Speranza
O
wunden-wundervoller heiliger Speer!
Ich sah dich schwingen von umheiligster
Hand!
O wounding, wondrous holy Spear!
I saw you wielded by
unhallowed hand!
The mysteriously bleeding lance appeared in Wagner's medieval
sources. It appears not only in the romances of Chrétien and Wolfram but also in
other versions of the Grail story.
A variant of the story that might have either
inspired or been inspired by Chrétien was preserved in the Welsh Mabinogion and
later appeared, in French translation, in the Comte de Villemarque's collection
Contes populaires des anciens Bretons.
This story has the title, Peredur son of
Evrawc.
In Perceval, a single drop of blood is seen to fall from the lance, as
it is carried in the Grail procession, and runs down the hand of the bearer.
In
Parzival this becomes a stream of blood.
In Peredur there are THREE streams of
blood.
In the Prose Perceval there are three drops of blood that fall from the
lance.
In none of these romances does the blood fall into a vessel, as Wagner
describes it doing when the relics are united at the end of the opera.
In the
Perlesvaus, however, Gawain sees the blood running into the Grail, which he sees
as a chalice (although in this poem the Grail appears in several different
forms).
The account of events at the Grail Castle in Peredur is
recognisably another version of the visit described in Chrétien's unfinished
romance; which contributed to Wolfram's tale of Parzival.
The relationships
between
Perceval (and its so-called Continuations),
Peredur,
Parzival,
Perlesvaus
and other romances has been discussed at length by Jessie L. Weston
and others.
These medieval poems and
other sources were used by Richard Wagner to make a new synthesis, in which
(eventually) the hero was renamed as Parsifal.
Unlike the medieval questers
Wagner's hero first has to recover the spear (although he does not know the
nature of this mission, or even that he has one, until he experiences Kundry's
kiss) and then to return it to Monsalvat; so that it can be used to heal
Amfortas, after which it is reunited with the Grail.
By doing so, Parsifal
achieves the twofold resolution of the drama.
Amfortas is healed and relieved of
his duties and the mystic union of the two relics enables the regeneration of
the community.
Above right: the healing of the fisher king.
Left: a
holy lance was discovered in Antioch cathedral during the First
Crusade.
This new synthesis was not arrived at
overnight.
Between Wagner's first encounter with Wolfram's poem in 1845 and the
completion of his own poem, there elapsed three decades.
According to his
autobiography Mein Leben the inspiration for Parsifal arrived on Good Friday¹ in
1857, when Wagner made a sketch or scenario that has been lost. At this stage it
is unlikely that either the Grail or the spear (as I have discussed elsewhere)
played an important role in the story. At the end of August 1865 Wagner
developed his scenario into a detailed Prose Draft. It is clear that Wagner
struggled with the incorporation of the spear. As with the Grail, there were
alternatives to choose between, or to combine from, different traditions. There
was the bleeding spear of the Celtic legends; also the spear of Longinus which
had pierced the side of the Saviour on the Cross and the spear of Achilles that
had both wounded and healed Telephus.
Right: the Spear of Destiny,
to be seen in the Hofberg museum in Vienna. This is one of several spearheads
that have been claimed as the spear of Longinus.
the pagan Grail had
been made into a Christian symbol by medieval writers, Wagner realised that he
could make the pagan, bleeding spear into a Christian symbol, drawing a parallel
between the wound suffered by Christ and the wound of Anfortas.
This
identification also led Wagner to think about the pure blood of Christ and the
impure blood of Anfortas (later Amfortas).
At least some of these ideas occurred
to Wagner while he was working on his first Prose Draft; where however there is
no suggestion that the spear that belongs with the Grail is the same spear that
pierced the side of Christ. But a couple of days later, Wagner noted in his
diary: As a relic, the spear goes with the cup; in this is preserved the blood
that the spear made to flow from the Redeemer's thigh. The two are
complementary.
Wagner considered two alternatives.
In the first, the spear is
carried by Anfortas in his ill-fated assault on Klingsor, and won from him.
In
the second, the Grail Knights had not yet gained the spear; Klingsor had found
it first. In either case it is a holy relic that belongs with the Grail, and
which is used by Klingsor to wound Anfortas (or so it seems, at least; we are
not told explicitly that Klingsor struck the blow). As we know, it was the first
of these alternatives that Wagner chose, at some time between 1865 and 1877. The
recovery of the spear became an important element of the story, replacing the
Question motif of the medieval romances and linking together all three acts of
Wagner's drama. Finally (perhaps as late as February 1877) Wagner made the
identification of the spear wielded by Klingsor with the magic weapon of Mára
and his story was complete.
Titurel the pious hero, Ivar Andrésen,
bass; Orchestra of the Berlin Staatsoper, conducted by Leo Blech, recorded in
1927. Ogg format, mono, duration 4 min.)
Left: The Holy Spear of
Antioch carried by bishop Adhemar of Le Puy into battle against the
Saracens.
It should be noted that Wagner deviates from his
medieval sources by deliberately locating the wound in the SIDE of Amfortas, not
(as in Wolfram's Parzival) in the GENITALS.
Clearly he made this change in order
to emphasise the similarity between the two wounds made by the same spear.
This
choice does not suit Marc Weiner (whose Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic
Imagination is even more confused about Parsifal than it is about some of
Wagner's earlier works).
Amfortas suffers from a wound in the body
that, in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzifal, the literary source for the
music drama, is explicitly portrayed as a wound to THE LOINS.
Maybe in Wolfram
but not in Wagner.
This does not prevent Weiner, who never lets the facts (or
the libretto) get in the way of his theories, from regarding Amfortas' wound as SEXUAL in nature.
He also accepts without question the interpretation of Robert
Gutman, in which Amfortas' blood became sinful through SEXUAL contact with
Kundry, whom Gutman believed was a depiction of someone racially inferior.
Weiner adds, Wagner's works time and again return to the image of a pure race
threatened by pollution from breeding with a genetically inferior foreigner.
Like Lohengrin, perhaps, son of Parzival?
Or the flying Dutchman?
It is
unfortunate that half-baked ideas like these have come to dominate the academic
domain of so-called Wagner scholarship.
There has been much speculation about the symbolism of the spear (as
there has been about that other relic, the Grail) in Wagner's drama. For Klaus
Stichweh (Wissendes Mitleid, in the Bayreuth Festival programme for 1977) the
spear symbolises (only) the sin of Amfortas; this overlooks Wagner's explicit
connection of the spear with the suffering of Christ. For Carl Dahlhaus (in
Richard Wagner's Music Dramas) the spear was to be interpreted as a symbol of
compassion, "the reversal of the will" as Schopenhauer understood it. It might
be objected that these interpretations are unsatisfactory because they fail to
account for the dual nature of the spear.
Like the spear of Achilles in the
Greek myth of Telefo the holy spear is able both to wound (even to destroy)
and to heal the wound that it made. The intention of the person who wields the
spear would seem to be important here.
The question naturally arises of
whether the spear is an active or passive element.
In particular, at the end of
the second act. Does the destruction of Klingsor's domain (that of
world-spanning illusion, Weltenwahn) result from Klingsor's use of the spear in
an attempt to destroy Parsifal, rather than from an action of his intended
victim? If so, why then did the relic not destroy Klingsor when he used it to
wound Amfortas? Was that wound caused, not by Klingsor, but by the spear itself
when Amfortas tried to use it as a weapon? If so, it is consistent that another
attack with the spear backfires on Klingsor. Wagner's stage directions suggest
that Parsifal, in another flash of insight, realises the power of the spear and
it is by his action (in making the sign of the Cross) that Klingsor's domain
(and not just the sorcerer himself) is destroyed.
lrike Kienzle (in her book
Das Weltüberwindungswerk) identifies the spear with Schopenhauer's concept of
"eternal justice" (der ewigen Gerechtigkeit). It is as an instrument of eternal
justice that the spear wounds Amfortas when he tries to use it as a weapon,
rather than guarding it as a relic. In Schopenhauerian terms, his attempt to
injure another, while deluded by the veil of Maya, results only in an increase
in his own suffering. The aggressor bites only his own flesh; tormentor and
tormented are one. When Klingsor becomes the aggressor, in this interpretation,
then his aggression turns back on himself. As a result then, for Parsifal at
least, the veil of Maya (the Weltenwahn of the Upanishads) is rent from top to
bottom.
As noted above, Wagner wrote
that the Grail and the spear were "complementary". Not only in Parsifal but in
other treatments of the legend, it was suggested by J.L. Weston, these relics
are sexual symbols.
She argued that the spear was a masculine element and the
cup was a feminine element.
Sometimes, of course, a cigar is just a cigar, but
in the case of Parsifal there does seem to be a sexual sub-text (although
whether it is the sexual sub-text proposed by Marc Weiner is less certain).
At
one level we see a community that is exclusively male and which, until the final
scene in which an exception is made for Kundry, excludes women from its holy
place, the Grail Temple.
This parallels the situation of Prakriti in Die Sieger
who is finally admitted into the monastic community by the Buddha, the
Victoriously Perfect, whose compassion for the Chandala girl opens the gate to
the final stage of his enlightenment.
These subtexts come together in the
final scene of Parsifal when the spiritual hero, whose compassion for the
penitent Kundry has opened the gate to the final stage of his enlightenment,
brings together the Grail and the spear. Shortly before he died Richard Wagner
told Cosima that he did not need to write Die Sieger (it was now too late, in
any case) because in Parsifal he had expressed his idea of community. This has
led some to suggest that Parsifal is fundamentally misogynistic. Yet, in the
last paragraph that Wagner wrote, he returned to the subject of the Buddha's
admission of women into his community and called it a beautiful feature of the
legend. So perhaps, just as Prakriti was the first of many sisters to become a
Buddhist nun, so is Kundry the first of many women who will be called to the
service of the Grail, thus bringing a healthy balance to Monsalvat.
A second
meaning that can be assigned to the reunification of the two relics and symbols
relates to Wagner's aesthetic theories. The spear can be interpreted as the
masculine element of poetry and the Grail as the feminine element of music. The
blood that (in the final text although not in the 1865 draft) flows from the tip
of the spear and falls into the cup represents the insemination of music by
poetry in order to create the artwork. This metaphor was employed by Wagner in
his treatise Opera and Drama of 1851:
... that in which understanding is
akin to feeling is the purely human, that which constitutes the essence of the
human species as such. In this purely human are nurtured both the manly and the
womanly, which become the human being for the first time when united through
love. The necessary impetus of the poetic understanding in writing poetry is
therefore love, -- and specifically the love of man for woman; yet not the
frivolous, carnal love in which man only seeks to satisfy his appetite, but the
deep yearning to know himself redeemed from his egoism through his sharing in
the rapture of the loving woman; and this yearning is the creative moment of
understanding. The necessary donation, the poetic seed that only in the most
ardent transports of love can be produced by his noblest forces -- this
procreative seed is the poetic intent (die dichterische Absicht) which brings to
the glorious, loving woman, music, the matter that she must bear.
his
metaphor can be found in several of Wagner's works. In the conclusion of
Parsifal it can be considered as one of the meanings that are carried by the
reunion of the two relics. Wagner's last music-drama is not only about sex,
however, nor is it only about the union of poetry and music in the artwork. It
is also, or so many commentators have claimed, about religion. On the religious
or spiritual plane the central theme of the drama is Parsifal's progress towards
total enlightenment. The reunion of the two holy relics after one of them is
returned to the desecrated sanctuary by Parsifal can be seen as a metaphor for
this final enlightenment, in the following way.
Wagner was interested in Buddhism. One of the three major branches of
Buddhism and the last of the three to emerge is the form with highly developed
rituals, which is known both as Tantráyána and Vajráyána². The second of these
names indicates the importance of a ritual object called (in Sanskrit) a vajra.
In Tibet, where this became the dominant form of Buddhism, it is called rdo rje.
It is a sceptre with five closed prongs at each end. In Buddhist legend, the
origin of the sceptre was the thunderbolt wielded by the Vedic god Indra (which
parallels the weapon of the thunder-god in other pantheons, such as Thor,
Wagner's Donner). The legend tells of how the Buddha took a thunderbolt from
Indra (presumably a metal statue) and bent the prongs until they were closed.
The sceptre is symmetric and the two ends respectively symbolise the virtues of
wisdom and compassion (which are prominent in Vajráyána as they were in Maháyána
Buddhism, from which Vajráyána developed). Thus the sceptre, in isolation,
symbolises the indissoluble union of wisdom and compassion. In its entirety it
symbolises the active, masculine aspect of enlightenment often equated with
skillful means, great compassion, or bliss. The complement to the ritual sceptre
is the bell (ghanta in Sanskrit, dril bu in Tibetan), which is regarded as a
feminine symbol and which represents the perfection of wisdom. In Buddhist
Tantric rituals the masculine sceptre and the feminine bell are used together.
The sceptre is associated with the right side of the body and it is held in the
right hand. The bell is associated with the left side of the body and it is held
in the left hand. When united these ritual objects symbolise enlightenment;
which might be another meaning of the ritual objects that are brought together
in the temple at Monsalvat.
The bell stands for transcendental wisdom,
prajña [in Sanskrit], which sees the true nature of all phenomena. That this
nature is no-nature -- an open dimension, ungraspable, and devoid of any fixed,
inherent existence -- is symbolised by the empty space enclosed by the bell...
The vajra stands for compassion, which is expressed as skilful means (Sanskrit,
upaya). This is the activity of wisdom. Seeing that living beings suffer
unnecessarily because of their deluded perceptions of life, and recognising that
those 'living beings' are not ultimately separate from himself or herself, the
Bodhisattva³ endowed with transcendental wisdom is impelled to act to help the
suffering world. The Bodhisattva does this by practising the perfections. Thus
the vajra stands for the practice of generosity, ethics, patience, effort and
meditation; the bell represents the wisdom with which these first five
perfections are imbued.
Vessantara, The Vajra and the Bell, 2001, page 36
Although, as Wagner later admitted, it was not on Good
Friday that his inspiration arrived; but a spring morning soon after Richard and
Minna moved into the Asyl, the cottage beside the Wesendonck Villa, on 28 April
1857. It was only the stillness of the Asyl garden which felt in his memory like
a Good Friday, it had not been Good Friday in fact. [Cosima's Diaries, entry for
13 January 1878.]
We know of at least one source in which
Wagner read about this branch of Buddhism, as it was practised in Tibet and
Mongolia. In October 1858 he read Die Religion des Buddha und ihre Entstehung by
Carl Friedrich Koeppen. The book can be seen in Wagner's library at Haus
Wahnfried.
The title Bodhisattva means literally "one whose
body is bodhi", where the Buddhist term bodhi can be translated either as
enlightenment or awakening. (Burnouf explained Bodhisattva as follows: celui qui
possède l'essence de la bodhi. Koeppen gave the definition: Derjenige, dessen
Wesenheit die höchste Weisheit (bodhi) geworden.) A Bodhisattva is one who
follows the path of enlightenment (from life to life and from world to world)
that passes through ten stages of progressive awakening. In the final stages the
Bodhisattva is in the world, where he chooses to remain for the sake of all
sentient beings, but no longer of the world. On passing beyond the tenth stage
the Bodhisattva becomes a Buddha.
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