In Steiner's reading, the composer whose music dramas renew lost mystery wisdom, carrying the listener from the Twilight of the Gods to the Christ principle of Parsifal.
Richard Wagner in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's reading of the German composer, who lived from 1813 to 1883, as the artist-initiate of the modern age, whose music dramas renew the lost wisdom of the ancient Mysteries through sound. In the four-lecture cycle Richard Wagner in the Light of Anthroposophy (GA 92, Berlin 1905), Steiner treats the Ring of the Nibelung, Lohengrin, Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal as one continuous arc. It moves from the Twilight of the Gods, through the four phases of northern life, toward the Christ principle. Wagner, Steiner holds, drew from myth unconsciously, as the plant grows by laws it does not know. Parsifal, the fifth phase, places the Christ-problem at the centre of the drama and rebuilds the medieval Grail mystery as a public temple of art for an age that had grown torn and splintered.
In Steiner's Own Words
You see, therefore, that Wagner grasped the problem of karma in all its depth, out of the true spirit of Buddhism; when he was about fifty years old he had developed to the extent of being able to create a drama of such deep moral force and earnestness as "The Victor". All these thoughts then flow together in his Parsifal, but at the same time the Christ-problem stands in the centre of the drama. Out of Parsifal streams the whole profundity of this medieval problem. It is very significant that after having described the whole primordial age of the Germanic peoples in the four phases of the Ring of the Nibelungs, Richard Wagner created an eminently Christian drama, the work with which he closed his life: Parsifal.
What it Means Today
Steiner's claim that Wagner built art into a temple has a concrete address: the Festspielhaus on the Green Hill at Bayreuth, the theatre Wagner designed for his own works, where the complete Ring of the Nibelung first sounded in August 1876. Six years later, on 26 July 1882, the same house gave the premiere of Parsifal, which Wagner subtitled a Buhnenweihfestspiel, a consecrational stage festival play. He meant it literally. The score was written for Bayreuth's hidden, sunken orchestra pit and its darkened auditorium, and for decades the family forbade staged performances anywhere else, holding the rights until they lapsed in 1913. A theatre where the audience sits in silence and the music seems to rise from an unseen source is, in design, a mystery temple translated into nineteenth-century brick. This is where Steiner's reading earns its keep. He does not treat Wagner as a clever borrower of Norse and Grail material. He reads the Festspielhaus as evidence that the old initiation, once guarded inside the Mysteries, was pressing back into public culture through music. Thalira synthesis: Bayreuth is what a mystery-school looks like when it can no longer hide, the temple rebuilt in the open air of the modern city, with sound doing the work that ritual once did.
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