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 n view of the speed with which
it was written this Prose Draft, dated 27-30 August
1865, cannot have been the first of Wagner's outlines
for Parsifal. There is evidence that an
earlier sketch was written
in 1857. In his autobiography Mein Leben, Wagner
describes the April (or it might have been early May)
morning in 1857 on which he was reminded of the
Good Friday passage in
Wolfram's Parzival:
 Ever since that stay in
Marienbad, where I had conceived Die
Meistersinger and Lohengrin, I had
not taken another look at that poem; now its
ideality came to me in overwhelming form, and from
the idea of Good Friday I
quickly sketched out an entire drama in three acts.
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 hat first sketch or scenario,
which H.S. Chamberlain claimed to have read,
has not survived. So the earliest outline known
is this one, a more detailed draft made by
Wagner at the request of King Ludwig. It
appears in the Brown Book
(left), the diary and notebook, given to him by
Cosima, that he used intermittently from 1865
until his death in 1883. The original has been
on display at Haus
Wahnfried in Bayreuth.
 ome names differ from
those that appear in the final poem and score.
At this stage in the development of the text,
Wagner was still, in most cases, using the
spellings that he had found in Wolfram. Thus, for example,
Anfortas had
not yet been changed to Amfortas. In
this draft, however, he uses the name Schmerzeleide
[Pain- sorrow] instead of Wolfram's Herzeloyde
[Hearts-sorrow] for Parzival's mother.
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We owe the resumption of the
work to king Ludwig: from 27 to 30 August 1865 the
Parzival-poem was written down in the earliest
version known today. The appearance of the young
king, who entered the circle of friends of Wagner's
Parzival [as the drama and its central character
were called at this stage], gave life and warmth to
the form of Wolfram's poem. Now there was a kind of
reconciliation between Amfortas-Tristan [who had
begun to dominate the developing scenario] and the
young prince, who moved into the center of the
action. Wagner was still in a state of shock
following the sudden death of his first Tristan,
Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, on 21 July 1865 in
Dresden. Work on Parzival gave Wagner release from
grim reality: that was help in need are the
words with which the Master concluded the draft of
Parzival. The contents of this draft match almost
exactly those of the finished drama, although it
begins with background details that were provided
for the benefit of the king. These would be
compressed in the drama.
["Parzival und der Grail", Wolfgang Golther,
1925]
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hose who know the
music-drama will notice that there are many
points in this draft that were removed, changed
or developed before the poem was completed.
Even in the copy that Wagner made for King Ludwig the day after
completing this draft, there were already some
changes and, probably while preparing the copy,
Wagner made some corrections to the original.
In particular, Wagner was uncertain about how
to deal with the bleeding spear, a mysterious element of
Wolfram's story that
would, in another form, become an important
element of Wagner's story. So although this
draft does not correspond in every detail to
Wagner's final concept, it represents the
outcome of his reflections on Wolfram's poem and other
medieval literature over the two preceding
decades.
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