Eva Rieger, Kundry’s Kiss and the Fear of Female Desire: A Gender Perspective

July 2017, Volume 11, Number 2, 34–43.

Being neither a psychologist nor a psychoanalyst I find it problematical when colleagues arbitrarily apply their own, subjective, psychological insights to the life or work of a composer under the guise of psychological theories, without taking into consideration the whole work or the whole life of the artist. Take, for instance, an analysis of Parsifal by Elisabeth Bronfen. She applies certain terms such as ‘trauma’ and ‘hysteria’ so that the actions of all the characters are interpreted as nothing more than hysterical behaviour. But turning Parsifal or Amfortas into hysterics does not lead anywhere. I prefer the approach of Dorothea Redepenning, who, in her essay ‘Salome und ihre Schwestern’, analyses figures such as Mona Lisa in the opera by Max von Schillings, Marietta from Korngold’s Die tote Stadt, or Prokofiev’s Renata in The Fiery Angel, all of them ‘hysterical’ figures onstage. She writes: ‘All this has hardly anything to do with women. They are projections by men – perverse yet bourgeois, inhibited yet lecherous, fearful male fantasies – in other words, they are all about male hysteria or schizophrenia, which are here personified in female form.’