Speranza
Parsifal: Ich sah sie welken, die einst mir lachten:
ob heut' sie nach Erlösung schmachten?
(Parsifal act
three)
When Wagnerians refer
to the "Green Hill" they mean the hill in Bayreuth on which Wagner built his
Festival Theatre. Before Wagner settled in Bayreuth, however, he had lived on
another "Green Hill", in the Enge district of Zürich, where his patrons the
Wesendonks had built a villa overlooking the lake. It was on a spring morning in
1857, a few days after Richard and Minna Wagner had moved into a cottage close
to the Wesendonk villa, that Richard was inspired to make his first sketch for
his drama Parsifal.
While walking in the garden of the villa he was put into a
creative frame of mind by what he later described as a pleasant mood in nature.
In that same garden, a few weeks later, he would sit under the ancient linden
tree and think about the music he was writing at the time, the second act of
Siegfried. Later the same year Wagner would put this work aside to concentrate
on another drama, Tristan und Isolde which was still only music. It was in that
autumn on the first green hill that this revolutionary work took shape; we can
imagine Wagner thinking about it as he sat under the ancient linden tree
overlooking the lake, waiting for Mathilde.
Left: The cottage on the
first Green Hill, the "Asyl".
In that morning in the garden,
however, Wagner thought about spring.
He saw the flowers emerging from the soil
and the buds appearing on the linden trees. No doubt he thought about animals
emerging from hibernation, something that his mentor Schopenhauer had written
about. Sleep, wrote Schopenhauer, was very much like death. Awakening from
hibernation was a kind of reincarnation, a subject that Wagner had recently read
about in Burnouf's book about Buddhism. While this book was fresh in his mind,
Wagner's thoughts also went back to the Good Friday passage in a book that he
had read twelve years before and not looked at since, Wolfram's Parzival. It was
from these thoughts that Wagner developed the concept of his drama about
Parzival; returning to the cottage (which he would later call his Asyl, although
his first name for it was Wahnheim) he quickly sketched out an entire drama in
three acts.
Flowermaidens and Parsifal (ogg format, mono,
duration 5.5 minutes)
It is possible that
Wagner thought of the maidens as flowers from the very beginning.
It is also
possible that at first he did not think of presenting them as flowers but simply
as magic maidens conjured up by the sorcerer Klingsor (just as the dead nuns
were conjured up by Bertram in Meyerbeer's Robert le diable).
In the Munich
Prose Draft there is no suggestion that the maidens have been grown in the magic
garden: concealed in that castle are the most beautiful women in all the world
and of all times. They are held there under Klingsor's spell for the destruction
of men, especially the Knights of the Grail, endowed by him with all powers of
seduction. Men say that they are she- devils.
In the libretto (written twelve
years after that Prose Draft) Klingsor's maidens are variously referred to as
magic maidens and as flowers.
Their music seems to have grown out of musical
ideas that Wagner had first conceived for his Rhine daughters.
In both cases
these female creatures are seductive but essentially innocent (even if this is
not always made clear in modern productions).
Where the Rhine daughters are
natural, however, the flower maidens are unnatural, like everything that
originates in Klingsor's magic.
This does not prevent Parsifal, in the third
act, from expressing his compassion for them.
Right: The daughters of
Mára. © Museum Rietberg (formerly the Villa
Wesendonck).
Attention has been drawn (initially by Karl
Heckel in 1896) to the similarities between the second act of Parsifal and
traditional accounts of an episode in the life of the Buddha Shakyamuni.
In an
attempt to prevent the future Buddha from achieving enlightenment, the dark lord
Mára sent an army of demonic warriors against him. They were unable to harm the
future Buddha, or even to distract him from his meditations.
hen Mára sent to
the future Buddha his daughters, fearfully seductive demons in female shape.
They sang, danced and laughed but were unable to seduce the future Buddha. In
Wagner's version it is Klingsor the sorcerer who first sends his knights against
Parsifal, who overcomes them and enters the magic garden. There he is surrounded
by the magic maidens whom Klingsor has conjured out of flowers. Like the future
Buddha (who was protected by his virtue), the young hero (who is protected by
his innocence) is immune to the enticements of the
maidens.
Left: Flower Maiden costume by Paul von Joukowsky,
Bayreuth 1882. © Richard- Wagner- Gedenkstätte.
The flower maidens, or Klingsor's magic maidens, do not appear in any
of the Grail romances.
In Wolfram's poem we read of maidens kept captive in
Clinschor's castle, which is a variant of the Castle of Wonders in Chrétien's
story and the Castle of Maidens in several related stories.
It appears probable
that Wagner's main source for the magic maidens was the Roman d'Alexandre, a
French poem of the early 12th century¹.
Alexander enters a forest whose
entrance is guarded by genies.
Here he finds beautiful, welcoming maidens, each
at the foot of a tree.
They cannot leave the forest alive.
When Alexander asks
his guides about them, he is told that they go underground in the winter, but
with the return of warm weather, they spring up and blossom. They open as
flowers, in which the central bud becomes the girl's body and the leaves her
garment².
Right: Villa Ruffolo with Klingsor's tower.
The first
modern French version of the Roman d'Alexandre was published in Stuttgart in
1846.
In 1850, H. Weissman published an adaptation by Lamprecht of the 12th
century German version. It is known that Wagner was familiar with Lamprecht's
Alexanderlied, since in his autobiography (Mein Leben, page 390) he mentioned
that he had attempted to imitate its style.
It has also been suggested that
Wagner might have been inspired by a pantomime that he enjoyed at the Adelphi
Theatre in the Strand, during his visit to London at the end of 1855.
This
production, with the title The Christmas, was a pot-pourri of fairy tales.
Apparently in one scene the female chorus were dressed as flowers.
This may have
reminded Wagner of the maidens in the Roman d'Alexandre.
So the origins of the
flower maidens are diverse.
Their roots can be found in a medieval romance, a
Buddhist legend and a Christmas pantomime.
See Bayreuther Blätter, 1886, pages 47 ff., Hans von Wolzogen, Tristan and
Parsifal.
Cil li ont respondu, qui sorent lor nature:
"A l'entree d'yver encontre la froidure
Entrent toutes en terre et müent
lor faiture,
Et qant estés revient et li biaus tans s'espure,
En guise
de flors blanches vienent a lor droiture.
Celes qui dedens naissent s'ont
des cors la figure
Et la flors de dehors si est lor vesteüre,
Et sont si
bien taillies, chascune a sa mesure,
Que ja n'i avra force ne cisel ne
costure,
Et chascuns vestemens tresq'a la terre dure.
Ainsi comme as
puceles de cest bos vient a cure,
Ja ne vaudront au main icele creature
Q'eles n'aient au soir, ains que nuit soit oscure."
Et respont
Alixandres: "Bone est lor teneüre;
Ainc mais a nule gent n'avint tele
aventure."
[Roman d'Alexandre, Paris version, Branch III, lines
3530-3544]
Saturday, February 23, 2013
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