[...] I am now engaged in working out the first half of the act. The passages which describe suffering always hold me up a great deal; at best I can only ever complete a very little at a single sitting. The fresh, lively and fiery sections then go incomparably faster; and so, even during the technical working out, I live through every moment “in suffering and in joy”, and become entirely dependent upon the object in hand. This last act is now a real intermittent fever: - the deepest and most unprecedented suffering and yearning, and, immediately afterwards, the most unprecedented triumph and jubilation. God knows, no one has ever taken the matter so seriously before, and Semper is right. It is this thought that has most recently turned me against Parzival again. You see, it has again dawned upon me of late that this would again be a fundamentally evil task. Looked at closely, it is Anfortas who is the centre of attention and principal subject. Of course, it is not at all a bad story. Consider, in heaven’s name, all that goes on there! It suddenly became dreadfully clear to me: it is my third-act Tristan inconceivably intensified. With the spear-wound and perhaps another wound, too, - in his heart - , the wretched man knows of no other longing in his terrible pain than the longing to die; in order to attain this supreme solace, he demands repeatedly to be allowed a glimpse of the Grail in the hope that it might at least close his wounds, for everything else is useless, nothing - nothing can help him: - but the Grail can give him one thing only, which is precisely that he cannot die; its very sight increases his torments by conferring immortality upon them. The Grail, according to my own interpretation is the goblet used at the Last Supper in which Joseph of Arimathea caught the Saviour’s blood on the Cross. What terrible significance the connection between Anfortas and this miraculous chalice now acquires; he, infected by the same wound as was dealt him by a rival’s spear in a passionate love intrigue, - his only solace lies in the benediction of the blood that once flowed from the Saviour’s own, similar, spear-wound as He languished upon the Cross, world-renouncing, world-redeeming and world-suffering! Blood for blood, wound for wound - but what a gulf between the blood of the one and that of the other, between the one wound and the other! Wholly enraptured, he is all devotion and all ecstasy at the miraculous proximity of the chalice which glows red in its gentle, blissful radiance, pouring out new life - so that death cannot come near him! He lives, lives anew, and more terribly than ever the sinful wound flares up in him - His wound! His very devotions become a torment! Where is the end to it, where is redemption? The sufferings of humanity endlessly drawn out! - Would he, in the madness of his despair, wish to turn away for ever from the Grail and close his eyes to it? He would fain do so in order to die. But - he himself was appointed guardian of the Grail; and it was no blind, superficial power which appointed him, - no! it was because he was so worthy, because there was no one who knew the Grail’s miraculous nature as profoundly and as intimately as he knew it, just as his whole soul now yearns, again and again, to behold the vision that destroys him in the very act of worship, vouchsafing heavenly salvation and eternal damnation! -
And you expect me to carry through something like this? and set it to music, into the bargain? - No thank you very much! I leave that to anyone who has a mind for such things; I shall do all I can to keep my distance from it! -
Let someone do it who will carry it through à la Wolfram; it will then cause little offence, and in the end may perhaps sound like something, maybe even something quite pretty. But I take such things far too seriously. Yet just look at the extent to which Master Wolfram has made light of it, by contrast! That he has understood absolutely nothing of the actual content is of no great matter. He tacks one event on to the next, one adventure to another, links together the Grail motif with all manner of strange and curious episodes and images, gropes around and leaves any serious reader wondering whatever his intention can have been? To which he is bound to reply that he himself in fact knows no more about what he is doing than the priest understands the Christianity that he serves up at the altar without knowing what is involved. - That’s how it is. Wolfram is a thoroughly immature phenomenon, although it must be said that his barbaric and utterly confused age is largely to blame for this, fluctuating as it did between early Christianity and a more modern political economy. Nothing could ever come to fruition at such a period; poetic profundity was immediately submerged in insubstantial caprice. I almost agree now with Frederick the Great who, on being presented with a copy of Wolfram, told the publisher not to bother him with such stuff! - Indeed, it is sufficient to have given new life to such a subject on the basis of the genuine features of the legend, as I have now done with this Grail legend, and then to take a quick look at how such a poet as Wolfram has depicted the very same thing - as I have now done by leafing through your book - in order to be utterly repelled by the poet’s incompetence. (The same thing happened to me with Gottfried v. Strassburg in the context of Tristan). Consider only this one point, that, of all the interpretations to which the Grail has been subjected in the various legends, this superficial “deep thinker” should have chosen the most meaningless of all. That this miraculous object should be a precious stone is a feature which, admittedly, can be traced back to the earliest sources, namely the Arabic texts of the Spanish Moors. One notices, unfortunately, that all our Christian legends have a foreign, pagan origin. As they gazed on in amazement, the early Christians learned, namely, that the Moors in the Caaba at Mecca (deriving from the pre-Muhammadan religion) venerated a miraculous stone (a sunstone - or meteoric stone - but at all events one that had fallen from heaven). However, the legends of its miraculous power were soon interpreted by the Christians after their own fashion, by their associating the sacred object with Christian myth, a process which, in turn, was made easier by the fact that an old legend existed in southern France telling how Joseph of Arimathea had once fled there with the sacred chalice that had been used at the Last Supper, a version entirely consonant with the early Christian Church’s enthusiasm for relics. Only now did sense and reason enter into it, and I feel a very real admiration and sense of rapture at this splendid feature of Christian mythogenesis, which invented the most profound symbol that could ever have been invented as the content of the physical-spiritual kernel of any religion. Who does not shudder with a sense of the most touching and sublime emotion to hear that this same goblet, from which the Saviour drank a last farewell to His disciples and in which the Redeemer’s indestructible blood was caught and preserved, still exists, and that he who is pure in heart is destined to behold it and worship it himself. Incomparable! And then the double significance of this one vessel which also served as a chalice at the Last Supper - , without doubt the most beautiful sacrament of Christian worship! Whence, also, the legend that the Grail (Sang Real) (whence San(ct) Gral) alone sustains the pious knights, vouchsafing them food and drink for their repasts. - And all of this has been so senselessly misinterpreted by our poet, who took only the inferior French chivalric romances as his subject-matter and repeated them like a parrot! You can infer from this what the rest must be like! Only individual descriptions are in any way attractive, but this is the forte of all medieval poets, for whom the predominant mood is a finely felt pictoriality. But each work as a whole always remains confused and silly. I would have to make a completely fresh start with Parzival! For Wolfram hadn’t the first idea of what he was doing: his despair in God is stupid and unmotivated, and his conversion is even more unsatisfactory. The thing about the “question” is that it is so utterly preposterous and totally meaningless. I should simply have to invent everything here. And then there is a further difficulty with Parzival. He is indispensably necessary as the redeemer whom Anfortas longs for: but if Anfortas is to be placed in his true and appropriate light, he will become of such immense tragic interest that it will be almost impossible to introduce a second focus of attention, and yet this focus of attention must centre upon Parzival if the latter is not simply to enter at the end as a deus ex machina who leaves us completely cold. Thus Parzival’s development and the profound sublimity of his purification, although entirely predestined by his thoughtful and deeply compassionate nature, must again be brought into the foreground. But I cannot choose to work on such a broad scale as Wolfram was able to do: I have to compress everything into three climactic situations of violent intensity, so that the work’s profound and ramified content emerges clearly and distinctly; for my art consists in working and representing things in this way. And - am I to undertake such a task? God forbid! Today I take my leave of this insane project; Geibel can write about it and Liszt can compose it! - When my old friend Brünnhilde leaps into the funeral pyre, I shall plunge in after her, and hope to die a Christian! So be it! Amen!
[...]
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 242