April 6, 1986

MUSIC VIEW; DON'T LOOK FOR LOGIC IN 'PARSIFAL'

By DONAL HENAHAN

Even those who despise ''Parsifal'' - and they have always constituted a mighty legion - must feel a twinge of pleasure when Wagner's last opera makes its annual appearance. No matter what the thermometer may say, we know that the arrival of ''Parsifal'' at the Metropolitan Opera this week spells spring. It is difficult to think of this music, which Thomas Mann penetratingly described as ''filled with a majestic sclerotic weariness,'' along with robins and crocuses, but perhaps more than any other Wagner work ''Parsifal'' is capable of arousing violently ambivalent feelings.

Like Nietzsche before him, Mann went to his death maintaining a fierce love-hate relationship to Wagner. Long after Nietzsche had rejected the music and the philosophy as life-denying works of a depraved northern genius, he could still say that knowing Wagner had been the one great happy experience of his life. Mann, asked in 1942 if it might not be time to decide one way or the other about Wagner, refused: ''No, it is like that and cannot be otherwise. I can write about him today like this and tomorrow like that.'' These three great Germans came from the same cultural background and it is likely that something in that atmosphere made them able not only to abide contradictions but to put them to creative use. Wagner, Nietzsche, Mann - have there ever been three such kindred souls, in spite of their radical philosophical differences?

If two geniuses, certainly the greatest Wagner critics who have ever written on the subject, could not dispose of him with any finality, others who find him a perpetual irritation and joy hardly need feel any guilt. I, for one, would not trust the musical instincts of anyone who did not feel similarly torn. I like Mann's typically half-admiring, half-deprecatory assessment: ''He is one of those musicians who can persuade even the unmusical to listen to music.'' After a visit to Bayreuth in 1909 during particularly hot and oppressive weather, he wrote to a friend that his passion for Wagner had cooled, but that despite his physical exhaustion certain scenes in ''Parsifal'' struck him as ''terrifyingly expressive.'' To the end of his life, however, it was ''Lohengrin'' that kept him in Wagner's grip most tightly. A few bars of the prelude, we are told, were enough to dissolve all his intellectual defenses.

Probably the high-water mark of creative ambivalence in all Wagnerian commentary came in Mann's ''The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner,'' which has been reprinted in ''Thomas Mann: Pro and Contra Wagner,'' a University of Chicago Press paperback. This is the famous 1933 speech, later reworked as an essay, in which Mann tried valiantly to separate Wagner's music from the political uses to which it was being put by the new German nationalists who were soon to enshrine Wagner as the official Nazi composer. Mann was denounced for his efforts in a pompous reply by 42 of Munich's leading citizens, including to their eternal shame Richard Strauss, Hans Knappertsbusch and Hans Pfitzner. Knappertsbusch, one of the more renowned of ''Parsifal'' conductors, is believed to have been the instigator of the manifesto. It extolled the ''uprising of Germany as a nation'' and denied Mann, a man with known sympathies for European ''cosmopolitan-democratic views,'' the right ''to criticize German intellectual giants.''

The infamous 42 were not wrong in seeing Mann's criticism as a threat to the proto-Nazi cause. He had written, after all, such heresies as this: ''It is thoroughly inadmissible to ascribe a contemporary meaning to Wagner's nationalistic gestures and speeches - the meaning that they would have today. To do so is to falsify and abuse them, to sully their romantic purity.'' That statement made sense in 1933 and it makes sense today when we regularly see operas being twisted out of shape by directors intent on imposing contemporary social views and political values on works whose artistic significance is clearly inseparable from the time and place of their birth.

There still are Wagnerites who somehow believe it is denying his genius to face up to the apparent anachronisms and confusions in his works, to what Mann oxymoronically refers to as ''Wagner's healthy brand of sickness.'' Instead, we should hail him among all composers as the master juggler and illusionist, an artist able to persuade us that he is keeping all the balls in the air. Wagner found ways to work successfully with conflicting ideas while resisting the neat synthesis that literary men and philosophers such as Mann and Nietzsche might find more satisfying. Perhaps it is just this refusal or inability to settle for final solutions that keeps us fascinated - obsessed, in some cases - with Richard Wagner.

Certainly he settled nothing for us or probably for himself in ''Parsifal,'' the most murky of his works. As for this last testament of a composer nearly 70 years old, which traditionally has been accepted by audiences as a profoundly religious experience rich in Christian symbols and mysticism, I suppose no one has ever described its weird cast of characters more vividly or more irreverently than Mann:

''What an assemblage of extreme and repellent oddities! A sorcerer emasculated by his own hand; a desperate woman of split personality, half corrupter, half penitent Mary Magdalene, with cataleptic transitions between these two stages of being; a love-sick boy who brings redemption at the hands of a chaste boy; this boy himself who brings redemption, this guileless fool, so very different from the awakened youth who wakes up Brunnhilde, and in his own way another case of remote peculiarity: together they remind one of that motley bunch of freaks who packed into Achim von Arnim's famous coach - the ambivalent gypsy witch, the dead layabout, the golem in female shape and the field marshal Cornelius Nepos, who is really a mandrake root grown beneath a gibbet. The comparison seems blasphemous, and yet the grave characters of 'Parsifal' derive from the same Romantic penchant for extremism as Arnim's scurrilous crew. Had they been presented in the guise of a novella, this would have been more obvious; only the mythicizing and sanctifying powers of music mask the affinity, and it is from the solemn spirit of the latter that the whole thing emerges not as gruesome-facetious nonsense, as it does in Romantic drama, but as a deeply religious sacred drama.'' (Translation c University of Chicago Press.) All true. And yet, when the first murmuring sounds of the ''Parsifal'' prelude begin to float over the Metropolitan Opera House, logical arguments are likely to dissipate like the mist in the morning. For the space of five timeless hours, the audience will, whether it approves intellectually or not, willingly submit to hypnotization. Mann described his love for Wagner's music as ''a love devoid of belief'' and that, I believe, is the most sensible attitude to take toward ''Parsifal,'' an old spellbinder's final, magically muddled sermon.