But this also relates, as I suggested earlier, to the layers of meaning each of us lays down en route into a work. Since my path into Parsifal, never a heavily traveled one, probably bears only the occasional footprint nowadays, a brief tracing may interest some readers. In some ways, I am not a natural acolyte of this work. I hold no religious belief, and don’t quite see—and this despite the assurances of some highly informed authors from Thomas Mann on down, that Parsifal is about religion but not itself religious—how to detach it from its religious identity, quite apart from my own youthful Protestant associations (see below.) It’s true, as these writers point out, that Christ is never named in the libretto, and that the references to a Redeemer, a Savior, or other specifically Christian appellations are carefully sidestepped. But to Whom could we conceivably suppose they refer? What is the Grail, as represented in the opera?  ^(I) And who could the “Him” be at whom Kundry laughed? Please!

I find it especially hard to separate the  work from the Christian belief in Redemption for All through the acts of a chosen individual, which is something far more than redemption with a small “r” (the possibility of redeeming oneself through good works, or of greatly aiding that process in another). True, Parsifal gains his standing as Redeemer through enlightenment, his sudden deep empathy with the suffering of another (Mitleid), and through the arduous journey of return I alluded to earlier, rather than through an ultimate self-sacrifice. Still, for me the nature of this blessed occurrence belongs to the category of thoughts that are beautiful and exalting, but wishful. Yet I have known religious people who felt for Parsifal nothing more than a ritual reverence, whereas I feel inescapable involvement.

Some of my early preparation for Parsifal happened in my prep school years, when my unreligious self, fascinated from childhood with ancient history and mythological tales,  attended four year’s worth of a mandatory Bible course as well as four chapel services per week. The music of these services invariably included repetitions of the Dresden Amen and, at the appropriate season, of Parsifal‘s Faith Motif (the ethereal, flutey version, which registers beautifully on the organ, rather than the militant, tromboney one) and snatches of the Good Friday music. During those years I also discovered the Muck recordings, Stokowski’s “Symphonic Synthesis” with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and T.S. Eliot, with The Waste Land‘s note references to Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance.

Over the succeeding few years this last volume, to this day an essential reference in the field of Grail studies, led me to more exploration in that literature and allied readings—sharpened, of course, by my increasing awareness of its relevance to operas I was seeing year after year (religious release time from office jobs to attend Good Friday matinees) and hearing on broadcasts and recordings. I read Eschenbach’s Parzival, Gawain and the Green Knight, and The Quest of the Holy Grail, with related commentaries. I made my way through all four volumes of Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God, which despite its many noted similarities that are perhaps more ben trovato than vero, is rich and edifying. Freudian interpretation was obviously applicable (a life-and-death mission to re-unite a cup and a spear; the conflation of motherly and sexual love), and I even plugged away at the Jungian study, The Grail Legend, by Emma Jung and M.-L. von Franz. I also read, of course, many of the commentaries by Wagnerian scholars and biographers, most of which skim rather lightly over this background.