Between the good and bad, that's where you'll find me, Reaching for Heaven

Icon directed at the cause of the rant.

So... An old headspace dweller has returned after fifteen years of silence, namely Klingsor from Wagner's "Parsifal". In order to deal with the warlock wars breaking out between him and Muraki, I decided to send the newcomer some place where there are people from his world. And for the heck of it, I've been doing a bit of a canon review, including listening to the opera and reading a relevant chapter on it in a study of the Grail legends, "The Grail" by Norma Lorre Goodrich.

I wonder if she'd actually heard the opera before she wrote the chapter about it. She seems hung up on Kundry as an antagonist, when it's Klingsor who's the one who set everything in motion; like Dracula in the Bram Stoker novel, or Darth Vader in the original "Star Wars" trilogy, he might not be on scene much, but he has an incredible amount of influence over the course of the story. He's the one who started shanghai'ing unwary Grail Knights, the one who filched the Holy Spear, the one who wounded Amfortas. It's almost like Kundry has become the magician's lovely assistant who distracts the audience from what the magician is up to. I don't see Kundry as this anti-feminist figure that the writer makes her out to be, especially when you look at the wider context of Wagner's operas: up until "Parsifal", his operas are about women saving men from the terrible mistakes they've made. It's as if, in this last of his works, Wagner decided to show the favor being returned. Granted, Klingsor uses Kundry as a tool to get his revenge on the Knights of the Grail, but she's not happy about it (the writer somehow mistook *Klingsor's* glee at the prospect of trying to snare Parsifal, for *Kundry's*, which leads me to think she just read the libretto, rather than listened to the opera, or watched a performance of it.). She fights to resist him, she mocks him: listening to their lines at the beginning of the second act is almost like listening to a prostitute arguing with her pimp. Kundry is the victim here, not the victimizer. She's no damsel in distress, but she does need to be rescued. And that, ultimately, is just what Parsifal does...