Parsifal: Prelude to Act 1

As much a religious ceremony as an opera, Parsifal was first performed as a consecration of Wagner’s new Festival Theatre, his temple, at Bayreuth in 1882. He had been thinking about it ever since he had first come across the medieval German epic poem Parzifal by Wolfram von Eschenbach nearly 40 years earlier, when he was researching the libretto for Lohengrin – the relationship between the two being that, according to the legend, Lohengrin is Parsifal’s son. In Wagner’s last opera Parsifal is the saintly hero who rescues the Kingdom of the Grail from moral decay. A naive young knight, he retains his innocence so effectively as to recover the precious Spear lost by the less virtuous Amfortas – whose duty it had been, as ruler of the Kingdom of the Grail, to preserve it – and to use it to cure him of the pain he had suffered ever since.

Parsifal is an uncommonly long opera and yet, according to the composer, the Prelude “contains all I need and it all unfolds like a flower from its bud.” He did not go so far as to claim, as some of his more ardent admirers have done, that the material from which everything develops is actually concentrated in the first forty seconds. But, certainly, the expressive melody heard on unison strings and woodwind in the opening bars gives rise to some of the more significant themes of the opera: the initial rising sequence of six notes will be used in one form or another to represent Redemption, Communion and the Knights of the Grail; the short falling motif will be associated with Suffering and the next rising phrase with the Spear that had wounded Jesus on the Cross and is finally to cure the long suffering Amfortas.

After the opening melody has been presented twice in A flat major and then with a consequent change of mood, in C minor, there is a long pause. The second part of the Prelude introduces two more important themes, mainly on brass instruments. Standing for the Holy Grail itself, the first of them is based on the Dresden Amen written by J.G. Naumann in the 18th century for use in the Royal Chapel at Dresden (and adopted by Mendelssohn for a similar purpose in his “Reformation” Symphony). The other, which follows immediately on a woodwind version of the Grail theme, is an unmistakable expression of Faith in staunch harmonies on horns and trumpets and becomes the mainstay of the central part of the Prelude. The last section recalls the opening melody for polyphonic meditation and ends with a last allusion to the Dresden Amen.

In the opera house the Prelude leads directly into the first act. There is, however, a concert version with a definitive ending which was completed (and performed) long before the opera itself.

Gerald Larner © 2009

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