understanding the various symbols in Parsifal in aliteral sense.47Adorno, Essays on Music, pp. 28485 (trans. Thomas Y.Levin). The original may be found in the GesammelteSchriften, 19: 55558. Adornos stance toward operatic pro-duction in this essay, as Richard Leppert points out, hasbeen frequently criticized, most recently by GaryTomlinson in Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).



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Adorno never spells out exactly how the phonyhoopla of live performances interferes withthe re-creation of an operas temporal dimen-sion. But his wordslike the comments re-corded by Cosima in her diariesimply thatappreciation of an operas essence (namely, itsmusic) can only be degraded by the materialityof performance.

Although Adornos comments are sometimestaken as evidence of a reversal in his attitudestoward recording technology, the early On theFetish-Character in Music and the late Op-era and the Long-Playing Record are both in-formed by the same ideal of the autonomouswork of art that, by virtue of its content andstructure, resists the corrupting forces of theculture industry. That continuity of thoughtmitigates even if it does not obliterate the im-portant shift in the late essay. What changesbetween 1938 and 1969 is the relationship be-tween the sound recording and this ideal. In1938 Adorno figures recording technology pri-marily as a tool of the imperialism of the ar-rangement. In 1969 he presents recording tech-nology as a tool that enables listenersat leastpotentiallyto have direct access to the mu-sic itself (the true object of opera) and notmerely to arrangements (or metonymical frag-ments) of it. What Adorno does not say in 1969is that the new position held by sound record-ing holds vis--vis the ideal of the autonomouswork of art is only possible because of techno-logical advances. This is a result of not only theexpansion of playing time made possible by theLP but also high-fidelity recording, which sub-tly enhances the sense that fragmentation is nolonger necessary and that other compromisesare no longer a problem. With the so-calledelectrical revolution of 192526, in which themicrophone replaced the acoustic horn as theprimary recording device, it became much morepractical to record complex timbres. In the sub-sequent years, the problem of surface noisethat plagued early recordings was overcome. InOpera and the Long-Playing Record there-fore, the development of technology appears,albeit without acknowledgment, as a poten-tially liberating force. The recovery of the tem-poral dimension of the original is dependenton the very technology of mechanical repro-duction that (at least in the first section of

Benjamins Work of Art essay) entails theloss of aura.

The same technological advances that madeAdornos reconfiguration of the relationshipbetween sound recording and the autonomouswork of art possible were advertised in rhetoricthat he would no doubt have regarded as anexample of the debased language of the cultureindustry: namely, that generated by the record-ing companies themselves. A 1926 blurb fromColumbia, for example, announces the adventof new electronic recordings in the followingterms:

ELECTRICAL recording is the one great advance inthe recording art in twenty years. Columbia NewProcess Records, with Viva-tonal Recording, are ab-solutely the same as the voices and instruments thatmake them. All the beauty, brilliance, and clarity ofthe original rendition and all the volume, too. Thehuman voice is humanundistorted, natural. Theinstruments are all real. The violin is actual. Theguitar is a guitar and nothing else. Each of the differ-ent woodwinds is unmistakable, each of the brassesgenuine. Even the difficult piano is the piano itselfno less. And besides all this is the marvelously smoothsurface of the record made possible by the ColumbiaNew Processno sound of the needle, no scratchingnoise. You hear nothing but the music.48

Although this advertising blurb and AdornosOpera and the Long-Playing Record essaywere created for different audiences and differ-ent purposes, they each present the idea thattechnology can collapse the distance betweenthe listener and the essence of the artwork. Inthis sense, the surface noise and textural dis-tortions described in the 1926 blurb occupy thesame position as Adornos phony hoopla: theyare distractions and limitations that the newtechnology allows the listener to overcome.

Indeed, we might frame both of these texts ina broader discourse of materiality and transcen-dence, a discourse that is also central both toWagners purported comments about Parsifaland to his Religion and Art essay. Each signifi-cant technological advance, from the electrical

48The advertisement appears in the 23 September 1926issue of the New York Times. Quoted by Hans UlrichGumbrecht, In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time (Cam-bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 111.



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revolution of 192526 to the introduction ofthe compact disc to the downloadable MP3 filesof the late twentieth century, attenuates themateriality of the process through which soundis transmitted. Listening to sound recordingsbecomes more transcendent insofar as themuffled timbres and balance problems of theacoustic era are left behind. Paradoxically, how-ever, the increasing sophistication of sound re-cording technology allows this discourse ofmateriality and transcendence to becomeinverted. For as recording technology becomesmore and more sophisticated, the sound record-ing replaces live performance as the primarymeans through which audiences come to knowmusical works. The aesthetic object becomesthe recording, rather than the live performance,or the idea of a live performance, which liesbehind it. In Adornos terms, the record be-comes fetishized: the focus of the listener is onthe marvelously smooth surface of the recordand its reproductive power. Sound recordingsbecome the subjects of legal disputes, objects tobe collected, bought and sold, as deeply rooted inthe material world as the costumes and grease-paint of which Wagner so despairingly spoke.

Similar transformations appear in the his-tory of The Victor Book of Opera. The firsteditions (including the 1913 edition in whichParsifal first appeared) addressed the relation-ship between performance and recording in theforeword. For every person who can attendthe opera, the anonymous author writes, thereare a hundred who cannot. However, manythousands of lovers of the opera in the latterclass have discovered what a satisfactory sub-stitute the Victor is, for it brings the actualvoices of the great singers to the home, withthe added advantage that the artist will repeatthe favorite aria as many times as may bewished, while at the opera one must usually becontent with a single hearing.49 By all accounts,Victor Book of Opera was a highly successfulmarketing tool, combining salesmanship withcultural uplift and giving millions of Ameri-cans the sense that by purchasing a Victor recordthey were acquiring real cultural capital. By1929 the book was in its tenth edition. The

editors expanded it not only by increasing thenumber of operas that it covered, but also byincluding more prefatory material (designed,among other things, to give readers an in-creasing appreciation of the advances whichWagner made over the older Italian opera).They also revised the foreword, so that it nowended with a passage that reads like a revisionof the one quoted above:

On new Higher Fidelity Victor records, the VICTORLIBRARY of fine operatic recordings offers the loverof music a wealth of performance at his pleasure. Hedoesnt have to depend upon the seasonal presenceof opera companies. With a fine collection of oper-atic records, together with the VICTOR BOOK OFTHE OPERA, the lover of lyric drama is affordedample opportunity to become thoroughly acquaintedwith both the music and the story of the worldsgreat operas. He can enhance his enjoyment andprepare more fully for any public performance ofopera that he may wish to attend.50

The emphasis in the later passage has beenshifted from the claim of exact reproduction tothe idea of education. The recording is not onlyan adequate substitute for live performance(the chief claim in 1913) but also a preparationfor itand for understanding it. The recordingsthemselves, and not merely the live perfor-mances to which they imperfectly allude, arethe source of pleasure for the lover of music.

This new concentration on the records ratherthan on the music that they reproduce alsoemerges clearly when we compare the imageson the book spines in the 1913 and 1935 edi-tions of The Victor Book (see plates 2a and 2b).The spine of the 1913 edition is replete withimages of musical instrumentsmainlytypical late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century visual emblems for music such as thelute or the Renaissance cornetdrawn insimplified Art Nouveau style. For the 1935 edi-tion the spine was completely revamped. ArtNouveau was replaced by streamlined modern-ism and the musical instruments were elimi-nated. In their place is a repeating pattern that

49The Victor Book of the Opera, p. 9.50Charles OConnell, foreword to the 1939 rpt. of The Vic-tor Book of the Opera, 10th edn. (1929), p. 12.



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a. 1913 spine. b. 1935 spine.

Plate 2: Victor Book of the Opera.

ways in which records were marketed. Tonetests and figures marching out of Victrolas wereno longer needed, we might say, because therecording could now claim to provide directaccess to the music itself. In this sense, theabstract images of spinning discs in the 1935book spine fill the symbolic space vacated bythe lutes and cornets in the 1913 edition. Therelationship between the original and its me-chanical reproductionor perhaps even the wayin which these terms applied to the process ofsound recordinghas irrevocably shifted. Thischange in what we might call the ontology ofthe sound recording obviously casts Benjaminsdiscussion of aura in The Work of Art in theAge of Mechanical Reproduction into newlight. What does it mean when the technologi-cally generated artwork assumes ontologicalpriority over the performance? If the recordingis the authentic original, how can it be inany sense a Verkmmerung of something else?As Alban Zak suggests: in order to understandwhat records are and how they come to be, theargument [of Walter Benjamin] needs to be re-arranged. The notions of presence, aura, andauthenticity must be transferred, as with film,to the work itself. For records and films repre-sent not a shriveling of aura, but rather, a trans-feral of aura. And it is this transferal that is atthe heart of the poetic process in the techno-logically mediated arts.51

VILike sound recording, photographic technol-

ogy underwent drastic changes in the course ofits history, improvements in whichif weare to follow Benjamins argumentsomethingwas also lost. That something, of course, isaura. In A Little History of Photography, Ben-jamin describes an image of Kafka as a childand goes on to observe that, in its boundlesssadness, this picture is a pendant of early pho-tography, in which people did not yet look outinto the worldlike this boy doesas isolatedand god-abandoned subjects. There was an auraabout them, a medium that lent fullness and

integrates abstractions of the five-line staff anda record disc. The spine of the 1913 editiongives no indication that The Victor Book of theOpera is, among other things, a partial cata-logue of opera recordings available from theVictor Talking Machine Company. The spineof the 1935 edition, on the other hand, clearlyannounces the books concern with recordedsound and signals a fundamental shift in the

51Alban Zak III, The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Mak-ing Records (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001),p. 19.


http://www.jstor.org/action/showImage?doi=10.1525/ncm.2009.33.2.151&iName=master.img-001.jpg&w=73&h=431http://www.jstor.org/action/showImage?doi=10.1525/ncm.2009.33.2.151&iName=master.img-002.jpg&w=70&h=431http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

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security to their gaze even as it penetrated thatmedium.52 The decay of the aura in theperiod between these early photographs (for in-stance, those of David Octavius Hill, one ofwhich is included as an appendix to his essayin the Gesammelte Schriften) and later snap-shots, according to Benjamin, was largely dueto technological improvements. Early photo-graphic techniques demanded long exposuretimes, during which, as Benjamin notes, thesubjects grew into their images, concentrat-ing a duration into a single point. Later tech-niques allowed exposure times to become pro-gressively shorter, effectively banishing the aurafrom the photograph even while it was beingdriven out of reality by the progressive degen-eration of the imperialistic bourgeoisie.53

Benjamins choice of the word aura to de-scribe the particular quality of the subjects ofearly photographs may have been conditionedas Georges Didi-Huberman suggestsby itscurrency among late-nineteenth-century pho-tographers themselves. Photographers of thisperiod occasionally used the term to describean accidental by-product of their craft: thestrange, spectral shapes that occasionally ap-peared in prints made with the wet-plate collo-dion process. Like the metaphorical auras Ben-jamin describes in his photography essay, theappearance of these shapes seems to have beenthe result of the long exposure times that thewet-plate collodion process demanded.54 But tosome photographers, these auras did not seemto be accidental, but rather the visible traces ofthe heretofore invisible emanations of spiritual

or mental energy that supposedly enveloped allliving beings (in this sense, the use of the termaura intersects and recalls its function inTheosophy).55 Just in the case with Benjaminsauras, these hidden truths were captured inimages that emerged only as a result of a pe-culiar interweaving of space and time, only asthe result of technical processes that wouldlater be regarded as imperfections.56

Early sound recordings are replete withsounds that may be compared to the photo-graphic auras that occasionally appeared in wet-plate collodion prints: crackles, pops, hisses,distortions, and other less easily explainedsounds. These sounds are not the result of anydurational problem, but they do indeed arisefrom the imperfections of technical processesthat would quickly be superseded. For the mostpart, these sounds function todayto useBenjamins metaphor againas markers of chro-nological distance.57 No one (at least to myknowledge) has interpreted this extraneousnoise as encoding any sort of spiritual mes-

52Gesammelte Schriften II,1: 37576. I have borrowed thelatter part of the translation from Diarmuid Costello,Aura, Face, Photography: Re-Reading Benjamin Today,in Walter Benjamin and Art (London: Continuum, 2005),pp. 16484, 169. Costellos essay is an excellent introduc-tion to the ambiguities surrounding Benjamins use of theword aura, and its subsequent role in the art-historicalliterature of the 1970s and 1980s.53Benjamin, Kleine Geschichte der Photographie, pp. 373,377.54For a description of the term aura as it was used innineteenth-century photography, see Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photo-graphic Iconography of the Salptrire (Cambridge, Mass.:MIT Press, 2003), pp. 91ff. Didi-Huberman includes anextensive discussion of the photographer Hippolyte Baraducand his efforts to capture auras by placing the wet platesdirectly on the foreheads of his subjects.

55For an example of theosophical writing, see CharlesWebster Leadbetter, Man Visible and Invisible: Examplesof Different Types of Men as Seen by Means of TrainedClairvoyance (London: Theosophical Publishing Society,1902); Annie Besant and Charles Webster Leadbetter,Thought-Forms (Wheaton, Ill.: Theosophical PublishingHouse, 1969; rpt. and abridgement of 1901 edition).Thought-Forms, curiously enough, includes a color plateof the aura generated by a performance of the Meistersingeroverture on a fine church organ.56Aura appears in many parts of Benjamins uvre, but themost well-known discussion comes from his essay DasKunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzier-barkeit, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. and withintro. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), pp.21751. For a discussion of Benjamins thoughts on pho-tography and aura, see Miriam Bratu Hansen, BenjaminsAura, Critical Inquiry 34 (2008), 33675, 34041.57The phonograph noise of early operatic recordings maybe regarded by many merely as a nuisance, and throughdigital processing it is now possible to edit most of it out.Indeed, assiduous sound engineers, in a process metaphori-cally akin to colorizing black-and-white films, may evenalter recordings in order to fill in what early technolo-gies were incapable of capturing. In the recent Caruso2000 project, for instance, early recordings of the greattenor were cleaned of all phonograph noise. The origi-nal accompaniments were then replaced with modern onessupplied by the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. For adevastating account of this project (RCA 74321-69766-2),see Allan Kozinns review Have You Heard the NewCaruso? (No Kidding), New York Times, 20 Feb. 2000,Sunday, Late Edition-Final, Section 2, p. 33. The artisticfailure of this project can be couched in Benjamins terms.



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