[...] Karl Ritter had written to me after all, only his letter was delayed in the post. That made me very glad. He has taken root in Rome, met Winterberger in front of St. Peter's, has fallen in love with the shallow cupola of the Pantheon and writes to me of all his interesting experiences with desperate naïveté! He is and remains a very original person. He did not write to me for a while, not from any idea of not compromising me with his people, but simply because he thought I got too many letters already and did not want to be a burden to me. I have given him a piece of my mind on that head!
30th May, 1859.
[...] I am now engaged in working out the first half of my act. It always takes me a long time to get through the tragic passages; at best I can only do very little of these at a time. The vigorous, lively, fiery parts go incomparably quicker. So, even in the technical working out, I live it all, "sorrowful and joyful," and am utterly immersed in my subject. This last act is a regular intermittent fever—the deepest, most unutterable suffering and longing alternating abruptly with inexpressible jubilation and triumph. God knows, no one has ever taken the matter so seriously before, and Semper is quite right. This it is that has turned me against Parzival just recently. Briefly, it has dawned on me again what a truly terrible piece of work this would be. Looked at closely, it will be seen that Amfortas is the central point, the main theme. It is rather a nice story, that! Think, in Heaven's name, what it all involves! It has suddenly become terribly clear to me; it is my Tristan of the third act inconceivably intensified. With the spearwound, and perhaps another—in the heart—the sufferer, in his terrible anguish, knows only one desire—to die. To win this supreme comfort, he longs ever and again for the vision of the Grail—if only to close the wound, for naught, naught else avails. But the Grail, ever and again, gives him but the one gift—that of being unable to die; the Vision only multiplies his sufferings by giving them immortality. The Grail, as I interpret it, is the Cup of the Last Supper into which Joseph of Arimathea received the Blood of the Saviour upon the cross. If so, what a fearful significance the relation of Amfortas to this miraculous Cup acquires! Wounded by the spear of a rival in a passionate love adventure, his one hope of healing is in the blessing of that Blood which once flowed from a like wound in the Saviour's side when, world-renouncing, world-redeeming, world-enduring, He languished upon the cross! Blood for blood and wound for wound, but what a gulf divides this blood and that, this wound and that! All rapture, all devotion, all ecstasy at the miraculous nearness of the Cup, glowing in its soft and blessed radiance, he draws new life from it—and death cannot come near him! He lives, lives anew, and more terribly than ever the unhallowed wound burns in him—his wound! His very devotion becomes a torment! What can end it, where is salvation? Mortal suffering to all eternity! Will he, in the madness of despair, turn utterly away from the Grail, close his eyes against it? He would like to do this and die. But—he himself was made guardian of the Grail, and by no mere blind exterior power. No! It was because he was worthy, because none like him knew the innermost depths of the marvel of the Grail which still and ever draws his whole soul again and again to the Vision—divine salvation guarded by eternal damnation!
And am I to carry out such a work?—actually make music for it? I thank you! Let him do it who will; I shall most politely decline to bow my shoulders to the burden!
Let someone do it who will work à la Wolfram. That would do no one any harm, and in the end would sound like something—even something quite pretty. But I take such things far too seriously. [...] Wolfram is a thoroughly crude phenomenon and probably his barbarous, confused period, swaying between the old Christendom and the new Nationalism, is very largely to blame. In that age nothing could come to perfection; profundity in the poet was instantly lost in unreal fantasy. I now almost agree with Frederick the Great who, on being presented with Wolfram's works, said to the publisher that he might spare him such stuff! The truth is that one must have spiritually reanimated the underlying verities of the saga, as I have done now with the Grail legend, and then just rapidly glance over its presentation by such a poet as Wolfram [...] in order to get the full shock of the poet's incapacity. (I even felt the same about Gottfried von Strasburg in the matter of Tristan.) [...] What a work I should have of it with Parzival, then! For with him Wolfram was helpless; his despair of God is foolish and unmeaning and his conversion is still less satisfying. The business of the "Question" is quite tasteless and altogether meaningless. Therefore I should have to invent absolutely everything. And moreover Parzival is another difficulty. He is indispensably necessary as the saviour of Amfortas, but if Amfortas is to be set in his true and appropriate light, he becomes of such immense tragic interest that it would be more than difficult to introduce a rival main interest—and yet this must centre in Parzival if he is not ultimately to appear a mere cold deus ex machina. Consequently Parzival's development, his sublime purification, predestined as it is by everything in his thoughtful, deeply sympathetic nature, must take the foremost place. For this purpose I cannot choose a broad scheme of treatment such as Wolfram had at disposal. I must compress the whole into three principal dramatic situations of intensive import, in such a way that the theme, at once profound and ramified, shall emerge clearly and distinctly; this way of working, this type of representation, is precisely my art. And now—am I to undertake such a task? God forbid! This very day I bid farewell to the mad project. Let Geibel write it and Liszt compose it! When my long-loved Brynhilde leaps into the funeral pyre, I shall leap with her and hope for a blessed end! So be it. Amen! [...]
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Vol. 2, selected and ed. Wilhelm Altmann, trans. M. M. Bozman (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1927), No. 414