PARSIFAL

Stage Dedication Festival Play (Bühnenweihfestspiel) in three acts, words and music by Richard Wagner. Produced Bayreuth, July 26, 1882. Save in concert form, the work was not given elsewhere until December 24, 1903, when it was produced at the Metropolitan Opera House at that time under the direction of He in rich Conried. At the Bayreuth performances there were alternating casts. Winckelmann was the Parsifal of the prem ière , Gudehus of the second performance, Jäger of the third. The alternating Kundrys were Materna, Marianne Brandt, and Malten; Gurnemanz Scaria and Siehr; Am fort as Reichmann; Klingsor , Hill and Fuchs. Hermann Levi conducted. In the New York cast Ternina was Kundry , Burgs taller Parsifal , Van Rooy Am fort as , Bla Gurnemanz , Goritz Klingsor , Journet Titurel , Mi Moran and Mi Braendle the first and second, Harden and Bayer the third and fourth Esquires , Bayer and Mühlmann two Knights of the Grail, Homer a Voice . Characters | Am fort as, son of Titurel, ruler of the Kingdom of the Grail | Baritone-Ba | | Titurel, former ruler | Ba | | Gurnemanz, a veteran Knight of the Grail | Ba | | Klingsor, a magician | Ba | | Parsifal | Tenor | | Kundry | Soprano | | First and Second Knights | Tenor and Ba | | Four Esquires | Sopranos and Tenors | | Six of Klingsor's Flower Maidens | Sopranos | Brotherhood of the Knights of the Grail; Youths and Boys; Flower Maidens (two choruses of sopranos and altos). Time —The Middle Ages. Place —Spain, near and in the Castle of the Holy Grail; in Klingsor's enchanted castle and in the garden of his castle. | Photographs of the First Performance of “Parsifal,” Bayreuth, 1882 | | The Grail-Bearer | | Photographs of the First Performance of “Parsifal,” Bayreuth, 1882 | | Winckelmann and Materna as Parsifal and Kundry | Scaria as Gurnemanz | "Parsifal" is a familiar name to those who have heard "Lohengrin." Lohengrin, it will be remembered, tells Elsa that he is Parsifal's son and one of the knights of the Holy Grail. The name is written Percival in "Lohengrin," as well as in Tennyson's "Idyls of the King." Now, however, Wagner returns to the quainter and more "Teutonic" form of spelling. "Parsifal" deals with an earlier period in the history of the Grail knighthood than "Lohengrin." But there is a resemblance between the Grail music in "Parsifal" and the "Lohengrin" music—a resemblance not in melody, nor even in outline, but merely in the purity and spirituality that breathes through both. Three legends supplied Wagner with the principal characters in this music-drama. They were "Percival le Galois; or Contes de Grail," by Chrétien de Troyes (1190); "Parsifal," by Wolfram von Eschenbach, and a manuscript of the fourteenth century called by scholars the "Mabinogion." As usual, Wagner has not held himself strictly to any one of these, but has combined them all, and revivified them through the alchemy of his own genius. Into the keeping of Titurel and his band of Christian knights has been given the Holy Grail, the ve el from which the Saviour drank when He instituted the Last Supper. Into their hands, too, has been placed, as a weapon of defence against the ungodly, the Sacred Spear, the arm with which the Roman soldier wounded the Saviour's side. The better to guard these sanctified relics Titurel , as King of the Grail knighthood, has reared a castle, Montsalvat, which, from its forest-clad height, facing Arabian Spain, forms a bulwark of Christen dom against the pagan world and especially against Klingsor , a sorcerer and an enemy of the good. Yet time and again this Klingsor , whose stronghold is nearby, has succeeded in enticing champions of the Grail into his magic garden, with its lure of flower-maidens and its arch-enchantre Kundry , a rarely beautiful woman, and in making them his servitors against their one-time brothers-in-arms. Even Am fort as , Titurel's son, to whom Titurel , grown old in service and honour, has confided his reign and wardship, has not escaped the thrall of Klingsor's sorcery. Eager to begin his reign by destroying Klingsor's power at one stroke, he penetrated into the garden to attack and slay him. But he failed to reckon with human frailty. Yielding to the snare so skilfully laid by the sorcerer and forgetting, at the feet of the enchantre , Kundry , the mi ion upon which he had sallied forth, he allowed the Sacred Spear to drop from his hand. It was seized by the evil-doer he had come to destroy, and he himself was grievously wounded with it before the knights who rushed to his rescue could bear him off. This wound no skill has sufficed to heal. It is sapping Am fort as's strength. Indecision, gloom, have come over the once valiant brotherhood. Only the touch of the Sacred Spear that made the wound will avail to close it, but there is only one who can regain it from Klingsor . For to Am fort as , prostrate in supplication for a sign, a mystic voice from the sanctuary of the Grail replied: | By pity guided, The guilele fool; Wait for him, My chosen tool. | This prophecy the knights construe to signify that their king's salvation can be wrought only by youth so "guile le ," so wholly ignorant of sin, that, instead of succumbing to the temptations of Klingsor's magic garden, he will become, through resisting them, cognizant of Am fort as's guilt, and, stirred by pity for him, make his redemption the mi ion of his life, regain the Spear and heal him with it. And so the Grail warders are waiting, waiting for the coming of the "guilele fool." The working out of this prophecy forms the absorbing subject of the story of "Parsifal." The plot is allegorical. Parsifal is the personification of Christianity, Klingsor of Paganism, and the triumph of Parsifal over Klingsor is the triumph of Christianity over Paganism. The character of Kundry is one of Wagner's most striking creations. She is a sort of female Ahasuerus—a wandering Jewe . In the Mabinogion manuscript she is no other than Herodias, condemned to wander for ever because she laughed at the head of John the Baptist. Here Wagner makes another change. According to him she is condemned for laughing in the face of the Saviour as he was bearing the cro . She seeks forgivene by serving the Grail knights as me enger on her swift horse, but ever and anon she is driven by the curse hanging over her back to Klingsor , who changes her to a beautiful woman and places her in his garden to lure the Knights of the Grail. She can be freed only by one who resists her temptations. Finally she is freed by Parsifal and is baptized. In her character of Grail me enger she has much in common with the wild me engers of Walhalla, the Valkyrs. Indeed, in the Edda Saga, her name appears in the first part of the compound Gundryggja, which denotes the office of the Valkyrs.