Abstract

Wagner's Parsifal has historically been received by critics both private and public as a "late work," its composer having assumed the persona and attributes of a "late artist." These coordinated designations have had important consequences for Parsifal interpretation and Wagnerian biography generally. Four sources of information are especially pertinent to the problematic of the late style of Parsifal: representations of artistic lateness that have evolved since the eighteenth century; the reception histories of late Goethe and late Beethoven; the remarks of Wagner and his intimates concerning historical lateness and artistic late style; and the repertoire of Parsifal criticism. ;In the modern era, late style has connotated organic decline and artistic transcendence. In the mid-eighteenth century, late style was subject to organicist theory, categorically denoting an absence of aesthetic worth. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, Goethe adumbrated what one might call a "metaphysic" of late style. Goethe provided not only a rhetorical foundation for the metaphysical dimension of lateness, but, especially on account of the stylistic departures represented by Faust Part Two, became the most invoked example of the contrary implications of artistic lateness. ;Eighteenth-century neo-classical and nineteenth-century rhetorics and constructions of lateness were followed by the emergence at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning decades of the twentieth of a formal exposition of lateness and its allied categories, especially in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Simmel, and Oswald Spengler. In particular, Parsifal was appropriated by Simmel and Spengler to demonstrate metaphysical and organicist aspects of artistic lateness, respectively, adumbrating themes that subsequently emerged in Theodor Adorno's critique of the late styles of Beethoven, Schoenberg, Wagner, and Goethe. ;Wagner himself was absorbed by the binary discourse of late style, with important consequences for Parsifal. The concept's binary character accounts for the structures of Wagner's self-representation as a late artist and aspects of the critical reception of Parsifal. Goethe and Faust Part Two, especially, provided models of late artist and late work that were central to representations of Wagner in his last years. The discourse of lateness determined Wagner's self-representation as a late artist no less than it did his contemporaries' views of his life and work