Richard Wagner's Parsifal and the theory of late style

Abstract

Theodor Adorno thought Parsifal unique, in many respects incongruous when compared with Wagner's earlier operas and music dramas. In a 1956 essay, ‘Zur Partitur des Parsifal’ (‘Concerning the Score of Parsifal’), he noted the ‘continually strange newness’ of Wagner's last work, concluding: ‘From out of the waning of his original inventive powers, Wagner's force produces the virtue of a late style; a style that, according to Goethe's dictum, withdraws from appearance’. More recently, Werner Breig paused appreciatively over Adorno's remark about the ‘continually strange newness’, but pursued a different argument. Breig claims that Parsifal was recapitulatory, stylistically homogeneous with the earlier works, and he is supported by Wagner's assertion to Cosima that he had written ‘nothing new’ since Tristan (CWD II, 26 March 1879), a conviction redolent of one the composer had earlier expressed (albeit in entirely different circumstances) in a letter to Mathilde Wesendonck of 2 May 1860: ‘I can now only repeat myself … I have no other significant characteristics to offer’. Breig summarises his position in the Wagner Handbook: ‘The musical structure of Parsifal contains no fundamentally new elements, but rather follows directly upon the achievements of the Ring and Tristan’, thus nodding to the Wagner who cheerfully confessed having ‘take[n] up the old paint pot’ of the Tristan style for Act II of Parsifal (CWD II, 5 April 1878).