Grail tale

The Grail Tale is a central part of Richard Wagner's romantic opera Lohengrin .

After Lohengrin had originally forbidden everyone, especially Elsa von Brabant, who was rescued and married by him, to ask him about his name and origin (“ You should never ask me, nor worry about knowing where I came from on the journey, nor how my name and Art! ”), Elsa let herself be carried away to this question. Lohengrin solemnly answers her in front of the king with the Grail story, in which he reveals his identity as the son of the Grail King Parzival :

In a distant land, inaccessible to your steps,
lies a castle called Monsalvat;
a bright temple stands there in the middle,
so precious as nothing known on earth;

inside a vessel of miraculous blessings
is guarded there as the highest sanctuary.
It was the purest of mankind
brought down by a host of angels.

Every year a dove approaches from heaven,
to re-strengthen his miraculous power:
It is called the Grail , and blessed is the purest faith
granted himself to his knighthood through him.

Who is now chosen to serve the Grail,
he armies him with supernatural power;
where every evil deception is lost,
when he sees him, the night of death gives way;

even those who send him to distant lands,
appointed to fight for the virtue of justice,
his holy power will not be stolen from him,
as his knight there he remains unrecognized.

So noble is the grail's blessing,
revealed he must flee the layman's eye;
the knight's therefore you should not have doubts,
do you recognize him - then he must pull away from you.

Now hear how I pay off the forbidden question:
I was sent to you by the Grail:
My father Parzival wears his crown
His knight I am called Lohengrin.

So far, the Grail story is a regular part of Lohengrin's performances. The original score, however, contains a “second stanza” with 56 through-composed measures. This further text reads:

Now hear how I came to you!
The air carried a plaintive sound,
from this in the temple we immediately heard,
that far from where a maid would be in trouble.

When we sent to ask the grail
where a fighter is to be sent,
when we saw a swan on the tide,
to us he drew a boat:

my father, who recognized the swan's essence,
took him into service according to the grail's saying,
because whoever chooses only one year for his service,
which then deviates from every spell curse.

First now he should lead me there,
from where the call for help came to us,
because by the grail I was chosen to fight
therefore I courageously took leave of him.

Through rivers and through wild ocean waves
has the faithful swan approached my goal,
until he drew me to you on the bank,
where in God you all saw me land.

Before the premiere, which Wagner could not organize himself because of his involvement in the March Revolution of 1848, he wrote a letter to Franz Liszt who was rehearsing the performance in Weimar and asked that this passage not be performed because it was after the first part the Grail Tale could have a "cold effect" on the audience. Later, the general opinion prevailed that Wagner shortened the Grail narrative with regard to the tenor part of Lohengrin, because the vocal burden was unreasonable for the singer. Such consideration for the singers is rarely found in Wagner's work.

In fact, with a few exceptions, the shortened work has survived to this day. At the Bayreuth Festival in 1936 the Grail narrative was only given in its full length. In more modern times, the unabridged version was performed in the Vienna State Opera in the 2005/06 season, for example .

There is a CD with Johan Botha , on which the Grail story was also recorded with the second verse. The same applies to the recording by Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin with Peter Seiffert as Lohengrin and for the 2013 Wagner CD by tenor Jonas Kaufmann .

For the interpretation of the work, this text, which tells the story of the fate of the duke's son Gottfried, who has been transformed into a swan, is to be used in its entirety as an integral part of the poem.