[...] Çakyamuni was initially totally opposed to the idea of admitting women into the community of saints. He repeatedly expresses the view of them that, by nature, women are far too subject to their sexual identity, and hence to whim and caprice, and far too attached to worldly existence to be able to achieve the composure and deep contemplativeness necessary for the individual to renounce his natural inclinations and achieve redemption. It was his favourite pupil, Ananda, - that same Ananda to whom I have already allotted a part in my “Victors” - who was finally able to persuade the master to relent and open up the community to women. - With this I gained something uncommonly important. Without any sense of unnaturalness, my plan has been vastly and hugely expanded. The difficulty here was to make the Buddha himself - a figure totally liberated and above all passion - suitable for dramatic and, more especially, musical treatment. But I have now solved the problem by having him reach one last remaining stage in his development whereby he is seen to acquire a new insight, which - like every insight - is conveyed not by abstract associations of ideas but by intuitive emotional experience, in other words, by a process of shock and agitation suffered by his inner self; as a result, this insight reveals him in his final progress towards a state of supreme enlightenment. Ananda, who is closer to life and directly affected by the violent love of the Chandala girl, becomes the agent of this ultimate enlightenment. - Deeply stirred and shaken, Ananda can return this love only in his own, supreme, sense, as a desire to draw his beloved to him in order to share with her his ultimate salvation. The master responds to this without harshness but as though lamenting an error, an impossibility. Finally, however, when Ananda begins to think in his deepest sadness that he must abandon all hope, Çakya, drawn to him by his fellow-suffering and as though by some new and ultimate problem whose solution detains him in life, feels called upon to test the girl. The latter now arrives to appeal to the master in her deepest grief, begging him to marry her to Ananda. He expounds the conditions, renunciation of the world, and withdrawal from all the bonds of nature; on hearing the principal commandment, she is sincere enough in her resolve to collapse in a faint; after which there unfolds (perhaps you recall it?) the colourful scene with the Brahmans who reproach him for his dealings with such a girl, claiming that this is proof of the error of his teaching. In rejecting all human pride, his growing sympathy with the girl, whose earlier existences he reveals to himself and his opponents, grows so strong that, when she herself - having recognized the whole vast complex of universal suffering on the basis of her own individual suffering - declares herself ready to swear that oath, he accepts her into the number of the saints, as though by way of his own final transfiguration, and thus regards his own course through life - which has been one of redemption and devotion to all living things - as now complete, since he has been able to promise that womankind, too, may now be - directly - redeemed. -
Happy Savitri! You may now follow your lover everywhere, be around him and with him constantly! Happy Ananda! she is now close to you, you have won her, never to lose her!
My child, the glorious Buddha was no doubt right when he strictly excluded art. Is there anyone who feels more clearly than I that it is this unhappy art that everlastingly restores me to life’s torment and all the contradictions of existence? If I did not have this wondrous gift of an over-predominant visual imagination, I could follow my heart’s instinctive urge, in accordance with my own clear-eyed insight, - and become a saint; and as a saint I could say to you: come here, leave behind you all that holds you back, burst the bonds of nature: in return for this I will show you the road to salvation! - Then we should be free: Ananda and Savitri! [...]
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 222