Notes on Act 1
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 thread that may be
followed from the Celtic story of Peredur to Wagner's story of
Parsifal, is the revelatory encounter between the young
boy and a female relative. In the story of Peredur, they meet immediately
after the boy leaves the Grail
Castle.
 olfram fragments this encounter. He
gives this cousin the name, Sigune, and she also appears in his
misleadingly-named poem, Titurel. Parzival meets her before he
arrives at the Grail
Castle, as well as after. She reveals to him his
true name. 'Upon my word, you are Parzival!' said she of the
red lips. 'Your name means,
pierce-through-the-heart.' In Wolfram's poem, the news about
Herzeloyde's death
is not revealed until the Good Friday meeting with
the hermit, and it is he and not the cousin who
breaks the news to Parzival.
 his is one of many
points on which Wagner seems to have had some direct
or indirect knowledge of Chrétien or other sources, since he does not follow
Wolfram at all. The fate of
Herzeleide is
revealed to Parsifal
in the forest before he is admitted to the Grail Castle, not by Sigune but by Kundry, and it is also the
latter who calls him by his true name, on her second
entry in Act 2.
he literary motif of
a hero who does not know his own name -- suggesting
that he has not yet discovered who he is -- is one
that is found not only in the Grail romances but also
in a group of stories (or variants of the same story)
about The Fair Unknown.
Left: Wagner's sketch for the knights'
headdress.
 t is clear both from
Wagner's libretto and this
Prose Draft, that the
community of knights had been actively opposing evil
from the foundation of the brotherhood by Titurel until its recent
defeats by Klingsor.
In particular, the loss of the spear and wounding of Amfortas, which have left
the knights without effective leadership. As Gurnemanz relates, they now
waste their time in fruitless adventures or in
dreaming of the recovery of the spear. They have turned inwards. The
hollow banality of their ceremonial song suggests
that the community is divided and decadent. It is
possible that Wagner intended this as a metaphor for
the state of the German Volk, awaiting a revival of
the German spirit.
t is sometimes
claimed that Wolfram
described the Grail knights as Templars . This
is incorrect. The word that he used was
Templeisen , which might be rendered into
English as Templists , or something similar. As
in Wagner's version of the story, the knights serve
the Grail and therefore also the Grail Temple. Nor
did Wagner state that his knights were Templars, only
that their costumes resembled the dress of knights
belonging to the Order of Templars.
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