Speranza
At the end of the first act of
Wagner's Parsifal, the knight Gurnemanz notices that the young fool is still
standing in the hall.
It is obvious that he does not understand what he has seen
and heard there.
Dort hinaus, deine Wege zu!
Doch rät dir
Gurnemanz:
lass du hier künftig die Schwäne
in Ruh'
und suche dir,
Gänser, die Gans!
Off with you, be on your way!
Take advice from
Gurnemanz:
In future leave our swans in peace. Go seek -- you gander
-- for geese!
These words are ironical.
Gurnemanz sends the young
man, whom he thinks is nothing but a fool, on his way.
Gurnemanz does not
realise that he has changed the direction of the young fool's life, or that the
way that the fool will find, will in the end lead him both to wisdom and back to
Gurnemanz.
In the next act, the young gander will find a (metaphorical) flock of
geese.
The mention of geese is a subtle reference to Wagner's medieval
sources.
It is well-known that Wagner first encounteres the story about the
young fool who stumbles upon the Grail Castle in a poem by Wolfram von
Eschenbach.
Wolfram's primary source was an unfinished poem by Chrétien de
Troyes, Perceval or The Story of the Grail.
We have
described, in another article, Perceval's visit to the Grail Castle.
The young
lad awakes in the castle, now deserted.
He bangs on doors and shouts, but nobody
appears.
Then he goes out into the courtyard, and finds his horse saddled, his
lance and shield leaning against the wall.
As he rides out through the gate and
on to the drawbridge, it begins to rise.
Horse and rider jump to the bank, and
he looks back to see who raised the bridge.
Seeing nobody, he calls out, but
there is no reply.
Wolfram expands on the story:
A page who had remained
hidden pulled the cable so sharply that the end all but toppled [Parzival's]
horse into the moat.
Parzival looked back in hope
of learning more.
'Damn you,
wherever the sun lights on your path!'
shouted the page.
'You silly goose!'.
Wagner's scene also has a voice whose owner is unseen, but it is
heard by Gurnemanz and not by the young fool.
After Gurnemanz has pushed
Parsifal out of the door and slammed it shut behind him, he walks across the
stage and, as he does so, a voice is heard from up above.
Durch Mitleid wissend,
der reine Tor (Made wise through compassion, the pure fool); the words of the
prophecy, once delivered to Amfortas.
To which a heavenly choir adds, Selig im
Glauben! (Blessed in faith).
There is another episode in Wolfram's Parzival
that involves a goose, a real one this time.
But before we consider whether that
episode has any relevance to Wagner's Parsifal, we need to consider a different
bird.
The episode in Parsifal that has puzzled
commentators, is the shooting of the swan in the first act.
There is no direct
parallel in Wolfram, although it has been suggested by Lucy Beckett that two
passages in Parzival could have inspired this scene.
a) Firstly, in Wolfram's
account of Parzival's boyhood:
bogen unde bölzelîn
die sneit er mit sîn
selbes hant,
und schôz vil vogele die er vant.
Swenne abr er den vogel
erschôz,
des schal von sange ê was sô grôz,
sô weinder unde roufte
sich,
an sîn hâr kêrt er gerich.
bows and arrows he fashioned with
his own hands, and shot at the flocks of birds there. But when he had shot
a bird that had been singing loudly just before, he would burst into
tears and tear out his own hair.
Much later, in Parzival's wanderings, he comes across
a goose
that has been
wounded by King Arthur's falcon.
Three drops of blood fall on the snow.
The red
on white reminds Parzival of his distant wife, Condwiramurs.
In contemplation of
the blood on the snow, he falls into a trance.
Amfortas Bathing, oil
painting by Franz Stassen.
Here is the episode of the swan in
Wagner's Prose Draft:
While the King is bathing in the sacred lake, a wild
swan circles over his head.
Suddenly it falls, wounded by an arrow; shouts from
the lake.
General indignation, who dares kill an animal on this sacred spot?
The
swan flutters nearer and drops bleeding to the ground.
Parzival emerges from the
forest, bow in hand.
Gurnemans stops him.
Parsifal confesses to the deed.
To the violent reproaches of the old man he has no reply.
Gurnemans, reproaching
him with the wickedness of his act, reminds him of the sanctity of the forest
stirring so silently around him, asks whether he has not found all the creatures
tame, gentle and harmless.
What had the swan, seeking its mate, done to him?
Was
he not sorry for the poor bird that now lay, with bloodstained feathers, dying
at his feet?
Parzival, who has been standing riveted to the spot, bursts
into tears and stammers.
'I don't know!'.
The connection with the first of
the two passages in Wolfram seems to be much closer than the second, which does
not seem relevant.
Even so, there is quite a difference between Wolfram's brief
episode and the more complex scene at the lakeside.
Carl Suneson suggests
that two passages in Indian literature could have contributed to Wagner's
episode.
The first of these, a story about a dispute between the future Buddha
and his cousin Devadatta, about a goose that the cousin had shot down, is
related to Mathilde Wesendonk's poem about the wounded swan.
Suneson points out
that, in the 19th century, it was common for the word hamsa to be mistranslated
as swan (Schwan) rather than goose (Gans).
One possible source for Wagner was an
article in German, written in 1851 by Anton Schiefner, in which he had
translated from a Tibetan text of 1734 (the Sanskrit text not being available in
the west until half a century later).
Schiefner's articles on Buddhism were
among those recommended in the 1854 edition of Arthur Schopenhauer's Über den
Willen in der Natur.
A second possible, perhaps stronger, candidate for an
Indian inspiration, according to Suneson, is an incident in the epic Ramayana,
which Wagner was reading with great enthusiasm a few days before writing the
1865 Prose Draft.
Combined with the first passage in Wolfram, this is a credible
basis for what Wagner wrote in that draft.
Parsifal Act 1 in the 1989
Bayreuth production by Wolfgang Wagner. Parsifal: William Pell, Gurnemanz: Hans
Sotin. ©Bayreuther Festspiele.
Wagner's
abhorrence for any act of cruelty to an animal, and his sympathy for their dumb
suffering, was something that he discovered was shared by Arthur Schopenhauer
(as it was by his beloved Mathilde Wesendonk).
In Arthur Schopenhauer's ethics,
Wagner found a rational basis for his instinctive belief in the rights of
animals. Both men rejected the Christian attitude to animals, taken from the Old
Testament, that they had been given to man to use as he wished, as part of
nature entrusted to man's stewardship by the Creator God. Also the modern,
philosophical view introduced by Descartes, in which animals were only
machines.
The moral incentive advanced by me as the genuine, is further
confirmed by the fact that the animals are also taken under its protection. In
other European systems of morality they are badly provided for, which is most
inexcusable. They are said to have no rights, and there is the erroneous idea
that our behaviour to them is without moral significance, or, as it is said in
the language of that morality, there are no duties to animals. All this is
revoltingly crude, a barbarism of the West, the source of which is to be found
in Judaism.
In philosophy it rests, despite all evidence to the contrary, on the
assumed total difference between man and animal. We all know that such
difference was expressed most effectively and strikingly by Descartes, as a
necessary consequence of his errors... And so we must remind the Western,
Judaized despiser of animals and idolater of the faculty of reason that, just as
he was suckled by his mother, so was the dog by his. Even Kant fell into this
mistake of his contemporaries and countrymen; this I have already censured. The
morality of Christianity has no consideration for animals, a defect that is
better admitted than perpetuated. This is the more surprising since, in other
respects, that morality shows the closest agreement with that of Brahmanism and
Buddhism, being merely less strongly expressed, and not carried through to its
very end. Therefore we can scarcely doubt that, like the idea of a god become
man (avatar), the Christian morality originates from India and may have come to
Judaea by way of Egypt, so that Christianity would be a reflected splendour of
the primordial light of India from the ruins of Egypt; but unfortunately it fell
on Jewish soil.¹
[Arthur Schopenhauer, Über die Grundlage der Moral,
section 19, 1839.]
... modern research has succeeded in proving that pure,
uncontaminated Christianity is no more and no less than a branch of the
venerable Buddhist religion which, following Alexander's Indian campaign, found
its way to, among other places, the shores of the Mediterranean. In early
Christianity we can still see traces of a total denial of the will to live, and
a longing for the end of the world, i.e. the cessation of all life.
[Richard
Wagner to Franz Liszt on 7 June 1855, Liszt-Briefe II, 73-80, tr. Spencer and
Millington]
ere, in Arthur Schopenhauer's assertion that animals had rights,
and indeed rights equal to those of human beings, Wagner found a morality
consistent with his own instincts. He accepted Schopenhauer's argument that the
origins of Christianity were in the religions of India, which had reached Judaea
in the centuries before Christ; and that there the teaching that animals had
rights had been rejected, in favour of the Old Testament teaching in which
animals were objects with no more rights than those of rocks. In the western
world, as Wagner expressed it, the Pentateuch had won the day (An Open Letter to
Herr Ernst von Weber, PW VI, p 202). Wagner's concern for animals, together with
the advice of his doctors, eventually led him to become a sympathiser with, if
not actually a practitioner of, vegetarianism.
Once Wagner had been
seized by enthusiasm for the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer, an enthusiasm that
unusually for Wagner was long-lived, he not only sought out and read everything
that the philosopher had published, but also other books that he had
recommended. This included books on Buddhism, where Wagner read about the
Buddhist attitude to animals, including of course birds. Here again he
encountered something that Schopenhauer had mentioned, the idea of
reincarnation. The respect of the Buddhist for animals was a natural consequence
of the belief that he could be reborn as an animal and that the animal could be
reborn as a human, or even divine, being.
t is not difficult to find hints of
a belief in reincarnation in Wagner's later works, and expressed in his
writings. In 1858 Wagner wrote to Mathilde Wesendonk that he had come to believe
in reincarnation, although it is not clear which of the different doctrines he
had accepted. In his projected Buddhist drama Die Sieger (The Victors), the
Buddha Shakyamuni was to reveal that the Chandala girl Prakriti was atoning for
guilt in her previous lives; which is the way Gurnemanz describes Kundry in the
first act of Parsifal. When Parsifal arrives, he tells Gurnemanz that he has had
many names, but forgotten them all. This could be read as an awareness that he
has lived previous lives, of which the details have been forgotten.
n a book
about her friend Richard Wagner, written in 1882, Judith Gautier wrote about the
scene in which Siegfried rests under a Linden tree and listens to the Forest
Bird: l'oiseau lui parle, en effet; ne serait-ce pas là l'âme de sa mère?
(indeed, the bird speaks to him; would this not be the soul of his mother?)
Which is reminiscent of a letter that Wagner wrote to his own mother in
September 1846, in which he writes that he thinks of her during country walks,
listening to a dear forest bird.
In the poem of Der junge Siegfried, in fact,
there are lines that Wagner did not set to music in the drama that he later
called Siegfried.
In the scene to which Judith refers, young Siegfried hears the
bird and sings, Mich dünkt, meine mutter singt zu mir!
I think my mother is
singing to me.
This suggests that, as early as 1851 and therefore before
Wagner had encountered either Schopenhauer or Buddhism, he was thinking in terms
of a transmigration of souls, by which Sieglinde became a bird that watched over
and helped her son, Siegfried.
In Parsifal the bird is a swan, which also
provides a musical connection (see number 33 in the leitmotif catalogue) between
Parsifal and his son Lohengrin.
In 1860, in another letter to Mathilde
Wesendonk, Wagner had written about the relationships between characters in
Lohengrin, Parsifal and Die Sieger.
Only the deeply wise idea of the
transmigration of souls could show me the consoling point at which all creatures
will finally reach the same level of redemption.
Lohengrin might be a
reincarnation of his father Parsifal (an odd suggestion, since the text of the
Grail Narration in Lohengrin suggests that Parsifal is then still alive), while
the all-too-human Elsa could reach the karmic level of Lohengrin through a
series of rebirths.
Given this preoccupation with the idea of reincarnation, it
is tempting to speculate that Herzeleide, Parsifal's mother, might have been
reincarnated as the swan.
In Wieland Wagner's interpretation of "Parsifal", the
spiritual hero progressed from the realm of mother and matter, symbolised by the
swan, to the realm of father and spirit, symbolised by the dove.
In this
interpretation the incident with the swan can be seen as the starting point of
Parsifal's journey and the descending dove as the end of that journey.
In
Wieland's famous Bayreuth production (1951-1973), however, the dove was omitted.
Perhaps because this symbol suggests a parallel between Parsifal and Christ, one
that Richard Wagner repeatedly denied had been his intention.
Schopenhauer was not alone in seeing the possibility that Indian religious ideas
had diffused to Judea. Later Wagner would read the following: Perhaps some of
those wandering Buddhist monks who overran the world, as the first Franciscans
did in later times, preaching by their actions and converting people who knew
not their language, might have turned their steps towards Judea, as they
certainly did towards Syria and Babylon? On this point we have no certainty.
Babylon had become for some time a true focus of Buddhism. Boudasp (Bodhisattva)
was reputed a wise Chaldean and the founder of Sabeism. Sabeism was, as its
etymology indicates, baptism — that is to say the religion of many baptisms —
the origin of the sect still existing called Christians of St. John or
Mendaites, which the Arabs call el-Mogtasila, the Baptists. [Ernest Renan, The
Life of Jesus, 1863, pages 70-71.]
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment