This is one instance of the incoherency of the two Grail dramas. There is another, and by this second departure from the old legends which furnished forth his subject, Wagner made "Lohengrin" and "Parsifal" forever irreconcilable. The whole fabric of the older opera rests on the forbidden question:--
Nie solist du mich befragen, noch Wissen's Sorge tragen, woher ich kam der Fahrt, noch wie mein Nam' und Art. { 2}
So impressed was Wagner with the significance of this dramatic motive sixty years ago, that he gave it a musical setting which still stands as the finest of all his many illustrations of the principle of fundamental or typical phrases in dramatic music:--
[Musical excerpt--"Nie sollst du mich befragen"]
And no wonder. No matter where he turned in his studies of the Grail legend, he was confronted by the fact that it was by asking a question that the seeker after the Grail was to release the ailing king, whom he found in the castle in which the talismans were preserved, from his sufferings. In the Welsh tale of Peredur and the French romances the question went only to the meaning of the talismans; but this did not suffice Wolfram von Eschenbach, who in many ways raised the ethical standard of the Grail legend. He changed the question so as to make it a sign of affectionate and compassionate interest on the part of the questioner; it was no longer, "What mean the bloody head and the bleeding lance?" but "What ails thee, uncle?"
Wagner was fond, a little overfond, indeed, of appealing to the public over the heads of the critics, of going to the jury rather than the judge, when asking for appreciation of his dramas; but nothing is plainer to the close student than that he was never wholly willing to credit the public with possession of that high imaginativeness to which his dramas more than those of any other composer make appeal. His first conception of the finale of "Tannhäuser," for instance, was beautiful, poetical, and reasonable; for the sake of a spectacle he reconstructed it after the original production and plunged it into indefensible confusion and absurdity.
A desire to abstain as much as possible from criticism (that not being the purpose of this book) led me to avoid mention of this circumstance in the exposition of "Tannhäuser"; but I find that I must now set it forth, though briefly. In the original form of the opera there was no funeral procession and no death of the hero beside the bier of the atoning saint. The scene between Tannhäuser and Wolfram was interrupted by the tolling of a bell in the castle to indicate the death of Elizabeth and the appearance of a glow of rose-colored light across the valley to suggest the presence of Venus. By bringing the corpse of Elizabeth on the stage so that Tannhäuser might die by its side, Wagner was guilty of worse than an anachronism. The time which elapses in the drama between Elizabeth's departure from the scene and her return as a corpse is just as long as the song which Wolfram sings in which he apostrophizes her as his "holder Abendstern"--just as long and not a moment longer. There is no question here of poetical license, for Wolfram sings the apostrophe after her retreating figure, and the last chord of his postlude is interrupted by Tannhäuser's words, "Ich hörte Harfenschlag!" Yet we are asked to assume that in the brief interim Elizabeth has ascended the mountain to the Wartburg, died, been prepared for burial, and brought back to the valley as the central object of a stately funeral.