Speranza
In the afternoon R[ichard] told me that he had been thinking about
the bloody lance in Parzival and had been led by it to the Greek mysteries.
[Cosima Wagner's diary entry for 29 October
1872]
Wgner was fascinated
by the Graeco-Roman classics.
In particular, he was interested in two aspects of the
ancient classical Graeco-Roman culture.
Firstly in the social and religious role of the classical Graeco-Roman
theatre.
Secondly in the myths that had provided the content of classical Graeco-Roman poetry
and drama.
Myths were, as Wagner expressed it in Oper und Drama, true for all
time.
It was the task of the poet to create art from the inexhaustible content
of myth.
In 1849 Wagner sketched his own drama on the subject of Achilles (WWV
81).
It was probably while reading about this hero of the Trojan War, that
Wagner encountered the story of Achilles and Telefo
Telefo, son of Heracles and Auge, was a king in Asia Minor.
After nearly making the same mistake as Edipo, of marrying his own mother,
Telefo marries a daughter of King Priam.
As an ally of the Trojans, Telefo's
kingdom was attacked by the Achaeans.
In the fighting, Telefo
is wounded in the thigh by the spear of Achilles.
After the Greeks had
withdrawn, Telefo's wound would not heal.
The Greeks had no leader who could
show them the way to Troy.
But Telefo, because his wound was unhealed, and
the oracle of Apollo had told him that he would be cured when the one who
wounded him should turn physician, came from Mysia to Argos, clad in rags, and
begged the help of Achilles, promising to show the course to steer for Troy.
So
Achilles healed him by scraping off the rust of his Pelian spear.
Accordingly,
on being healed, Telefo showed the course to steer, and the accuracy of his
information was confirmed by Calchas by means of his own art of
divination.
[Apollodorus, tr. Sir James George Frazer]
Frazer notes that
the spear was the famous one which Chiron the Centaur had bestowed on Peleus,
the father of Achilles.
The shaft was cut from an ash-tree on Mount Pelion, and
none of the Greeks at Troy, except Achilles, could wield it.
The healing of
Telefo's wound by Achilles was the subject of a play by Sophocles, called
"The
Assembly of the Achaeans", and one by Euripides called "Telefo".
Aristophanes
ridiculed the rags and tatters in which Telefo appeared on the stage in
Euripides's play.
The cure of a wound by an application to it of rust from the
weapon which inflicted the hurt is not to be explained, as Plinio supposed, by
any medicinal property inherent in rust as such, else the rust from any weapon
would serve the purpose.
It is clearly a folklore remedy based on the principle
of sympathetic magic.
It is almost certainly the myth of Telefo
to which Goethe refers in his poem Torquato Tasso:
The poet tells us of a
spear which yet Might cure the wound that it itself had dealt If friendly hand
were but to place it there.
The Spear that Heals
This myth
provided an important element in Wagner's Parsifal.
When reading the medieval
Grail romances, in which a number of different spears appeared, it would seem
that Wagner recalled the wound of Telefo.
He might even have seen the
reference to a spear that relieved the pain of Anfortas, although it did not
heal him, in Wolfram's Parzival, as a remnant of the almost forgotten myth.
By
the time he wrote his Prose Draft in August 1865, Wagner had decided to make the
spear that caused the wound into the instrument with which the enlightened fool
would heal the wound. '
He was still uncertain, however, about how to deal with
the magic weapon.
Had it been given to Titurel at the same time as the Grail, or
had Klingsor found it for himself?
2 Sept.
What to do about the bloodstained
lance?
The poem says the lance is supposed to have been produced at the same
time as the Grail, and clinging to the tip was a drop of blood.
Anyway, this
is the one which has caused Anfortas' wound.
But how does this hang together?
Great confusion here.
As a relic, the lance goes with the Grail.
In this is
preserved the blood that the lance made to flow from the Saviour's thigh.
The
two are complementary. -- So, either this:
The lance has been entrusted
to the knights at the same time as the Grail.
When trouble presses hard it is
even borne into battle by the Keeper of the Grail.
Anfortas, in order to break
Klingsor's magic, which is so fatal to the knights, has taken it from the altar
and set off with it against the arch-foe. Succumbing to seduction, he let shield
and spear fall, the sacred weapon was stolen from him and used to wound him as
he turned to flee. (Perhaps Klingsor is anxious to have Anfortas in his power
alive, he commands the lance to be used against him, knowing that it wounds but
does not kill. Why?) The healing and deliverance of Anfortas is now logically
only possible if the lance is rescued from impious hands and reunited with the
Grail.
Or this:
On being entrusted with the Grail, the knights
were also promised the lance: only it must first be won by hard fighting. Were
it one day to be united with the Grail, then nothing again could assail the
knights. Klingsor has found this lance and is keeping it, partly because of its
powerful magic -- it is capable of wounding even the godliest of men if any
fault attach to him -- and partly to withhold it from the community of the
Grail, who by winning it would become invincible. Anfortas has now gone forth to
deprive Klingsor of this lance: seduced by love, he is wounded by Klingsor's
hurling the lance at him. -- The continuation now remains the same: it must come
into the knights' possession. -- Klingsor hurls the spear at Parzival; he
catches it; he knows about it, knows its power, its significance.
[Diary
entry in the Brown Book, following the 1865 Prose
Draft]
Prometheus - the Redeemer Unbound
The Theft of
Fire, by Christian Griepenkerl. Prometheus steals fire from
Zeus.
On 28 February 1877, Richard gave Cosima to read the
second Prose Draft of Parsifal, which he had just completed.
She recorded her
reactions in her diary: This is bliss, this is solace, this is sublimity and
devotion! -- The Redeemer unbound!
Prometeo, like Amfortas and Telefo, had
a wound that would not heal.
As punishment for Prometheus giving fire to man,
Zeus had him chained up in the Caucasian mountains.
Every day, an eagle came to
Prometheus and bit him in the liver, which grew again every night. In his
Prometheus trilogy, of which only Prometheus Bound has survived, Aeschylus
developed him into the creator and saviour of mankind. Although he gave them
fire, Prometheus took away their knowledge of the future. In the next part of
the trilogy, Prometheus Unbound, Zeus allowed Prometheus to be freed. Heracles
shot the eagle and freed the titan from his chains.
R[ichard] says to me,
"Prometheus' words, 'I took knowledge away from Man' came to my mind and gave me
a profound insight; knowledge, seeing ahead, is in fact a divine attribute, and
man with this divine attribute is a piteous object, he is like Brahma before the
Maya spread before him the veil of ignorance, of deception; the divine privilege
is the saddest thing of all."
[Cosima Wagner's diary entry for 29 November
1871]
Right: Prometheus and the Eagle, by
Rubens.
Prometheus, unbound, appeared on the title page of the first
edition of Friedrich Nietzsche's first book.
The ideas presented in that book,
The Birth of Tragedy, were either ideas that originated with Wagner, or which
Nietzsche developed during and after conversations with Wagner.
Nietzsche
contrasted the myth of Prometeo with the Biblical myth of the Fall.
Prometheus, a male character, committed sacrilege by stealing from divine
nature.
His was an active sin. Eve, a female character, allowed herself to be
deceived.
Hers was a passive sin.
To Nietzsche's observations might be added,
that through Eve's fault mankind gained the knowledge of good and evil, whereas
through Prometheus' actions mankind lost the knowledge of the future.
In
Wagner's letter to King Ludwig of 7 September 1865, he suggests (but with
considerable caution) that Adam-Eve-Christ might be compared to Amfortas-Kundry-
Parsifal.
The analogy is certainly not an exact one. It seems that Amfortas' sin
was an active sin, like that of Prometheus, and he too was punished with an
unhealing wound. Kundry is not tempted, as was Eve, but rather she is a
temptress. The common theme is knowledge. One day there arrives a young man
whose distinguishing characteristic is his lack of knowledge. Parsifal lacks
even the knowledge of good and evil; perhaps he represents pre-fallen,
paradisiacal human, still in a state of dreaming innocence?
Saturday, February 23, 2013
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