Richard Wagner's "Parsifal" and the Theory of Late Style

Richard Wagner's "Parsifal" and the Theory of Late StyleAuthor(s): Anthony BaroneSource: Cambridge Opera Journal, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Mar., 1995), pp. 37-54Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/823580 .

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Cambridge Opera Journal, 7, 1, 37-54 ? 1995 Cambridge University Press

Richard Wagner's Parsifal and the theory of late style

ANTHONY BARONE

GewiB, das Alter ist ein kaltes Fieber Im Frost von grillenhafter Not. Hat einer dreiBig Jahr voriiber, So ist er schon so gut wie tot. Am besten wirs, euch zeitig totzuschlagen.

Goethe, Faust Part Two, vv. 6785-91

'First of all, in the urgency of youth, under the sign of Sirius, a person produces something, and then it gets worse and worse, nothing else succeeds.' - He cites Halevy, above all Marschner, even Spontini, and also to a certain extent Weber, who, however, was hindered by illness: 'Whereas with all the genuine fellows like Beethoven, things become more and more astonishing; it is quite impossible to say what Mozart, for instance, might not have produced.' - He even cited Goethe with his Werther: 'Except that Faust stands in relation to Werther exactly as Goethe does to Goethe.'

Cosima Wagner's Diaries, 12 July 18812

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'.3 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,4 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

'Age is indeed an ague much augmented/by the capricious frost of impotence./One who has passed the thirtieth year/already is as good as dead - /it would be best to kill you off by then.' Faust I and II, ed. and trans. Stuart Atkins (Princeton, 1984), 174.

2 Cosima Wagner's Diaries, ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack, trans. Geoffrey Skelton, 2 vols. (New York, 1980); hereafter, citations will be indicated in the text as CWD I or II followed by the date of diary entry.

3 In Musikalische Schriften 4: Moments musicaux, Impromptus, vol. 17 of Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main, 1982), 47-52; reprinted in Richard Wagner: 'Parsifal'. Texte, Materialien, Kommentare, ed. Attila Csampai and Dietmar Holland (Reinbeck bei Hamburg, 1984), 191-5. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are by the author.

4 'On the Musical Style of "Parsifal" ', Programm des Osterfestspiels Salzburg. 11. bis 20. April 1981 (English translation by Adrienne Jones), 71-5.



Anthony Barone

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',5 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). For Carl Dahlhaus, however, the homogeneity of Breig's model was unaccept-

able. Dahlhaus dismissed the anecdotal record of Cosima's diaries and similar documents as irrelevant, indeed detrimental to the style analysis and exegesis of Parsifal. He believed that criticism absorbed with the hyper-mythology generated by Wagner as part of his creative activity and self-representation - more or less that

queasy 'feast of relationships' described by Thomas Mann- 'winds up in barren, endless pursuit, as well as a confusion of the genesis of a work with the criteria for its esthetic appraisal'.6 Like Adorno, Dahlhaus thought Parsifal unique, and he ascribed this quality to its being a 'late work', alienated, set apart from the Zeitgeist. Taking the late works of Beethoven as a model, Dahlhaus observed that while such works affected later generations, they remained inert among their creators'

contemporaries. Were Adorno and Dahlhaus right? Does the designation of Parsifal as a 'late work'

wield hermeneutic authority in criticism and analysis of the work? Does their intuition of a Wagnerian 'late style' have more than a rhetorical function? Indeed, with what intentions and consequences is Parsifal called a 'late work'? How did Wagner become part of the discourse of 'late style'?7

Late style is, of course, a translation of Spdtstil, a term that denotes both individual and world-historical lateness (one often sees the term Spdtgeiten conferred on 'late' historical periods). Spatsti/ is, in most contexts, equivalent to A/tersstil ('style of old

age'), though the latter is meaningful only with respect to personal style development. While the theory and rhetoric of late style have origins in the eighteenth century, its terminology seems first to have been used in German aesthetic criticism around the beginning of the twentieth century.8 Broadly, theoretical constructions

5 Breig, 'The Musical Works', Wagner Handbook, ed. Ulrich Muiller and Peter Wapnewski, trans. John Deathridge (Cambridge, 1992), 474.

6 Liner Notes to Decca Gesamtausgabe Parsifal (n.p.), reprinted as 'Parsifal- Eine Einfiihrung', in Richard Wagner, 'Parsifal' (Munich, 1990), 10-19.

7 A fuller discussion of many of the issues and the materials to be discussed here will be found in my dissertation, 'Richard Wagner's Parsifal and the Hermeneutics of Late Style' (Columbia University), currendy in progress, and in my article, 'Adorno's "Zur Partitur des Parsifal", a Translation and Commentary', Music c Letters (forthcoming 1995).

8 For a discussion of Spatteitlichkeit as a world-historical phenomenon, see Werner Kohlschmidt's introductory essay, 'Die Problematik der Spatzeitlichkeit', Spditeiten und SpatZeitlichkeit. Vortrage gehalten auf dem II. Internationalen Germanistenkongress 1960 in Kopenhagen, ed. Werner Kohlschmidt (Bern, 1962), 16-26. The first appearance in print of the term Altersstil is ascribed by Erich Trunz to Friedrich Vischer's and Paul Krauth's monograph Goethes Sprache und Stil im Alter (Leipzig, 1898); see 'Altersstil', Goethe Handbuch. Goethe: Seine Welt und Zeit in Werk und Wirkung 2nd edn, ed. Alfred Zastran (Stuttgart, 1955), 178-9; a slightly altered version appears as 'Goethes Altersstil', Goethe im Urteil seiner Kritiker.

38




of late style are confluences of two intellectual tributaries: teleological or periodic historiography, especially as codified by Winckelmann and Hegel; and natural

history, the construction of organic narratives of human development and their

application to the lives of artists.9 In its mid-eighteenth-century incarnation, the

concept of late style was subject to organicist theory, categorically denoting an absence of aesthetic worth. The pervasive organicism of representations of world-historical and individual lateness from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries was mitigated by Goethe's adumbration in the first decades of the nineteenth century of what one might call a 'metaphysic' of late style; this

metaphysic, however, affected philosophy and aesthetic criticism only long after Goethe's day, as evidenced by the early reception of Goethe's own late works as well as those of Beethoven. The heavy tread of Winckelmann's organicism can be followed well into the nineteenth century: at mid-century Theodor Friedrich Vischer and Christian Hermann WeiBe still credited Winckelmann with the invention of the modern representation of lateness.10 Goethe's traces are less readily discerned, at least until the beginning of the twentieth century, when his nascent

metaphysic of late style would emerge whole in the late aesthetic writings of Georg Simmel.

Meanwhile, Wagner himself was absorbed by the discourses of both organicist and, indeed, metaphysical lateness with important consequences for Parsifal. Indeed, the binary character of late-style theory can account for the structures of both

Wagner's self-representation as a late artist and aspects of the critical reception of his last work. Wagner's and his intimates' reflections on historical and artistic lateness - especially Wagner's own situation as a late artist- and the critical

reception of Parsifal compellingly illustrate the problematic of late style.

1

In the morning I read Winckelmann's biography (Homo vagas et inconstans!), much moved. How clearly the German genius speaks in this man; the poor cobbler's son, born in a land that at the time hardly possessed a language, bears within his spirit the Greek idea.

Cosima Wagner's Diaries, 10 February 1869

Dokumente Zur Wirkungsgeschichte Goethes in Deutschland. Teil IV. 1918-1982, ed. Karl Robert Mandelkow (Munich, 1984), 395-400. The emergence of the term in art criticism is illustrated by A. E. Brinkmann's frequently cited Spiitwerke grosser Meister (1925); see, for example, Julius S. Held's introductory 'Commentary' to an issue of Art Journal (1987) devoted to the problem of late style in the visual arts.

" 'Natural history' in August Wilhelm Schlegel's sense: 'a singling out and recording of the essential stages of a development'. See Moshe Barasch, Modern Theories of Art, vol. 1, From Winckelmann to Baudelaire (New York, 1990), 173. 10 Vischer, Aesthetik oder Wissenschaft des Schonen. Dritter Theil. Die Kunstlehre (Stuttgart, 1853); WeiBe, 'Uber Stil und Manier' (1863/64), Kleine Schriften turAsthetik und asthetischen Kritik, compiled by Rudolf Seydel (Hildesheim, 1966).

39



Anthony Barone

Cosima's homage suggests the stature that Winckelmann had among culturally literate Germans well into the nineteenth century."1 His main work, the Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (1756-62), was a memento mori with alarming implications for late artists and their works, and had an enormous impact on nineteenth-century historiography and aesthetic criticism. One might also suppose that Winckelmann's

peculiarly 'German genius' and his fantasies about the culture of antiquity were

warmly received in parochial, utopian Wahnfried. It is pertinent to an understanding of late Wagner and Parsifal, then, that the

theory of late style originates in the pages of Winckelmann's Geschichte, which

proposed an organicist model for the development of cultures that postulates for all cultural phenomena an inexorable end in decline. Winckelmann's neoclassical scheme conflated world-historical periodicity (a chronological sequence of distinct

temporal phases) with aesthetic criteria (expressed by the identification of these

phases with poetic genres). He welded to this a simple organic paradigm of human

development - the ages of man - to adumbrate a historiographical theory that culminates in an as yet vaguely defined and unstable late phase of decay, the least

explicable, the most ineffable. Especially fervent is the organicism of his history of Greek art:

Greek art, like Greek poetry, has according to Scaliger four periods, resembling in this

respect the division made in Roman history by Florus; we might even count five such epochs. For as every action or event has five parts, as it were, stages - namely, beginning, progress, state of rest, decrease, and end, in which lies the foundation of the five scenes or acts in dramatic pieces - so it is with the succession of time in art; but since the close of art is beyond art's bounds, so there are properly only four periods in it for consideration here.12

Winckelmann's appeal to classical and Renaissance precedent is a justification of the radical premise stated at the very opening of the Geschichte: 'The Arts which are dependent on drawing have, like all inventions, commenced with the necessary; the next object of research was beauty; and finally, the superfluous followed: these are the three principal stages in art'.13 Diagnosis of the 'superfluity' of lateness motivates his inclination to dismiss artistic products of late historical stages. Thus, although Winckelmann's accounts of Egyptian, Etruscan, Greek and Roman cultures vary in their taxonomy, they are conceptually reconciled in the bold claim

According to the editors of CWD I, 'Wagner appears to have possessed Winckelmann's Collected Works (published in twelve volumes between 1825 and 1829), and the biography to which Cosima refers is probably that by Joseph Eiselein printed in the first volume.'

12 My emphasis. The History of Ancient Art, trans. G. Henry Lodge, 4 vols. (vols 1 and 3, Boston, 1872; vol. 4, 1873; vol. 2, 1849), III, 177. Adumbrations of late-style theory have been identified in pre-eighteenth-century sources. See, for further discussion, Heather McPherson, 'The Fortune Teller of 1824 or the Elegant Dilemma of David's Late Style', Gagette des Beaux-arts, ser. 6, vol. 118 (July-August 1991), 35nl; she notes Pliny as a source of the concept. Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609), French philologist, was from 1593 to his death professor at the University of Leiden; Publius Annius Florus, African-Roman historian and teacher of rhetoric, was active in the late first and second centuries A.D. 13 History of Ancient Art, I, 1.

40




that 'art in its decline is of no style in itself',14 a position consonant with

eighteenth-century views that predicate the identification of style on aesthetic value; the attribution of style to an artwork was a mark of critical approbation, not a value-free parameter of analysis.15

More clearly than any other single passage in the History, Winckelmann's footnote to the Scaliger allusion reveals the organicist foundations of this theory: We do not have Scaliger's text at hand so as to indicate exactly where and how he divides the history of Greek poetry into four principal parts. But we believe it is highly useful and very pertinent to the course of Greek cultural development as a whole to establish the following four periods in the history of Greek poetry, namely, first: the epic (childhood); second: the lyric (youth); third: the dramatic (manhood); the fourth comprehends the gradual decline of art in the Motherland; the spirit is fled away; the beautifully integrated totality falls apart and dissolves (The Sicilian poets); in vain does one seek on foreign soil to bring new life to the corpse (the Alexandrine poets) and nothing remains but to mourn the great dead (the late elegists) and to consecrate his grave with some blooms and flowers (the Anthology). Viewed thus, Greek poetry forms an organic whole.16

The stages of art's organic development are not merely convenient temporal organising devices or allegories, but find characteristic artistic expression as distinct

genres. Furthermore, the naming of the stages of human development - the organic correlatives of these periods - ends with manhood. Winckelmann's failure to name the last stage indicates a very important, repeatedly encountered theoretical reticence - an inability or unwillingness to confront at close range, even semanti- cally, the late or last stages of the organic model; it is the rhetorical correlative of Winckelmann's theoretical dismissal. Winckelmann's luxuriant evocation of the dispersed remnants of Greek poetry is nothing less than a description of mourners disposed around a corpse - but the mourners are studied in detail, the viewer's gaze averted from the dead. This footnote reveals one of the principal problems in organicist late-style theory: its inability to express the peculiar nature of the late artist and his work.

Winckelmann's preference for the early, youthful stages of cultures (and men), and his discovery of their aspect in classical Greek sculpture, underlies his critical disdain - fear is perhaps a better word - of the end. His schema was decisive for art historical criticism and biography, but it seems also to have strongly marked the course of philosophy, surfacing in a rather unexpected manner in Hegel's Philosophy of Histogy. Hegel was apparently possessed by the spirit of Winckelmann when he

14 History of Ancient Art (Book 3, chap. 3, 1, 'Different Stages and Epochs in Style'), I, 362, my emphasis.

1 See Goethe, 'Einfache Nachahmung der Natur, Manier, Stil', in Stilepoche, Theorie und Diskussion. Eine interdis!iplindre Anthologie von Winckelmann bis heute, ed. Peter Por and Sandor Radn6ti (Frankfurt am Main, 1990), 48-9. Goethe's hierarchy of attributes places style (Stil) at the peak of the ascent from 'simple imitation of nature' through 'manner': 'then it is style that becomes the level of achievement, that level where the highest of human strivings may be measured against one another ... style [draws near] the deepest foundations of human understanding, the essence of being, in so far as it is permitted us to recognise this in visible and apprehensible forms'. Goethe's remarks were first published in 1789.

16 Geschichte der Kunst (1812), II, 516n822. Lodge's English translation (see n.12) unhelpfully omits Winckelmann's extensive notes.

41



Anthony Barone

embarked on his consideration of classical Greece. He conflated two narratives: first, a world-historical one, in which the classical phase of Greek civilisation is one of world-historical adolescence ('Achilles, the ideal youth of poetry, initiated the Greek way of life: Alexander the Great, the ideal youth of reality, concluded it'). The second narrative is of corruption:

We have, then, to distinguish three periods in Greek history: the first, that of the growth of real Individuality; the second, that of its independence and prosperity in external conquest ... and the third, the period of its decline and fall, in its encounter with the succeeding organ of World History.... The third period is that of ruin, through contact with the nation that embodies a higher Spirit. The same process, it may be stated once and for all, will meet us in the life of every world-historical people.17

Winckelmann, of course, never sought to subsume the entire history of Greek art under the organic category of adolescence - this is Hegel's inclination, although it

may well take its cue from Winckelmann's fetishisation of youth. The second narrative, however, appropriates Winckelmann's model with a new, fascinating twist. To the inexorability of natural organic decline, Hegel contributes a patho- logical dimension, anticipating Oswald Spengler: cultures do not die of natural causes, but are overcome by contact with stronger organisms, as though through infection or contamination. Spengler himself would arrive at a grimly Hegelian prognosis for late art based upon the pathology of works like Parsifal.

2

R. says he would like to have Faust splendidly printed for himself on fine vellum paper, as a symbolic, holy book.

Cosima Wagner's Diaries, 20 July 1871

Goethe's works had long been absorbed into the peculiar cultural liturgies of the

Wagner household when the composition of Parsifal began, and Wagner's devotion to them, especially the two Faust plays, is of more than passing interest. Goethe's shadow fell long during the late years of the composer's life, and Wagner's absorption in the poet's life and works profoundly affected his evolving consciousness of lateness. His interest in Faust, seeded by encounters with the work in his

youth and blossoming early in 'Eine Faust-Ouvertiire' (1840), was entirely characteristic of artists in the decades of Romanticism; in Wagner's later years, though, his immersion in Goethe deepened to a kind of sympathy with the Greis of Faust Part Two: Wagner was drawn to Goethe's imposing incarnation as a late artist, simultaneously the consummate observer and ideal specimen of late style.

Goethe's importance for the history of late style is two-fold. He aligned a neoclassical model of human development with parallel models of psychological and philosophical differentiation, thus making available new ways of expressing with the language of organicism and teleological history the peculiar aesthetic qualities of the late artist. Furthermore, Goethe's own career appeared to many a model of such

17 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York, 1956), 223-4.

42




a differentiation, his last works, especially Faust Part Two, being subject to extensive

analysis as icons of late style.18 His special contribution to the rhetoric of late style, however, is his recognition of the epistemological dimension of life's stages, a recognition that invites correlation of the stages of human development with

specific cognitive and perceptive capacities: 'age, moment in time - everything brings about diversity in manner of seeing and perceiving'.19 Among the principal motifs of his phenomenology of lateness is its changed perspective: 'To grow older means to enter upon a new occupation; all relationships change, and one must either

entirely cease to act or consciously and deliberately take on a new role'.20 The

dynamism of youth is replaced by the contemplativeness of old age: 'Just as activity and work are seemly to early age, so are contemplation and dialogue to later',21 its

peculiar vitality, which 'like youth, has its own bloom',22 and the enhanced powers of the aged to 'understand in maturity what [was] experienced in youth'.23

More sombrely, Goethe perceived the isolation, alienation and withdrawal often characteristic of the aged: 'age separates us more and more from sensitive men',24 an aspect of his construction summarised in the opaque definition preserved in the Maximen und Reflexionen: 'old age: the gradual withdrawal from appearance'. The full context of the definition is as follows:

The manifestation of the idea as beauty is just as transitory as the manifestation of the exalted, the spirited, the merry, the comical. This is the reason why it is so difficult to discuss.

A principle must necessarily exist for beauty, which is manifest in the appearance of beauty.

Take the example of a rose. The vegetative principle is manifest in its most elevated appearance in the bloom; the rose is as though the 'peak' of appearance.

Even the rind of the fruit can be beautiful. The fruit can never be beautiful, because the vegetative principle resides within merely as principle.

The principle that emerges - with utmost freedom and in satisfaction of its own requirements - in appearance brings forth objective beauty, which indeed must surely find worthy subjects who will apprehend it.

18 Most analyses in the early decades of the nineteenth century arrived at negative evaluations of the late phase of Goethe's work, affirming Winckelmann's neoclassical postulate of terminal decline and degeneration. Ludwig Tieck, for example, divided Goethe's career into three phases, of which the first, Goethe's youth, was marked by artistic wholeness and perfection; the second, 'classical' phase, was regarded as having much in it of high quality; the third and last, however, was viewed as a regrettable phase of frigidity and decline.

19 Conversation with Johanna Fahlmer, beginning of May 1774, in Gedenkausgabe der Werke. Briefe und Gesprache, vol. 22, Goethes Gesprache. Erster Teil (Zurich, 1949), 44.

20 Maximen und Reflexionen, in Goethes Werke, 5th edn. (Hamburg, 1963), XII, 542 (no. 1328). 21 West-Ostlicher Divan, 'Noten und Abhandlungen zu besserem Verstindnis des West-Ostlichen Divans', 'Einleitung' (Leipzig, 1923), 132.

22 'Zu briiderlichem Andenken Wielands', Gedenkausgabe, vol. 12, Schriften ur Literatur, 694. 23 Letter to Zelter, 7 November 1816, Goethes Briefe, XXVII (Weimar, 1903), 219 (no. 7539). 24 Letter to C. F. v. Conta, 11 September 1820, Goethes Briefe, XXXIII (Weimar, 1905), 215

(no. 154).

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Anthony Barone

The beauty of youth is derived from the above. Old age: the gradual withdrawalfrom appearance.

That extent to which the aging can be regarded as beautiful. Eternal youth of the Greek gods.25

The concluding lines, admitting to age its own beauty, is redolent of Winckelmann's bow to the mature aspects of certain Greek divinities, but seems uncomfortably fitted to Goethe's main idea. The image of the aged subject 'withdrawing from

appearance' contributes philosophical and aesthetic dimensions to Goethe's construction of late style. With this and other remarks, he surpassed the organicist model of Winckelmann and suggested a metaphysical correlative to the culmination of human development, affixing a solemn moment of transcendence to the last

stage. It is no surprise that elsewhere in the Maximen und Reflexionen he plainly acknowledged the cabalistic predisposition of the late subject: 'A particular philosophy corresponds to each age ... the old man, though, will always confess to mysticism'.26 With the potential to 'metaphysisise' the behaviour and products of late artists, late artworks needed no longer be consigned to the fate awarded the

aged by nature, and could instead be endowed with values that transcended nature. Goethe's definition of age long resonates in the evolution of late-style theory: a

century later, the philosopher Georg Simmel's explanation of the Goethe maxim would adduce Wagner's Parsifal to illustrate the nature of late style.

3

R. not very well, finds his greatest pleasure in rereading Faust, tells us that Shakespeare, with Dante before him and Goethe after him, forms a line shaped rather like this _.J--, Shakespeare belonging to a culminating point in civilization; Goethe, no less great, to a time of decadence.

Cosima Wagner's Diaries, 21 January 1877

Georg Simmel explored the facets of late style in several essays. In 'Leonardo da Vinci's "Last Supper"' (1905), he associated old age (Griesentum) with a distillation of artistic perceptions and a dispensing with ornament in favour of the unencum- bered, rarefied poiesis of essentials, a quality he ascribed to Goethe's Faust Part Two and Beethoven's last quartets: 'In artists of the highest calibre, old age sometimes manifests a development permitted to emerge most purely and essentially precisely on account of aging's natural process of decay: in light of a decline in the formative

powers, the appeal of sensation, the self-abandonment to the world as it is, there remain, so to speak, only the broad outlines, the most profoundly characteristic of one's creativity'.27 Da Vinci, like late Goethe and late Beethoven, was an artist

25 Maximen und Reflexionen, Goethes Werke, XII, 470 (nos. 745-8); my emphasis. 26 Maximen und Reflexionen, Goethes Werke, XII, 540 (no. 1315). 27 Simmel, 'Das Abendmahl Leonardo Da Vincis', Zur Philosophie der Kunst. Philosophische und Kunstphilosophische Aufsiite (Potsdam, 1922), 55.

44




who transcended the objective world; his distillation of artistic perceptions and abandonment of ornament were an instance of Goethe's 'stepping back from

appearance'. By contrast, Michelangelo, the subject of an essay Simmel wrote in 1910-11, demonstrated the eviscerative potential of lateness. Simmel thought Michelangelo was ultimately vanquished in a 'tragic' ethical and aesthetic struggle fought on the field of his late works, the conflict between his spiritual and physical values failing to resolve in a higher synthesis - failing to transcend. The expiration of the struggle was an ethical offence, a betrayal of the essential principles of Michelangelo's art: 'The soul, released from corporeal existence, did not march triumphantly into transcendence, but instead collapsed at its threshold'.28

Michelangelo was a casualty in the organicist catastrophe of lateness. These essays were preludes to Simmel's strange, ambitious study of Goethe

(1913), which offers what may be the earliest extended and systematically argued theory of late style. His treatment of Goethe culminates in a chapter ('Entwicklung') that celebrates a special kind of organic development, described by Simmel as a dialectical succession: 'undifferentiated unity, followed by differentiation, and finally by the overcoming of differentiation' ('Uberwindung der

Differenzierung').29 Goethe's last years -'h6chstes Alter'- witnessed this over-

coming of differentiation, a synthesis that marks a third, special period of artistic

development: 'Following his development thus far, there now appear in Goethe's old age symptoms of a third stage'.30 Three features of the 'third stage' should be noted: its fragmentary, trace-like nature - it is not represented by all Goethe's work, but is restricted to a few instances; its distinctive stylistic traits; and its manifestation in the works of other artists, including - in an unprecedented invocation - Wagner's Parsifal

And now finally I come to the anticipated point to which the arrangement of Goethe's developmental phases leads. In [Goethe's] old age appear traces of a further intellectual stage of development, which remains fragmentary, but which nonetheless marks a breakthrough and surmounting of the principle of form. In such phenomena the peculiar quality of late art appears, that quality with which certain of the very greatest artists achieve an unprecedented level of expression: Michelangelo with the Pieta Rondanini and the late poems, Frans Hals with the 'Mistresses of the Alms House', even Titian in the works of his old age; but most unambiguously Rembrandt in the late etchings and portraits, Beethoven in the last sonatas and quartets, as well as Parsifal and 'When We Dead Awake'.31

According to Simmel, in this third stage the artist's subjectivity is assumed into ideal, eternal forms, and thus, paradoxically, graced with objectivity:

In old age the great creative man - I am speaking here of the pure principle and ideal - is possessed by and fully possesses form. The subject, indifferent to all that is determined and

28 'Michelangelo' (1910-11), Philosophische Kultur. Gesammelte Essais von Georg Simmel, 3rd edn (Potsdam, 1923), 169-70.

29 Simmel, Goethe (Leipzig, 1913), 228.

30 Ibid., 255. 31

Ibid., 250.

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Anthony Barone

fixed in time and space, has, so to speak, stripped himself of his subjectivity - the gradual withdrawal from appearance, Goethe's definition of old age.32

The annihilation of the very essence of subjectivity is indispensable to Simmel's sacralisation of late artists and their works. Accordingly, in its moment of transcendence, the late Wagner's Parsifal would signal a radical extinction of the classical dialectic of subject and object. The fluorescent mysticism of Simmel's

peroration - the late Goethe poised at the brink of a 'new, mysteriously absolute level of perfection' - recalls, as we will see, similar representations of the late

Wagner elsewhere. Simmel's metaphysic of late style did not inhibit a late flowering of the organicist

theory: Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlands, perhaps the organicist narrative par excellence, appeared in 1918, five years after Simmel's Goethe. Despite its overwhelm-

ing inclination towards world-historical issues, Spengler's analysis intimates a

late-style theory pertinent to individuals: that individuals, like cultures, have attributes of lateness and can be analysed as manifestations of cultural-historical

periodicity; and that the attributes of historical lateness, which in Spengler are

strictly determined by organicism and are entirely unmitigated by any postulate of

transcendence, can be examined in their instantiations in individual artists. The key sentence falls at the end of a cavalcade of intellectual icons that seems almost a parody of Simmel's Goethe:

In this sense, too, every individual being that has any sort of importance recapitulates, of intrinsic necessity, all the epochs of the Culture to which he belongs. In each one of us, at that decisive moment when he begins to know that he is an ego, the inner life wakens just where and just how that of the Culture wakened long ago. Each of us men of the West, in his child's daydreams and child's play, lives again its Gothic - the cathedrals, the castles, the hero-sagas, the crusader's 'Dieu le veult', the soul's oath of young Parzival. Every young Greek has his Homeric age and his Marathon. In Goethe's Werther, the image of a tropic youth that every Faustian (but no Classical) man knows, the springtime of Petrarch and the Minnesinger reappears. When Goethe blocked out the Urfaust, he was Parzival; when he finished Faust I, he was Hamlet, and only with Faust IIdid he become the world-man of the 19th Century who could understand Byron. Even the senility of the Classical- the faddy and unfruitful centuries of very late Hellenism, the second-childhood of a weary and blase intelligence -can be studied in more than one of its grand old men. Thus, much of Euripides' Bacchae anticipates the life-outlook, and much of Plato's Timaeus the religious syncretism of the Imperial age; and Goethe's Faust II and Wagner's Parsifal disclose to us in advance the shape that our spirituality will assume in our next (in point of creative power our last) centuries.33

The governing analogy of the passage illustrates phases of Goethe's artistic development with a triad of works; the equation of Faust Part Two with Parsifal subverts the transcendental values assigned to these works by Simmel, and is exploited to index the decline of creativity in the last phase of world history. Spengler's concept of lateness does not postulate transcendence, because to do so would fundamentally conflict with his resolute adherence to organic paradigms of

32 Ibid., 252-3; my emphasis. 33 The Decline of the West, 2 vols. (New York, 1926), I, 110-11.

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decline. While Simmel's passage celebrated the 'overcoming of differentiation', the

peculiar achievement of a late artistic style, Spengler's concludes with decline, senility, second childhood. Simmel examines the souls of these late works and testifies to their metaphysical ascendancy; Spengler examines their entrails and

prophecies catastrophe. Some forty years earlier, Wagner had already noted traces of cultural degeneration in Goethe, just as he was taking up the Parsifal project in earnest, and his own subsequent observations on lateness and age reflect his

growing fixation on the uncertain dusk of his own creative life. Wagner surely sought his place on the Winckelmannian arc of history that he drew for Cosima.

4

Such sublime naivete! How long it takes for one to reach this stage!

Richard Wagner on Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Cosima Wagner's Diaries, 19 January 1883

There is compelling evidence that Wagner thought himself a 'late artist' in the mould of Beethoven and Goethe, his final years a period of distinct, late creativity. But the evidence is beset by contradictions. Should one believe the Wagner of 1872, who counsels the young Nietzsche, 'You know-: in old age people start to repeat themselves!',34 or the Wagner of 1881, who tells Cosima: 'I am not a ghost, after all-with my Parsifal I am coming along with something new' (CWD II, 12 November 1881)? Conflicting historiographical models of continuity versus change, which persist in Wagner criticism up to the present, were recognised as early as 1877

by Cosima, whose aim could be uncannily sure: 'In the evening he goes through the 1st act of Der Hollander with Herr Seidl; from Hollander to Parsifal- how long the

path and yet how similar the character!' (CWD I, 27 October 1877). Wagner more than once described the abyss between youth and old age with a

mixture of Goethean and Schopenhaurian conceits. Among the reflections reported by Cosima:

The worst thing about old age is not that one loses one's fire, but that one's sum total of bad experiences forces one not to think about the world. In youth ambition plays such a big role - you write your Hollander and your Tannhauser; fine, but you don't yet know whether and in what way you are a somebody; but in old age ambition has nothing more to say, and to keep the will to work you have, like Goethe, to follow a rigorous discipline. One's conceptions of the world and of life become more and more dismal, and need begins to look like a protection against sorrow! (CWD I, 16 August 1873)

Along with this curious mix of Olympian asceticism and resignation, Wagner appropriated the Lenzian periodisation of Beethoven's career. Sometimes the resulting constructions of self were sardonic, such as the ill-tempered reflection: 'I am in the 3rd phase of my life; in the first, people from other times, like Bierey, still figured; the second was horrible, Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn' (CWD II, 24 March 1878). On the other hand, during work on Parsifal, Cosima heard him say 'that he

34 Letter to Friedrich Nietzsche, 23 October 1872, Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (London, 1987), 813.

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Anthony Barone

is in the youth of his 3rd period of life' (CCWD II, 6 December 1880), a revealing formulation that acknowledges the duality of his situation, first, as an artist in the third phase of creative life and, second, as a late artist who experiences a

rejuvenation, one that according to Schopenhauer is the prerogative of genius.35 Wahnfried must have fairly echoed with such remarks.

Wagner sensed the newness of Parsifal, that he had achieved a new means and level of expressiveness. But his construction of himself as a late artist, animated

by his fascination with late Goethe and Beethoven, was also affected by an

equally developed ideology of organic stasis and unity that inflected his testimony about his own development. This ideology was pointedly summarised by Thomas Mann:

Strictly speaking [Wagner's] work has no chronology. It unfolds through time, but is essentially present in toto right from the very beginning. His last work, which he knew to be his last many years before he finally wrote it at the age of 69, was a kind of deliverance inasmuch as it signified an end, a conclusion, a completion, after which nothing more would follow; and the labour that he devoted to it as an old man, as an artist who had lived out his potential to the full, was really no more than tinkering. It is finished, the vast undertaking; and the heart that has stood up to the most punishing demands for seventy long years can come to its rest in one last paroxysm.36

In the end, though, Wagner's vision of music history and biography reveals him as the prophet of Simmel rather than Mann. The rambling centenary tribute to Beethoven (1870), whatever its impact on Beethoven studies, laid a foundation for

Wagner's own reception. His cavalier disregard of historical detail, of the stylistic traits of Beethoven's music, and even of substantial differences between works far removed in time, such as the Eroica Symphony and the C-sharp minor quartet, Op. 131, did not conceal his consciousness of the reality and importance of style development: the first task that falls to whomever wishes to enquire into the 'evolution of Beethoven's genius' will be 'to consider the practical maturing of the master's own peculiar style'. The qualification of a musician for his art, his vocation to it, can only be proven by the manifest effect on him of the music going on around him. 'In what manner his faculty of inner vision .. . has been aroused thereby, we learn only with the complete realisation of the goal of his self-development.' 3

Of course, Wagner's 'Beethoven' never explicitly considers 'the practical maturing of the master's own peculiar style'; instead, Wagner absolved himself of the task by releasing the 'master's inner genius' from the obligations and scrutiny of reason:

It would be a foolish enterprise to try to explain [Beethoven's] works ... It is utterly impossible to wish to discuss the peculiar essence of Beethoven's music, without falling at once into a tone of rapture. ... We realise that we must exclude every assumption of a rational cognitive process by means of which the development of his artistic endeavours

35 The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols. (New York, 1958), II, 395-6.

36 Mann, Pro and Contra Wagner, trans. Allan Blunden (London, 1985), 113. 37 'Beethoven', Richard Wagner: Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen (Leipzig, 1873), IX, 101; my

emphasis.

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might have been guided. Rather, we must rely solely upon the masculine power of his character, to whose influence upon the unfolding of the inner genius of the master we have already had occasion to allude.38

In doing this, Wagner apes Schopenhauer's genuflections to 'Genius':

The method of consideration that follows the principle of sufficient reason [i.e., reality is understood in terms of time, space, causality, etc.] is the rational method, and it alone is valid and useful in practical life and in science. The method of consideration that looks away from the content of this principle is the method of genius, which is valid and useful in art alone39

Cosima, who read 'Beethoven' very carefully (and many times), could not have overlooked the essay's eschatological implications; she observed to Richard that 'for R. himself [the] age of fulfilment would be old age, since only then would all that he is become apparent' (CWD II, 17 February 1881). Wagner encouraged such speculations:

When I [Cosima] tell him I have just been thinking of Parsifal and am pleased that this last work is also his masterpiece, he replies, or, rather, interrupts me very excitedly, 'No, no, I was telling myself today that it is quite remarkable that I held this work back for my fullest maturity; I know what I know and what is in it'. (CWD II, 5 January 1882)40

Intimates of Wagner's circle constructed elaborate metaphors to enshrine the image of the late Wagner. In 1910, recollecting Wagner at work on the music of

Parsifal, Hans von Wolzogen wrote: 'The harmonies hovered as though they were the inspiring ether of his creative fantasy, an ether in which he was pleased to sink ever deeper, so that, like Faust ascending to the mothers, he would attain the "eternal ideas", the forms and shapes of his art. Indeed, Faust among the mothers!'41 Wolzogen pursued the fantasy with scattered quotations from Faust Part Two: "to realms where forms exist detached" - "There shapes will crowd and swirl like clouds."-"for all is form in transformation, Eternal Mind's eternal entertainment". - "Henceforth, if you so will, by magic art this cloud of incense can be changed to gods."42 All these mysterious words of Goethe come to mind when I think about those heaving, ghostly sounds'.43 But Goethe's verses were surely not suggested only by the Umschwebung of Wagner's improvisations. Wolzogen conjures a Faustian Wagner - the strange, re-created and constantly transfigured necroman- cer of Part Two. Indeed, Wolzogen's allegory captures both Faust and Wagner at moments of transcendence and rebirth, Wagner's 'sinking into' the atmosphere of his Parsifal improvisations coupled with an ascent to 'eternal ideas'. This allegory, interestingly, was already long in the thoughts of Wagner himself, who in 1870 described Part Two as a 'complete palingenesis' (CI/D I, 13 March 1870).

38 Ibid., 106-8. 39 The World as Will, I, 185. 40 My emphasis. 41 Hans von Wolzogen, 'Bayreuther Gedanken und Erinnerungen. II. Parsifal. Nach 1883', Der

Merker. Osterreichische Zeitschrift fur Musik und Theater, 1.12 (25 March 1910), 493. Wolzogen alludes to Act I of Faust Part Two.

42 Faust I and II, ed. and trans. Stuart Atkins (Princeton, 1984), vv. 6277, 6279, 6287-8 and 6301-2.

43 Wolzogen, 'Bayreuther Gedanken', 493.

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Anthony Barone

Regarded in light of the interest Wagner took in his own identity as a late

artist, Wolzogen's allusion to the re-encounter of Faust and Mephistopheles assumes more meaning. The image of the revitalised Faust taking the key from

Mephistopheles and migrating into the realm of the 'mothers' implicates the

mystical intentions of the Parsifal project, the representation of Wagner as a

rejuvenated artist, and the transformative and transportative properties of this final work. More profoundly, Wolzogen's fantasy dramatises the dialectic of artistic

subjectivity and objectivity allegorised repeatedly in the history of late style by formulations like Goethe's 'withdrawal from appearance', and Simmel's and Adorno's respective reconceptions of artistic subjectivity and objective form.

Wolzogen's epiphany of a Faustian late Wagner is reinforced by the composer's own strange proclamations. Glasenapp records how Wagner, during lunch at Wahnfried on 21 August 1882, spoke solemnly about the Parsifal performances of the preceding weeks: 'if at the end of such performances [Wagner] were to find occasion to speak, he would be able only to repeat: "All that is transitory is only a

symbol; what seems unachievable here is seen done" '.44 Thus did the composer see the refraction in himself and his last work of the luminous Verkldrung of Faust Part Two; his citation of the famous penultimate lines of Goethe evokes Faust-Wagner's final transformation into a man in the dusk of life and creativity.45 Indeed, one of the last stage directions of Faust, 'Faust, extremely old, wandering and meditating',46 perhaps most vibrantly paints the tableau of the late artist that Glasenapp and his

companions witnessed during the 1882 Festival. Just as the cult of the late Wagner could very well accommodate in its ceremonies and texts the mythology of late Goethe, so could the two artists' last works coalesce, as it were, through the alchemy of 'transcendence' in the crucible of artistic lateness. Well before a note of Parsifal had been composed, Wagner regaled Cosima with an exegesis of Faust Part Two that could easily be taken, in hindsight, as one of Parsifal:

In the garden [Goethe's] line 'All transient things are but an image' comes to mind, and that leads us to talk of this drama [Faust, Part Two], 'which does indeed belong on a stage, but a stage one cannot envisage'. 'The world of appearances, that is what is transient; inadequacy, shown here in action, that is what life shows us; the unseeable, that is what the drama sets out to reveal to us. And all this,' R. continues, 'in the tone of a mystical medieval saying, like something from Jakob B6hme; the colouring of Faust is retained throughout'. (CWD I, 17 June 1871)

44 Edwin Lindner, Richard Wagner iiber 'Parsifal'. Ausspriiche des Meisters iiber sein Werk (Leipzig, 1913), 197, after Carl Friedrich Glasenapp, Das Leben Richard Wagners, 6 vols. (Leipzig, 1905-11), VI, 664.

45 Wagner, of course, knew the lines well; he had paraphrased them in an impromptu speech delivered during the celebrations of the 1876 Festival: 'Calls, dinners, a tremendous amount of coming and going, in the evening a banquet; R., quite without preparation, makes a wonderful speech, paraphrasing the final chorus from Faust- "All things transitory are set but as symbols." The idea: "The eternally feminine leads us on"' (CIVD I, 18 August 1876).

46 In the scene preceding Faust's death and redemption, Goethe's stage directions indicate Faust's appearance and pose as well as the scene: 'Palast/Weiter Ziergarten/Grosser, Gradgefuihrter Kanal/Faust, im hochsten Alter wandelnd, nachdenkend'. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Zweiter Teil (Frankfurt am Main, 1975), 331.

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Wagner's intuition of the inadequacy of aesthetic appearance and his appreciation of the epiphanic ambitions of the drama capture him in a Goethean pose, pondering what would ultimately be the problematic of Parsifal.

It was not the first time that the visionary qualities of Faust Part Two had been invoked to vindicate another's late work; this had already happened in Beethoven criticism. In Beethoven et ses trois styles (1852), Wilhelm von Lenz proposed that 'the third style of Beethoven is comparable to the second part of Faust', and he correlated the developmental stages represented by Beethoven's second and third

styles with those represented by the two parts of Goethe's drama. Lenz thought Beethoven's late works sibylline, like Faust Part Two, and construed them as revelations of the 'profound and mystical'.47 He imagined composer and poet roaming a landscape of dreams, immersed in memory, indifferent to the world around them, their late works the fruit of a 'longing for the infinite'.48 Wagner's allusion and Wolzogen's allegory construct in a like manner the late identities of Parsifal and its composer. Like late Beethoven, Wagner would dwell in a Goethean

empyrean, Faust Part Two an emblem of his lateness. The 'stage one cannot

envisage', the stage Wagner wished for Faust Part Two, is that upon which the

mysteries of late works are uttered.

5

The saying, age makes childish, is not true; it only finds us really children still.

Faust Part One, w. 212-14

How does late-style discourse function in Parsifal criticism? Historically, one of the first obligations of Wagner's partisans was to defend the work against the charge that it represented a creative decline or regression. Eduard Hanslick's review-essay is a prominent and exemplary case in point; it seems to parody the rhetoric of late

style: 'And Wagner's creative power?' Hanslick enquires, 'For a man of Wagner's age and of Wagner's system, it seems to me to be still astonishing'. The 'astonishing' creativity resided for Hanslick in a few scenes, and his comparisons with Wagner's preceding works leads to a mixed, finally dour appraisal of the whole. However, the Flower Maidens scene of Act II evoked rapturous praise: 'Whoever can produce pieces of music of such captivating melodic charm as that of the Flower Maidens, and of such energy as the final scene, has power that today's young men might well envy'. But despite his selective admiration, he concluded that Parsifal was not entirely the product of a still fertile creativity: 'It would be "pure foolishness" to claim that Wagner's imagination and musical inventiveness have survived intact. In Parsifal, a certain sterility and dryness associated with increasing prolixity is unmistakable.' To underscore the point, he contrasted the 'autumnal' Parsifal prelude with the 'full bloom' of the Lohengrin prelude.49 Parsifal, in short, is an Alterswerk: competing metaphors of residual strength and decay struggle at the

47 Beethoven et ses trois styles (rpt. New York, 1980), 235-6. 48

Ibid., 61. 49 Hanslick, 'Richard Wagners "Parsifal", Erster Brief aus Bayreuth vom Juli 1882', printed in

Richard Wagner: 'Parsifal'. Texte, Materialien, Kommentare, ed. Csampai and Holland, 158.

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Anthony Barone

precipice of artistic death. Perhaps haunted by such criticism, Houston Stuart Chamberlain was compelled to declare at the very outset of his 'Notes sur Parsifal' (1886) that Parsifal was not a work of old age, by which he meant a work uninhibited

by old age.50 Debate would flourish long after in apparent innocence of Wagner's own remarkable assertion regarding Parsifal, recorded by Cosima: 'In the morning R. said he was not staging an old work of his youth, but a youthful work of his old age' (CWD II, 11 July 1882).

The Parsifal premiere inspired imaginative resolutions of the problematic of late

style; critics naturally enough translated the theoretical rhetoric of late style into the

practical language of style analysis, and tried to discern or deny evidence of fundamental changes in Wagner's artistic style. In a monograph on Parsifal published in 1883, the French critic Edmond Hippeau, a guarded admirer of the work and of Wagner's achievement in general, addressed what he thought the untenable claim that it marked a new departure in Wagner's style. He noted that

many critics charged that Parsifal was too dependent on Wagner's earlier works, showing a lack of inspiration and dearth of invention. Furthermore, he regretted that some critics thought Parsifal to be a return to the earlier style of works like

Lohengrin, representing not only a lack of novelty but, worse, a regression. Hippeau took pains soon after the premiere to clarify Parsifal's relationship to the earlier music dramas by pursuing a strategy of simply pre-empting the problem of late style - along with its historically rooted assumptions of decline - by insisting that the opera was one of a kind with the Ring. His basic claims were that there was no 'third style' in Wagner, that Parsifal was produced in strict accordance with the principles that guided the whole of a so-called 'second period'.51 This critical subterfuge rescued Parsifal both from the charge of regression and from the aesthetic vertigo of a late style, and was evidently one manifestation of a broader effort to exorcise the critical demon of Spdtstil from Parsifal. In attempting to gather all the post-revolutionary music dramas into an affirmative, second-period allegory of organic vitality, Hippeau stifled the intimations of transcendence implicit in a metaphysics of late style. However, such good intentions blinded him and like-minded critics to the uniqueness of Parsifal, that 'newness' that constantly surprised not only Adorno, but Wagner himself.

Carl de Crisenoy, writing some thirty years after the premiere of Parsifal, noted that in the work's reception in France, alleged weaknesses were attributed to the physical infirmity of the aged Wagner.52 He identified this trope of organic decline in the criticism of his compatriot, Jean Chantavoine, according to whom Parsifal suggested Wagner's 'exhaustion and decrepitude'.53 Chantavoine argued that the

50 Houston Stuart Chamberlain, 'Notes sur Parsifal', Revue wagn6rienne, 6 (August, 1886), 220. 51 This is revealed early on to be the guiding premise of the monograph: 'J'ai pris pour

principal sujet d'etude le dernier en date des ouvrages de Wagner, d'abord parce que c'est celui dans lequel il a donne la plus parfait application de son systeme' ('Parsifal' et l'opera wagndrien [Paris, 1883], 27).

52 Carl de Crisenoy, 'Parsifal' et la Critique. Extrait des 'Entretiens Idealistes' (Paris: Biblioth&que des 'Entretiens Idealistes', 1914). The premiere of Parsifal in France took place on 4 January 1914 at the Paris Opera, conducted by Andre Messager.

53 Revue hebdomadaire, 31 January 1914.

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more contemplative nature of Parsifal betokened an artistic ralentissement. Suspecting that Wagner had lost his vitality, Chantavoine believed that the sublime elements of

Parsifal that some liked to associate with the composer's old age were not disposed in accord with the artist's intentions, and were in fact the scattered traces of his senescence. Ernest Newman, writing in the 1940s, found it still necessary to defend

Wagner against such imputations:

Nothing could be further from the truth than the belief entertained in some quarters that Parsifal is a 'senile' work. Into no other work of his had Wagner ever put such severely critical thinking. He knew well that he was engaged on the creation of a musical world undreamed of till then not merely by others but by himself ... and his fundamental technical problem, upon which he brought to bear the whole maturity of his powers and his experience, was how to realise this strange world in an idiom purely its own. He had no lack of 'ideas': rather was he embarrassed at times by a superabundance of them, ideas not only for Parsifal but for instrumental works with a new content and in a new style.54

Wagner's pantomime of artistic lateness, rife with commemorations and prefigura- tions, is performed in the shadows between history and myth; it is from these shadows, indeed, that Parsifal criticism has historically emerged, replete with the dualities inherent in the late-style concept - of decline and transcendence, of stasis and evolution. These manifest themselves throughout Parsifal reception, as, for

example, when Paul Bekker argues for 'an elemental unity in all Wagner's life and work',55 a claim that seems vaporous when placed beside his skilful demonstration of the unique, radical qualities of Parsfal. The contextualisation of the late Wagner within the conceptual history of late style calls attention especially to the insidious effects of paradigms of organic decline, which have historically disadvantaged the reception of late works. This acknowledged, Parsifal- the work and its genesis - need not be regarded merely as a sign of atrophy or regression, but as a performed rite of self-fulfilment, of transcendence.

Cosima's diary entry of 24 October 1881 reminds us how stratified are the mediations of Wagner's self-image, his creativity, his history, the history of European music, of European culture: 'R. talks about Faust and remarks how unique it is - there is nothing else to compare with these two parts; this meeting in the first part, whereas in the second, Goethe, like Beeth., felt the desire at the end of his life to write once more "in his own way" '. Parsifalwas similarly born of such a liberation, of the fecundity of lateness. Adorno, noting its 'continually strange newness', concluded: 'From out of the waning of his original inventive powers, Wagner's force produced the virtue of a late style, a style that, according to Goethe's dictum, withdraws from appearance'. Although he recognised the dualism of the concept, his writings never explored in any depth its history or its xthonic effects within repertoires of aesthetic criticism; his task remains unfinished.

54 Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner, 4 vols. (London, 1947), IV, 604. 55 Paul Bekker, Richard Wagner: His Life in His Work, trans. M. M. Bozman (London, 1931), vi.

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Anthony Barone

Late artists are assimilated to fictions of influence and emulation. A late work,

according to Adorno, may be described as a monad, but the late artist, a precipitate of the mythologies of his or her predecessors, cannot. The construction of the late artist is not only retrospective: just as the tableau of the late Wagner composing Parsifal looks back to the hagiographies of late Goethe and Beethoven, it looks forward to the final moments of Mann's Leverkiihn. In the ambiguity of its

relationships to past, present and future, the late work is arguably 'timeless' in Dahlhaus's sense. Following Simmel, we might imagine it endlessly mimicking its creator in extremis, at the 'portal of transcendence'. The late work's illusion of timelessness, of dislocation, derives in fact from relationships posited between artistic subjects and objects. Goethe's 'withdrawal from appearance' was an

archetype of the dialectic of subject and object in late art, an archetype that evolved into more tendentious forms. Seeking the essence of late art, Simmel imagined artistic subjectivity fully reconciled with objectivity and implied the extinction of their dialectic and the expulsion of the late work from history, from time. His

analysis of the subject-object relation is an important precedent for the later

positions of Adorno and Carl Dahlhaus, for whom the subject and object of late works stand in a steady-state of mutual alienation and confrontation, more or less the situation described by Dahlhaus as follows: 'In a certain sense we could speak of the dialectics being in suspension: the subjective element is no longer "subsumed" in the objective, and the objective element, vice versa, is no longer "justified" by the subjective - it is no longer the case that either is "transformed" into the other, but, rather, that they directly confront each other'.56 Such analyses dramatise the subject-object dialectic within larger narratives of organic decline or transcendence, sometimes conflations of both; as a result, the concept of late style possesses enormous hermeneutic authority. For Parsifal, this authority is felt along every vector of the work's ontology, including its relationships to its creator, audiences, other works. The designation of Parsifal as a 'late work' confers upon it

apocalyptic significance - that of a monstrous birth.

56 Ludwig van Beethoven: Approaches to His Music, trans. Mary Whittall (Oxford, 1991), 220.

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Richard Wagner's "Parsifal" and the Theory of Late Style

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