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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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