Monsalvat: the Parsifal home page | Magic
flowers
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Monsalvat: the Parsifal home page | Magic
flowers
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hen
Wagnerians refer to the "Green Hill" they mean the hill in Bayreuth on which Wagner built his
Festival Theatre. Before Wagner settled in Bayreuth, however, he had lived on another "Green
Hill", in the Enge district of Zürich, where his patrons the Wesendonks had built a villa overlooking the lake. It was on a spring
morning in 1857, a few days after Richard and Minna Wagner had moved into a cottage close to
the Wesendonk villa, that Richard was inspired to make his first
sketch for his drama Parsifal. While walking in the garden of the villa he was put
into a creative frame of mind by what he later described as a pleasant mood in nature
.
In that same garden, a few weeks later, he would sit under the ancient linden tree and think
about the music he was writing at the time, the second act of Siegfried. Later the
same year Wagner would put this work aside to concentrate on another drama, Tristan und
Isolde which was still only music
. It was in that autumn on the first green hill
that this revolutionary work took shape; we can imagine Wagner thinking about it as he sat
under the ancient linden tree overlooking the lake, waiting for Mathilde.
n that
morning in the garden, however, Wagner thought about spring. He saw the flowers emerging from
the soil and the buds appearing on the linden trees. No doubt he thought about animals emerging
from hibernation, something that his mentor Schopenhauer had
written about. Sleep, wrote Schopenhauer,
was very much like death. Awakening from hibernation was a kind of reincarnation, a subject that Wagner had recently read about in Burnouf's book about Buddhism. While this book was
fresh in his mind, Wagner's thoughts also went back to the Good Friday
passage in a book that he had read twelve years before and not looked at since, Wolfram's Parzival. It was from these thoughts that Wagner developed
the concept of his drama about Parzival; returning to the
cottage (which he would later call his Asyl, although his first name for it was
Wahnheim) he quickly sketched out an entire drama in three acts
.
t is possible
that Wagner thought of the maidens as flowers from the very beginning. It is also possible that
at first he did not think of presenting them as flowers but simply as magic maidens conjured up
by the sorcerer Klingsor (just as the dead nuns were conjured
up by Bertram in Meyerbeer's Robert le diable). In the Munich Prose Draft there is no suggestion that the maidens have been grown in
the magic garden: concealed in that castle are the most beautiful women in all the world and
of all times. They are held there under Klingsor's spell for the destruction of men, especially
the Knights of the Grail, endowed by him with all powers of seduction. Men say that they are
she- devils.
n the libretto (written twelve years after that Prose Draft) Klingsor's maidens are variously referred to as magic maidens and as
flowers. Their music seems to have grown out of musical ideas that Wagner had first conceived
for his Rhine daughters. In both cases these female creatures are seductive but essentially
innocent (even if this is not always made clear in modern productions). Where the Rhine
daughters are natural, however, the flower maidens are unnatural, like everything that
originates in Klingsor's magic. This does not prevent Parsifal, in the third act, from expressing his compassion for
them.
ttention has
been drawn (initially by Karl Heckel in 1896) to the
similarities between the second act of Parsifal and traditional accounts of an episode
in the life of the Buddha Shakyamuni. In an attempt to prevent the
future Buddha from achieving enlightenment, the dark lord Mára sent an army of demonic
warriors against him. They were unable to harm the future Buddha, or even to distract him from
his meditations.
hen Mára
sent to the future Buddha his daughters, fearfully seductive demons in female shape. They sang,
danced and laughed but were unable to seduce the future Buddha. In Wagner's version it is Klingsor the sorcerer who first sends his knights against Parsifal, who overcomes them and enters the magic garden. There
he is surrounded by the magic maidens whom Klingsor has
conjured out of flowers. Like the future Buddha (who was protected by his virtue), the young
hero (who is protected by his innocence) is immune to the enticements of the maidens.
he flower
maidens, or Klingsor's magic maidens, do not appear in any of
the Grail romances. In Wolfram's poem we read of maidens kept captive
in Clinschor's castle, which is a
variant of the Castle of Wonders in Chrétien's story and the Castle of Maidens
in several related stories. It appears probable that Wagner's main source for the magic maidens
was the Roman d'Alexandre, a French poem of the early 12th century¹.
lexander
enters a forest whose entrance is guarded by genies. Here he finds
beautiful, welcoming maidens, each at the foot of a tree. They cannot leave the forest alive.
When Alexander asks his guides about them, he is told that they go underground in the winter,
but with the return of warm weather, they spring up and blossom. They open as flowers, in which
the central bud becomes the girl's body and the leaves her garment².
he first
modern French version of the Roman d'Alexandre was published in Stuttgart in 1846. In
1850, H. Weissman published an adaptation by Lamprecht of the 12th century German version. It
is known that Wagner was familiar with Lamprecht's Alexanderlied, since in his
autobiography (Mein Leben, page 390) he mentioned that he had attempted to imitate its
style.
t has also
been suggested that Wagner might have been inspired by a pantomime that he enjoyed at the
Adelphi Theatre in the Strand, during his visit to London at the end of 1855. This production,
with the title The Christmas, was a pot-pourri of fairy tales. Apparently in one scene
the female chorus were dressed as flowers. This may have reminded Wagner of the maidens in the
Roman d'Alexandre. So the origins of the flower maidens are diverse: their roots can
be found in a medieval romance, a Buddhist legend and a Christmas pantomime.
Cil li ont respondu, qui sorent lor nature: "A l'entree d'yver encontre la froidure Entrent toutes en terre et müent lor faiture, Et qant estés revient et li biaus tans s'espure, En guise de flors blanches vienent a lor droiture. Celes qui dedens naissent s'ont des cors la figure Et la flors de dehors si est lor vesteüre, Et sont si bien taillies, chascune a sa mesure, Que ja n'i avra force ne cisel ne costure, Et chascuns vestemens tresq'a la terre dure. Ainsi comme as puceles de cest bos vient a cure, Ja ne vaudront au main icele creature Q'eles n'aient au soir, ains que nuit soit oscure." Et respont Alixandres: "Bone est lor teneüre; Ainc mais a nule gent n'avint tele aventure."
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