The Fool Who Waited Twenty-Five Years

Richard Wagner first encountered the medieval poem Parzival, written by the Minnesänger Wolfram von Eschenbach, during a stay at Marienbad in 1845. More than a decade later, in April 1857, while living at the Asyl — a cottage on Otto Wesendonck's estate near Zürich, made available through the kindness of Wesendonck's wife Mathilde — Wagner awoke to bright sunshine and singing birds and suddenly felt the poem's possibilities strike him with overwhelming force. In his autobiography Mein Leben he claimed this happened on Good Friday itself, sketching the entire drama in three acts within moments. His second wife Cosima later noted a wrinkle in this story: Good Friday that year had actually fallen on 10 April, when the Wagners were still living elsewhere in Zürich. Wagner himself later laughed and admitted it was less a religious epiphany than a beautiful mood in nature that made him think 'this is how a Good Friday ought to be.'

Whatever the precise date, the initial spark did not translate into swift work. Wagner set the idea aside for eight years, during which he completed Tristan und Isolde and began Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. He returned to Parsifal briefly between 27 and 30 August 1865, producing a prose draft with an outline of the plot and extensive notes on its characters and themes. Then the project was shelved again — this time for eleven and a half years — while Wagner poured his energy into completing the monumental Ring cycle, finally staged in full at Bayreuth in August 1876.

Only after the Ring was finished did Wagner turn his full attention back to Parsifal. By 23 February 1877 he had drafted a more extensive prose version, and by 19 April of that year he had shaped it into a verse libretto. That September he began composing the music in earnest, working through two complete drafts — first a pencil sketch on three staves, then a more detailed ink version with up to five staves — often switching between them to keep the words and music developing together.

The story itself draws on a legend of the Holy Grail — the cup, in this telling, used by Christ at the Last Supper and later filled with drops of his blood at the crucifixion. According to Wagner's version, an angel gave the Grail and the Holy Spear to Titurel, who built a temple at Monsalvat in the mountains of northern Spain and founded an order of Grail Knights. Titurel's successor, King Amfortas, fell victim to the sorceress Kundry, allowing the wizard Klingsor to seize the Holy Spear and wound him — a wound that never heals, kept from killing him only by the Grail's power. Prophecy held that a pure, innocent youth would one day arrive, gain wisdom through compassion, resist temptation, defeat Klingsor, reclaim the Spear, and heal Amfortas. That youth is Parsifal.