The Magic Flowers of Klingsor's
Garden
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Spring on the First Green Hill
 hen Wagnerians refer
to the "Green Hill" they mean the hill in Bayreuth on
which Wagner built his Festival Theatre. Before
Wagner settled in Bayreuth, however, he had lived on
another "Green Hill", in the Enge district of Zürich,
where his patrons the Wesendonks had built a villa
overlooking the lake. It was on a spring morning in
1857, a few days after Richard and Minna Wagner had
moved into a cottage close to the Wesendonk villa, that Richard was
inspired to make his first sketch for his drama
Parsifal. While walking in the garden of the
villa he was put into a creative frame of mind by
what he later described as a pleasant mood in
nature . In that same garden, a few weeks later,
he would sit under the ancient linden tree and think
about the music he was writing at the time, the
second act of Siegfried. Later the same year
Wagner would put this work aside to concentrate on
another drama, Tristan und Isolde which was
still only music . It was in that autumn on the
first green hill that this revolutionary work took
shape; we can imagine Wagner thinking about it as he
sat under the ancient linden tree overlooking the
lake, waiting for Mathilde.
Left: The cottage on the first Green Hill, the
"Asyl".
 n that morning in the
garden, however, Wagner thought about spring. He saw
the flowers emerging from the soil and the buds
appearing on the linden trees. No doubt he thought
about animals emerging from hibernation, something
that his mentor Schopenhauer had written about.
Sleep, wrote Schopenhauer, was very much like
death. Awakening from hibernation was a kind of
reincarnation, a subject
that Wagner had recently read about in Burnouf's book about Buddhism. While this book was fresh
in his mind, Wagner's thoughts also went back to the
Good Friday passage in a
book that he had read twelve years before and not
looked at since, Wolfram's
Parzival. It was from these thoughts that
Wagner developed the concept of his drama about
Parzival; returning
to the cottage (which he would later call his
Asyl, although his first name for it was
Wahnheim) he quickly sketched out an
entire drama in three acts .
 Flowermaidens and Parsifal
(ogg format, mono, duration 5.5 minutes)
Magic maidens
 t is possible that
Wagner thought of the maidens as flowers from the
very beginning. It is also possible that at first he
did not think of presenting them as flowers but
simply as magic maidens conjured up by the sorcerer
Klingsor (just as
the dead nuns were conjured up by Bertram in
Meyerbeer's Robert le
diable). In the Munich
Prose Draft there is no suggestion that the
maidens have been grown in the magic garden:
concealed in that castle are the most beautiful
women in all the world and of all times. They are
held there under Klingsor's spell for the destruction
of men, especially the Knights of the Grail, endowed
by him with all powers of seduction. Men say that
they are she- devils.
n the libretto (written twelve years after
that Prose Draft) Klingsor's maidens are
variously referred to as magic maidens and as
flowers. Their music seems to have grown out of
musical ideas that Wagner had first conceived for his
Rhine daughters. In both cases these female creatures
are seductive but essentially innocent (even if this
is not always made clear in modern productions).
Where the Rhine daughters are natural, however, the
flower maidens are unnatural, like everything that
originates in Klingsor's magic. This does
not prevent Parsifal, in the third act,
from expressing his compassion for them.
Right: The daughters of Mára. © Museum Rietberg
(formerly the Villa Wesendonck).
 ttention has been
drawn (initially by Karl Heckel in 1896) to
the similarities between the second act of
Parsifal and traditional accounts of an
episode in the life of the Buddha Shakyamuni. In an attempt
to prevent the future Buddha from achieving
enlightenment, the dark lord Mára sent an army of
demonic warriors against him. They were unable to
harm the future Buddha, or even to distract him from
his meditations.
 hen Mára sent to the
future Buddha his daughters, fearfully seductive
demons in female shape. They sang, danced and laughed
but were unable to seduce the future Buddha. In
Wagner's version it is Klingsor the sorcerer who
first sends his knights against Parsifal, who overcomes them
and enters the magic garden. There he is surrounded
by the magic maidens whom Klingsor has conjured out of
flowers. Like the future Buddha (who was protected by
his virtue), the young hero (who is protected by his
innocence) is immune to the enticements of the
maidens.
Left: Flower Maiden costume by Paul von Joukowsky, Bayreuth
1882. © Richard- Wagner- Gedenkstätte.
Flower maidens
he flower maidens, or
Klingsor's magic
maidens, do not appear in any of the Grail romances.
In Wolfram's poem we read
of maidens kept captive in Clinschor's castle, which is a variant of the
Castle of Wonders in
Chrétien's story and the
Castle of Maidens in
several related stories. It appears probable that
Wagner's main source for the magic maidens was the
Roman d'Alexandre, a French poem of the
early 12th century¹.
lexander enters a
forest whose entrance is
guarded by genies. Here he finds beautiful, welcoming
maidens, each at the foot of a tree. They cannot
leave the forest alive. When Alexander asks his
guides about them, he is told that they go
underground in the winter, but with the return of
warm weather, they spring up and blossom. They open
as flowers, in which the central bud becomes the
girl's body and the leaves her garment².
Right: Villa Ruffolo with Klingsor's tower.
he first modern
French version of the Roman d'Alexandre was
published in Stuttgart in 1846. In 1850, H. Weissman
published an adaptation by Lamprecht of the 12th
century German version. It is known that Wagner was
familiar with Lamprecht's Alexanderlied,
since in his autobiography (Mein Leben, page
390) he mentioned that he had attempted to imitate
its style.
t has also been
suggested that Wagner might have been inspired by a
pantomime that he enjoyed at the Adelphi Theatre in
the Strand, during his visit to London at the end of
1855. This production, with the title The
Christmas, was a pot-pourri of fairy tales.
Apparently in one scene the female chorus were
dressed as flowers. This may have reminded Wagner of
the maidens in the Roman d'Alexandre. So the
origins of the flower maidens are diverse: their
roots can be found in a medieval romance, a Buddhist
legend and a Christmas pantomime.
Footnote 1:
See Bayreuther Blätter, 1886, pages 47
ff., Hans von Wolzogen, Tristan and
Parsifal.
Footnote 2:
Cil li ont respondu, qui sorent lor nature:
"A l'entree d'yver encontre la froidure
Entrent toutes en terre et müent lor faiture,
Et qant estés revient et li biaus tans s'espure,
En guise de flors blanches vienent a lor droiture.
Celes qui dedens naissent s'ont des cors la figure
Et la flors de dehors si est lor vesteüre,
Et sont si bien taillies, chascune a sa mesure,
Que ja n'i avra force ne cisel ne costure,
Et chascuns vestemens tresq'a la terre dure.
Ainsi comme as puceles de cest bos vient a cure,
Ja ne vaudront au main icele creature
Q'eles n'aient au soir, ains que nuit soit oscure."
Et respont Alixandres: "Bone est lor teneüre;
Ainc mais a nule gent n'avint tele aventure."
[ Roman d'Alexandre, Paris version, Branch
III, lines 3530-3544]
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