Wagner on Parsifal
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I am also clear in my own mind why I can even feel greater fellow-suffering for lower
natures than for higher ones. A higher nature is what it is precisely because it has
been raised by its own suffering to the heights of resignation, or else has within it
- and cultivates -- the capacity for such a development. Such a nature is extremely
close to mine, is indeed similar to it, and with it I attain to fellow-joy. That is
why, basically, I feel less fellow-suffering for people than for animals. For I can
see that the latter are totally denied the capacity to rise above suffering, and to
achieve a state of resignation and deep, divine calm. And so, in the event of their
suffering, as happens when they are tormented, all I see - with a sense of my own
tormented despair - is their absolute, redemption-less
suffering without any higher purpose, their only release being death, which confirms
my belief that it would have been better for them never to have entered upon
life¹. And so, if this suffering can have a purpose, it is simply
to awaken a sense of fellow-suffering in man, who thereby absorbs the animal's
defective existence, and becomes the redeemer of the world by recognising the error
of all existence. (This meaning will one day become clearer to you from the Good Friday morning scene in the third act of
Parzival.)
 ooked at closely, it is Anfortas who is the centre of attention and principal subject. Of
course, it is not at all a bad story. Consider, in heaven's name, all that goes on
there! It suddenly became dreadfully clear to me: it is my third-act Tristan
inconceivably intensified. With the spear-wound and perhaps another wound too, -
in his heart -, the wretched man knows of no other longing in his terrible pain than
the longing to die; in order to obtain this supreme solace, he demands repeatedly to
be allowed a glimpse of the Grail in the hope that it might
at least close his wounds, for everything else is useless, nothing - nothing can help
him: - but the Grail can give him one thing only, which is
precisely that he cannot die; its very sight increases his torments by
conferring immortality upon them...
et
someone do it who will carry it through à la Wolfram; it
will then cause little offence, and in the end may perhaps sound like something,
maybe even something quite pretty. But I take such things far too seriously.
Yet just look at the extent to which Master Wolfram has
made light of it, by contrast! That he has understood absolutely nothing of the
actual content is of no great matter. He tacks one event on to the next, one
adventure to another, links together the Grail motif with all
manner of strange and curious episodes and images, gropes around and leaves any
serious reader wondering what his intention can have been? To which he is bound to
reply that he himself in fact knows no more about what he is doing than the priest
understands the Christianity that he serves up at the altar without knowing what is
involved.-
 hat's how it is. Wolfram is a thoroughly immature
phenomenon, although it must be said that his barbaric and utterly confused age is
largely to blame for this, fluctuating as it did between early Christianity and a
more modern political economy. Nothing could ever come to fruition at such a period;
poetic profundity was immediately submerged in insubstantial caprice. I almost agree
with Frederick the Great who, on being presented with a copy of Wolfram, told the publisher not to bother him with such
stuff!
Left: Henri Fantin-Latour: "Parsifal et les filles-fleurs", from
L'Illustration, 29 April 1893.
 onsider only this one point that, of all the interpretations to which the
Grail has been subjected in the various legends, this
superficial deep thinker should have chosen the most meaningless of all.
That this miraculous object should be a precious stone is a feature which,
admittedly, can be traced back to the earliest source, namely, the Arabic texts of
the Spanish Moors. One notices, unfortunately that all our Christian legends have a
foreign, pagan origin. As they gazed on in amazement, the
early Christians learned, namely, that the Moors in the Caaba at Mecca (deriving from
the pre-Muhammadan religion) venerated a miraculous stone (a sunstone - or meteoric
stone - but at all events one that had fallen from heaven). However, the legends of
its miraculous power were soon interpreted by the Christians after their own fashion,
by their associating the sacred object with Christian myth, a process which, in turn,
was made easier by the fact that an old legend existed in southern
France telling how Joseph of Arimathea had
once fled there with the sacred chalice that had been used at the Last Supper, a
version entirely consonant with the early Christian Church's enthusiasm for relics.
Only now did sense and reason enter into it, and I feel a very real admiration and
sense of rapture at this splendid feature of Christian mythogenesis, which invented
the most profound symbol that could ever have been invented as the content of the
physical-spiritual kernel of any religion. Who does not shudder with a sense of the
most touching and sublime emotion to hear that this same goblet, from which the
Saviour drank a last farewell to His disciples and in which the Redeemer's
indestructible blood was caught and preserved,
still exists, and that he who is pure in heart is destined to behold it and worship
it himself. Incomparable!...
had to make a completely fresh start with Parzival! For Wolfram hadn't the faintest
idea of what he was doing: his [i.e. Parzival's] despair in God is stupid and unmotivated, and his
conversion is even more unsatisfactory. The thing about the Question is that it is so utterly preposterous and
totally meaningless. I should simply have to invent everything here. And then there
is a further difficulty with Parzival. He is indispensably necessary as the redeemer whom Anfortas longs for: but if Anfortas is to be placed in his true and
appropriate light, he will become of such immense tragic interest that it will be
almost impossible to introduce a second focus of attention, and yet this focus of
attention must centre upon Parzival
if the latter is not simply to enter at the end as a deus ex machina who leaves us
completely cold. Thus Parzival's
development and the profound sublimity of his purification, although entirely
predestined by his thoughtful and deeply compassionate nature, must again be brought
into the foreground. But I cannot choose to work on such a broad scale as Wolfram was able to do: I have to compress everything into
three climactic situations of violent intensity, so that the work's profound
and ramified content emerges clearly and distinctly; for my art consists in
working and representing things in this way.
Diary entry for 17 June 1881
letter from a man in Duisburg, wanting to link a study of Parsifal to a
study of Wolfram's Parzival, irritates R. He says, I could just as
well have been influenced by my nurse's bedtime story.
Footnote 1: Wagner's belief stated here is,
characteristically, one that he had received from Arthur Schopenhauer, whose
pessimistic philosophy taught that it was better never to have been born at all. In
his most famous book, The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer
cited a number of precedents for this view, including the following:
 For in the end time proclaims the
judgement of nature on the worth of all beings that appear in it, since it
destroys them:
And justly so: for all things, from the void
called forth, deserve to be destroyed:
'twere better, then, were naught created.
[Goethe, Faust]
In Oedipus at Colonus
Sophocles has the following abbreviation of [some lines by Theognis]:
Μη ϕυναι τον 'άπαντα
νικα λόγον · το δ'επει ϕανη,
βηναι κειθεν, 'όθεν περ 'ήκει,
πολυ δεύτερον, 'ως τάχιστα.
(Never to be born is far best;
yet if a man lives,
the next best thing is for him to return
as quickly as possible
to the place from which he came).
Count o'er the joys thine hours
have seen,
count o'er thy days from anguish free,
and know, whatever thou hast been,
'tis something better not to be.
[Byron, Euthanasia]
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Above: The philosopher: Arthur Schopenhauer, in a portrait of ca. 1850.
The World as Will and Representation, tr. E.F.J. Payne, volume 2,
chapter 46.
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