Lucerne, May 29, 59. So May is drawing to a close, and I am not to get up the Rigi? Everything was ordered yesterday, when the Lord of the Sky put in his veto once more. Luckily it had gone fairly well with the work: which helps. Meanwhile we have buried the good soldier also [her poem] ! I rather think he must have stood with Garibaldi, who is reputed not to spare his men ; for which reason I'm right glad de Sanctis did not join him. I'm rejoiced at your being in such high spirits. I am in neither good nor bad ; the vile weather is teaching me submission. After all, one has only got oneself to live on : fair weather in the heavens and upon earth may help one to live on oneself better and easier ; but there too in the long run, as in every circumstance, one must bear the costs oneself. Nothing enters into us that isn't already inside us by sympathy, and when one has consumed one's whole self there's an end of it, let one stick as much plaister as one likes upon it from outside. — So — patience, as long as aught's left to consume ! — Let that pass for a little philosophy. Regarding poetry, my change in Goethe's "freudvoll und leidvoll" has falsely alarmed you : you should simply have laughed at it, — nothing more ! Among all vaunted things, unfortunately this " honesty " has been turned to something risible for me ; and that springs perhaps from " Ueb' immer Treu' und Redlichkeit," which was the first little piece I learnt on the piano ; then came " God save the King," and then the " Maiden's wreath." Heine also once poked some neat fun at it, describing the Hamburg Exchange, "where our fathers dealt as honestly as possible with one another." It will ever be the same, where one converts an accidence, a symptom, into the actual substance of a line of conduct. The genuine man, concerned for nothing save the genuine, cannot help being honest: and what were honesty without genuineness? And — Karl Ritter did write me, after all, only his letter got delayed in the post. That has made me very glad. He has drifted to Rome, met Winterberger in front of S. Peter's, fallen in love with the flat dome of the Pantheon, and writes me excruciatingly naively about his interesting affairs. He is and remains a most original fellow. It was by no means for fear of compromising me in the eyes of his people, that he had not written me earlier, but simply because he fancied I was in receipt of far too many letters already, and didn't want to bore me. I have paid him well out for that! — May 30. After work I generally lie down awhile, to shut my eyes for a quarter of an hour. Yesterday I wouldn't give way, but tried to write to you instead. It avenged itself, however : a regular faintness came over me ; I was obliged to stop. — Now you see how things stand with me. — To-day I'm sitting down before work, for a moment, and also have the pleasure of being able to reply to a kind couple of lines this lovely morning brought me from you. For — lovely it is to-day ! — : whether it will last, remains doubtful. At present the early morning is the important weather-point for me, and the afternoon may look after itself at a pinch. Only think : I've been on my legs at 6 o'clock each morning since my birthday, drinking my Kissinger and promenading withal till about 8. Luckily the mornings have at least been bearable till now. Dear child, I could wish you also the refreshment of these morning promenades : I find myself quite perceptibly better since taking them ; the slight fatigue of the unaccustomed early walk soon wears away, after a little rest, and has all the more freeing and lightening an effect. Of course you know that yourself, from your various bath-cures. One is liable to forget it though, and yet should maintain this regime all the summer, as it is a true nerve-strengthener and blood-restorer. In summer one really can't pass the real day out-of-doors : the mornings are the actual fortifiers, whereas the evenings merely calm. Throughout the daytime one had better take a good siesta ; at evening, too, not go to bed too late. But the whole thing fits hand in glove. For my part, I mean to stick to it the summer through, wherever I may be, perhaps even rise still earlier, later on ; so vividly has the effect of these early morningwalks impressed itself upon me this time. Do follow my example ! Wesendonck will certainly have nothing against it ; on the contrary, he'll praise you. What you lose on such a morning, the whole day, even including the evening, can never make good to you : 'tis the fair rosebud of the day, the quick of summer's joy, and as we're always so wishing for sun and for slimmer, one ought also to know the real cream of them. — For my work, too, I'm exceedingly fond of the sun ; but the kept-off sun, the sun one seeks to shade to pleasant coolness. It then has the effect of fame and honours, which one despises, yet which kindle a comfortable feeling of our leaving them outside for very wealth. In the opposite event we're reminded of ©ur poverty ; for whoso has to seek for light and warmth, is badly off. I'm busy working out the first half of my act now. It always costs me a deal of time to get through the suffering passages ; there, even in a good vein, I can finish very little at a sitting : but the brisk, swift, fiery parts get reeled off infinitely quicker. Thus with the technical completion, too, I'm living it " leidvoll und freudvoll " all through, and hang entirely from my subject's thread. And this last act is a veritable ague — profoundest, most unheard-of suffering and pining, and immediately thereon the most turbulent exultation. God knows, no one yet has taken the thing in such earnest, and Semper is right. Which itself has set me once again against the Parzival. For it has struck me again, only quite recently, that this is bound to be another very nasty job. Considered strictly, Anfortas is the centre and principal subject. There you have a pretty tale at once. Imagine, I ask you, what is up ! To myself of a sudden it has grown too appallingly clear : it is my Tristan of the third act with an inconceivable increase. The spear-wound — haply yet another — in his heart, the poor man knows but one longing in his fearful anguish, that for death ; to win to that uttermost cordial, again and again he craves the aspect of the Grail, if that at least might close his wound, since every other aid is impotent, nothing — nothing serves ! — Yet again and again does the Grail but renew him this one thing, that he cannot die ; its sight but multiplies his torments, adding undyingness to them. Now, the Grail, after my reading, is the cup of the Last Supper, wherein Joseph of Arimathea gathered the blood of the Saviour on the cross. Now see what a terrible import is gained by Anfortas' relation to this wonder-cup ; he, stricken with the selfsame wound, dealt him by the spear of a rival in a passionate loveadventure, — for his only sustenance must yearn for the boon of that blood which erst flowed from the Saviour's like spear-wound, when, world-renouncing, world-redeeming, He pined world-suffering on the cross! Blood for blood, wound for wound — but from here to there what a gulf between this blood, this wound ! All transport, worship, ecstasy, at the wondrous presence of the chalice which reddens into soft entrancing radiance, new life is poured through all his veins — and death can not draw nigh him ! He lives, re-lives, and more fiercely than ever the fatal wound ravens him, his wound ! Devotion itself becomes a torture ! Where is an end to it, where redemption ? Suff'ring of mankind through all eternity ! — In the frenzy of despair might he turn entirely from the Grail, shut fast his eyes thereto ? Fain would he, for a possibility of death, but — he has been appointed Guardian of the Grail himself. And no blind outer; power appointed him, — no! but since he was so worthy, since none had wist the marvel of the Grail so deeply and so inwardly as he ; as even now his whole soul ever turns again towards that sight which withers him in adoration, blends heavenly unction with eternal ban ! — And I'm to execute a thing like that, to boot ? make music for it too ? — Declined with thanks ! Let him do it who likes ; Til keep it fairly off my neck ! — Someone may do it, who will manage just a la Wolfram ; that won't much matter, and after all may sound like something, perhaps even something quite pretty ; but / take such things far too seriously. Look, if you please, on the other hand, how easy even Meister Wolfram made it for himself! Never mind his understanding simply nothing of the inner content ; he strings incident to incident, adventure to adventure, turns the Grail-motive into rare and curious happenings and pictures, fumbles around, and leaves the earnest seeker with the question what he really meant. To which his answer would have to be : Hm, I really don't know that myself, any more than the priest his Christianity, which he also mumbles at the altar without a notion what it is. — And that's the truth. Wolfram is an utterly unripe appearance, the blame for which must largely be laid on his barbaric, altogether mongrel era, hovering between primitive Christendom and the newer State. Nothing in that age could be carried right through; poetic depth immediately is merged in insubstantial fantastries. I am almost coming to agree with Frederick the Great, who, upon the Wolfram being handed him, told the publisher he mustn't bother him with such rubbish ! — Seriously, one must have so lived into the heart of a subject like this through its legend's sterling features, as I now have done with this Gralssage, and then taken a bird's-eye glance at the way in which Wolfram represents the same thing to himself — which I also have done in skimming through your book [cf. p. 136] — to be repelled at once by the poet's incapacity (with Gottfried v. Strassburg's Tristan it already had gone much the same with me). Take merely one point : among all the meanings given by the legends to the Grail, this superficial "penetrator" selects the one that has the very least to say. Certainly the identification of this marvel with a precious stone occurs in the earliest sources one can trace, namely in the Arabic of the Spanish Moors; for one observes, alas ! that all our Christian legends have a foreign, pagan origin. In this case our onlooking Christians were amazed to learn that the Moors in the Caaba at Mecca (dating from the pras-Mohammedan religion) paid reverence to a wondrous stone (sun-stone — or meteoric stone — indubitably fallen from the sky). The Christians, however, soon framed the legends of its miraculous power their own way, and brought it into rapport with the Christian mythos ; a proceeding simplified by the persistence of an ancient legend in the south of France, that Joseph of Arimathea once fled there with the sacred bowl of the Last Supper — which harmonises perfectly with the enthusiasm of the early Christian age for relics. Sense and meaning thus entered at once, and with true rapture do I marvel at this splendid trait of Christian myth-development which devised the most pregnant symbol ever yet invented as physical garb for the spiritual core of a religion J Whom does it not thrill with the most affecting and sublimest feelings, to hear that that goblet whence the Saviour pledged his last farewell to his disciples — and wherein the Redeemer's deathless blood itself was gathered and preserved — is still extant, and the elect, the pure, may gaze at and adore its very self? How incomparable ! And then the doubled meaning of one vessel, as chalice also at the holy eucharist— unquestionably the Christian cult's most lovely sacrament! Thence, too, the legend that the Grail (Sang Rdal— hence San(ct) Gral) alone sustained its pious knighthood, and gave them food and drink at meal-times. — And all this so senselessly passed over by our poet, who merely took his subject from the sorry French Ritter-romances of his age and chattered gaily after, like a starling ! Conclude from that to all the rest ! Fine are none but single descriptions, the strong point of all the medieval poets : there visuality reigns finely-felt, but their whole remains ever invertebrate. Then think of all I should have to set about with Parzival himself! For with him, too, Wolfram knows not what to do : his despair of God is absurd and unmotived, still more unsatisfying his conversion ; that matter of the " question " is too entirely flat and meaningless. Here, accordingly, I should have to invent just everything. Added to that is one more difficulty .with Parzival. As the longed-for saviour of Anfortas, he is wholly indispensable : but if Anfortas is to be set in the true light due him, he acquires such intensely tragic interest that it becomes wellnigh more than hard to let a second maininterest crop up beside him ; yet Parzival must be accorded that main-interest, unless he is merely to come on at the end as a damping deus ex machina. Consequently Parzival's evolution, his sublimest purification, albeit predestined by his whole pensive, profoundly compassionate nature, has to be placed in the foreground once more. And for that I can choose no spacious outline, such as Wolfram had at disposal : I must so compress the whole into three main situations of drastic intent, that the deep and branching contents yet may stand forth sharp and clear ; for, to operate and represent thus, when all's said, is my art. And — I'm still to undertake a task like that ? Heaven preserve me ! To-day I bid farewell to this insensate project ; let Geibel write, and Liszt compose it! — When my old friend Briinnhilde leaps into the pyre, I'll make my plunge beside her and hope for a blessed end ! You have my word on it. Amen ! Eh ! haven't I nicely de-grailed myself? Take it as a lecture, for which you have not needed to go to the Zurich Rathhaus ! You will get no more to-day, despite the last fine Zwieback ! — I'll see if I can do a little music now ! Farewell, keep Whitsuntide in view, and — promenade right early in the garden. A thousand greetings. Your R. W.
Richard Wagner
Source: Richard Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck, translated by Ellis, No. 75