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The days only get longer from here. Kundry presentation went well, I think (it helps that the subject is inherently interesting--I mean, hey, primeval witch), and that took more of a load off that I'd realized it would. By contrast, my two huge ling homeworks, plus finals, impending Chemistry final and paper, two composition recitals, my own recital, three-part fugue to write, Vocal Rep final, Chorale concert, opera workshop aria concert, and next year's program notes to write before this time next week don't seem like such an impossible proposition.
Dan's recital was lovely. It made me look forward to mine.
Here are my lecture notes for the Kundry presentation, in case anyone has nothing to do at the end of term and feels like reading a bunch of interesting quotes and semi-coherent opinions about a rather controversial figure.
Kundry=Eve and all diabolical women
No seductresses in medieval sources; the grail company contains women, too, in equal numbers with men, abiding by courtly decorum. Cundrie in Wolfram is a Grail messenger and so ugly that she must dress in finest and latest fashions, while Wagner’s Kundry must hide her beauty with a beast disguise, in the maniacally chaste and paranoid all-male Grail society, whose men can hardly encounter a woman in their company.
“Even in her ugly, beast-like disguise Kundry arounses suspicion on the part of Gurnemanz’s young charges, who in seeming error but with unerring instinct, suspect that she herself is the seductress responsible for the wounding of Amfortas. We are left with the impression that the Grail company attracts, even seeks, novices of misogynist bent, young men whose visceral reaction to women is to see them as seductresses, as daughters of Eve.” (McGlathery 56-7)
Millington charges that the extinction of women by Kundry’s death, with the all-male, chaste, and racially pure community left at the end, is the ultimate in Wagner’s misogynistic and anti-Semitic expression (even as Kundry is Wandering Jew who must be eliminated, so did Wagner identify himself with Ahasuerus).
Women are prominent in both medieval sources; Chretien’s company even has a beautiful young girl bearing the grail, and Wolfram’s Grail procession has two dozen beautiful women in fine clothes preceding the one with the Grail, called the Grail Queen, and Anfortas’s sister. The Grail Knights may marry according to God-given inscriptions on the grail, and sexual desire isn’t censured except in violation of God’s commandments. Wolfram’s Parzifal is married, and his Gawan breaks Klingsor’s spell holding hundreds of young men and women apart, imprisoned in his castle. Gournemans offers Parzival his daughter, and Parzival demurs only to earn a reward by adventure (though he wanders into a castle where he wins an even better bride, and follows his mother’s advice with her).
He also encounters a weeping penitent woman named Sigune who turns out to be his cousin, and runs into her three times over the course of his episodic adventures, always compassionate with her grief. She sits in a linden tree with the embalmed corpse of her beloved (who died because she didn’t give herself up to him), and he learns his name’s meaning (“right in two”, in Wolfram, reference to losing his father broke his mother’s heart). Coming back from the Grail temple he encounters her again, and she tells him the redeeming question he should have asked. On the third meeting, he asks her why she wears a ring, since pious recluses are supposed to be unattached, and she engaged herself to him posthumously because he died in her service. After becoming Grail King, he and his wife seek her out and find her dead, and bury her with her corpse boy.
“Cundrie, when she arrives to denounce Parzival in the presence of Arthur’s court, is not blind to the young knight’s radiant handsomeness, to the point where we may suspect that the denunciation is motivated not only by compassion for Anfortas, but by her regret in that her ugliness renders any chance of awakening passion for her in Parzival impossible. She hurls shame on his beauty and masculinity, and says that while she is ugly in his eyes, she is not as ugly as he. The she goes on to say to him that there was never baseness as great in a man so handsome.” (McGlathery 71)
Cundrie announces to Parzival that he has become the Grail King, and asks to see Parzival’s relatives who were held captive at Klingsor’s castle, saying that was the other reason she was there five years before, besides denouncing and shaming Parzival. In Wolfram’s ending, Parzival is reunited with his wife and forswears questing on behalf of women (though he says enmity against them will never arise in him) for humility serving the Grail.
“Since Kundry represents the most radical departure from her counterpart in the medieval poems, it is well to conclude discussion of erotic love in Parisfal with a reutrn to the consideration of Wagner’s changes in her depiction. In Chetien’s Perceval and Wolfram’s Parzival, Cundrie is not Klinsor’s agent, but quite the contrary: the Grail company’s messenger. This role is in effect what Wagner’s seductress yearns for, with part of her being…As seductress, Kundry’s medieval counterpart was not Cundrie but Orgeluse, the proud beauty who sought proof of the power of her riper, no longer virginal charms in men’s eagerness to suffer humiliation and mortal danger out of passionate desire to possess her. It was Orgeluse of whom Wolfram’s Anfortas became enamoured, thereby violating his calling as Grail King and suffering the poisoned wound that will not heal… To be sure, Orgeluse expresses regret in the end over her activities as a femme fatale, but she does not do so out of piety; she is not torn between a passion to seduce and a yearning for purity as is Wagner’s Kundry. Similarly, while the Grail messenger Cundrie displays wounded vanity in the fashionable was she dresses to hide her ugliness, she is not depicted as struggling between pride and humility.” (McGlathery 78)
The unique quality in Wagner’s Kundry is her implicit wish to be defeated as a seductress, to find a man worthy of her (who will, by definition, reject her). Therefore, her answer to Parsifal’s rejection is that he will find her again even as he seeks Amfortas, and her death at the healing of the Wound and confirmation of Parsifal as Grail King suggests she wanted more to be Parsifal’s beloved than to serve the Grail Knights, even with him as King.
“It was this tragic paradox, that the path undertaken on the search for salvation leads to destruction, so similar to his conception of the Ring, that kindled Wagner’s enthusiasm for the subject. Kundry, too, is caught in an analogous trap: in her search for absolution, she yearns for Parsifal’s embrace, but if Parsifal succumbs to her as Amfortas did she will only plunge even deeper into the damnation from which she is trying to escape.
O, Elend! Aller Rettung Flucht!
O, Weltenwahns Umnachten:
in hoechsten Heiles heisser Sucht
nach der Verdammnis Quell zu schmachten!
O misery! flight of all deliverance!
Enveloping night of world’s delusion!
In the heated search for highest salvation,
to thirst for the source of damnation!” (Dahlhaus 145)
Knowing him as a child
Kundry’s telling of the tale of Herzeleide, Parsifal’s mother, is related to the seduction scene, besides tying him to her as the only woman he’s known.
She approaches him as a maternal figure because he has never met any women, in contrast to Perceval/Parzival, who are surrouinded with beautiful women and remain innocent, and who are great warriors to win the favors of women. She tries several approaches, recalling his mother. It’s less strange than someone from our perspective would think, as Parsifal has most likely never met a woman besides his mother. The Freudian implications are difficult to unravel, as are the repercussions of her kiss; it makes him welthellsichtig, which in the Parsifal seciton of Wagner’s Music Dramas Dahlhaus’s translator renders as “cosmically clear-sighted” but in a more literal mind might be “worldly-clear-sighted,” which brings the idea of worldiness into the picture.
“It is at this point in her attempt to seduce Parsifal that, impersonating his mother, Kundry plants her long passionate kiss on his lips. That he does not reject the kiss immediately suggests that he is indeed in a reverie about his deceased mother; when he then leaps up and cries out ‘Amfortas!’ it soon becomes clear that Kundry has idneed succeeded in awakening sexual desire in him, desire that he experiences as sinful and associates—correctly—with Amfortas’s bleeding wound that will not heal. Indeed, Amfortas’s susceptibility to Kundry’s seductive wiles, like Parsifal’s, may have been owing not least to his inexperience with women, as Grail King, and to his apparent separation from his mother, which must have occurred at some point between his birth and his arrival at manhood.” (McGlathery 77-8)
Wagner’s take on Kundry’s motivation concentrates on her sphinx-like qualities in the face of his foolish purity. She is inimitably drawn to him, and doesn’t know why until after he comes to Klingsor’s realm. In a letter to Mathilde Wesendonck he identifies her necessity as both Grail servant and agent of evil: she can only seek redemption by continuing her corruptive work, because only the pure fool she knows of, who will be seen among the Grail knights, can redeem her. Still, Wagner claims no conscious motive on her part, just the instinct of an indefatigable (and evil) dog. He’s making her motivations mysterious, perhaps so that we will not notice her inconsistency. Then again, in practical dramatic terms, a woman old and magical enough to have tempted John the Baptist, laughed in the face of Christ, been discovered by Titurel and caused the downfall of Amfortas has got to be immensely wise and certainly insane. She is the figure of Eve, containing even aspects of the apple and the snake.
Nattiez finds in Kundry an amalgamation of Wagner’s misogynist and anti-Semitic tendencies, since she is both purveyor of original sin and doomed to wandering cultureless and eternally cursed. “That Wagner is guilty of a fundamental misogyny throughout his works, from Der fliegende Hollaender to Parsifal, and that it is left to womankind to sacrifice herself in order for men to be redeemed, is all too evident.” (Nattiez 168)
“Thus, for Kundry, Parsifal creates a bridge to that other sphere, the realm of the undisclosed redeemer. Regarded in this way, Kundry’s death at the end of Parsifal stands for her disappearance from the level of visible action to another, metaphysical level, not so unlike Isolde’s seemingly inexplicable death at the end of Tristan und Isolde, when she joins Tristan in the realm of Night.” (Kinderman 25)
Alternative; she does become Parsifal’s, but in heaven.
Musical representation
Very first time we see Kundry, she’s come from unimaginably far away, and then flings herself to the ground to sleep (from the exhaustion of her trip, or some other, more sinister reason? Leitmotifs say sinister. Dahlhaus says “the galloping figure and the violent descending figure suggestive of collapse are musical illustrations of her mode of entry” (148)).
p. 40 in full score, also p. 228 beg. of Act II
chromaticism, as Stephan so fully discussed, is the representative of evil, foreignness, Islam, Judaism, Amfortas’s suffering/wrongness (derived from his association with Kundry), and womanhood. Therefore, there is a connection between deception and suffering.
The Sorcery motive (Dahlhaus likens it to the Tarnhelm motive from the Ring) and Klingsor’s motive (which contains the Sorcery motive’s first bar) contain mirror images.
She may be related to the Flowermaidens, as after her seduction fails, her music reverts to their motive; p. 394
When she dies, the crescendo at shift from major triad to minor 3rd lower, corresponds to revelations of the Grail; when Amfortas sets it down in Act I, and after her kiss in II when Parsifal says “das Heislgefass” (the healing cup). p. 587-8
sleep=death
Disc 2, Track 7
p. 228 in score
full of Kundry’s falling motive
Chromatic
Track 8 2:18
p. 251 top, starting at
“The most dangerous”
Act II opening
from Wagner's text:
Klingsor
The time has come. My magic castle lures the fool, whome I see approaching from afar, shouting boyishly. In deathly sleep the woman is held fast by the curse whose grip I have the power to loosen. Up then1 To work!
Come up! Come up! To me! You master calls you, nameless one, primeval witch, rose of hell! You were Herodias, and what else? Gundryggia there, Kundry here! Come here! Come hither, Kundry! Your master calls: obey!
(Kundry’s shape arises in the bluish light. She seems asleep. Gradually however she moves like one awaking. Finally she utters a terrible scream.)
Are you waking? Ha! To my power you fall again today, at the right time. (Kundry utters a loud wail that subsides to a frightened whimper.) Say, where have you been roaming again? Fie! There among the knights and their circle where you let yourself be treated like a beast! Do you not fare better with me? When you captured their master for me—ha ha—that chaste guardian of the Grail—what drove you forth again?
Kundry (hoarsely and brokenly, as if striving to regain speech) Oh!—Oh!
Blackest night! Frenzy! O rage! O misery! … Sleep…sleep…deep sleep! …death!
Klingsor Did another awaken you? Eh?
Kundry Yes…my curse!... O yearning…yearning!
Klingsor Ha ha! There, for the saintly knights?
Kundry There…there I served.
Klingsor Yes, to make good the wrong that you had maliciously done them? They will not help you; if I bid the right price, they are all venal; the steadiest will fall when he sinks into your arms, and so be brought low by the spear which I myself seized from their master. Now today we have the most dangerous to meet; he is shielded by his foolishness.
Kundry I …will…not…oh!…oh!
Klingsor You will, because you must.
Kundry You…cannot…force me.
Klingsor But I can hold you.
Kundry You?
Klingsor Your master.
Kundry By what power?
Klingsor Ha! Since only with me does your power avail you nothing.
Kundry (laughing shrilly) Haha! Are you chaste?
Klingsor (furiously) Why do you ask this, accursed witch? (He sinks into gloomy brooding) Dire distress! So now the fiend mocks me that once I strove after holiness?. Dire distress! The pain of untamed desire, most horrible, hell-inspired impulse which I had throttled to deathly silence – does it now laugh aloud and mock through you, bride of the devil? – Beware! One man already repents his contempt and scorn, that proud man, strong in holiness, who once drove me out. His race I ruined; unredeemed shall the guardian of the holy treasure languish; and soon – I know it – I myself will guard the Grail – Haha! How did you like the hero Amfortas whom I ensnared to your charms?
Kundry O anguish!...Anguish! He too was weak! … weak are they all! All fall victim to my curse! – O endless sleep, only release, how can I win you?
Klingsor Ha! He who spurns you sets you free: attempt it with the boy who is drawing near!
Kundry I…will not!
Klingsor (hastily mounting the tower wall) He is already mounting the tower!
Kundry Alas! Alas! Did I wake for this? Must I? Must I?
Klingsor (looking down) Ha! The boy is handsome!
Kundry Oh! – Oh! Woe is me!
Oh, and by the way, though I am by no means over Mika yet (I ordered his album this afternoon), I will just say that the Squirrel Nut Zippers are cooler than I had expected.
Dan's recital was lovely. It made me look forward to mine.
Here are my lecture notes for the Kundry presentation, in case anyone has nothing to do at the end of term and feels like reading a bunch of interesting quotes and semi-coherent opinions about a rather controversial figure.
Kundry=Eve and all diabolical women
No seductresses in medieval sources; the grail company contains women, too, in equal numbers with men, abiding by courtly decorum. Cundrie in Wolfram is a Grail messenger and so ugly that she must dress in finest and latest fashions, while Wagner’s Kundry must hide her beauty with a beast disguise, in the maniacally chaste and paranoid all-male Grail society, whose men can hardly encounter a woman in their company.
“Even in her ugly, beast-like disguise Kundry arounses suspicion on the part of Gurnemanz’s young charges, who in seeming error but with unerring instinct, suspect that she herself is the seductress responsible for the wounding of Amfortas. We are left with the impression that the Grail company attracts, even seeks, novices of misogynist bent, young men whose visceral reaction to women is to see them as seductresses, as daughters of Eve.” (McGlathery 56-7)
Millington charges that the extinction of women by Kundry’s death, with the all-male, chaste, and racially pure community left at the end, is the ultimate in Wagner’s misogynistic and anti-Semitic expression (even as Kundry is Wandering Jew who must be eliminated, so did Wagner identify himself with Ahasuerus).
Women are prominent in both medieval sources; Chretien’s company even has a beautiful young girl bearing the grail, and Wolfram’s Grail procession has two dozen beautiful women in fine clothes preceding the one with the Grail, called the Grail Queen, and Anfortas’s sister. The Grail Knights may marry according to God-given inscriptions on the grail, and sexual desire isn’t censured except in violation of God’s commandments. Wolfram’s Parzifal is married, and his Gawan breaks Klingsor’s spell holding hundreds of young men and women apart, imprisoned in his castle. Gournemans offers Parzival his daughter, and Parzival demurs only to earn a reward by adventure (though he wanders into a castle where he wins an even better bride, and follows his mother’s advice with her).
He also encounters a weeping penitent woman named Sigune who turns out to be his cousin, and runs into her three times over the course of his episodic adventures, always compassionate with her grief. She sits in a linden tree with the embalmed corpse of her beloved (who died because she didn’t give herself up to him), and he learns his name’s meaning (“right in two”, in Wolfram, reference to losing his father broke his mother’s heart). Coming back from the Grail temple he encounters her again, and she tells him the redeeming question he should have asked. On the third meeting, he asks her why she wears a ring, since pious recluses are supposed to be unattached, and she engaged herself to him posthumously because he died in her service. After becoming Grail King, he and his wife seek her out and find her dead, and bury her with her corpse boy.
“Cundrie, when she arrives to denounce Parzival in the presence of Arthur’s court, is not blind to the young knight’s radiant handsomeness, to the point where we may suspect that the denunciation is motivated not only by compassion for Anfortas, but by her regret in that her ugliness renders any chance of awakening passion for her in Parzival impossible. She hurls shame on his beauty and masculinity, and says that while she is ugly in his eyes, she is not as ugly as he. The she goes on to say to him that there was never baseness as great in a man so handsome.” (McGlathery 71)
Cundrie announces to Parzival that he has become the Grail King, and asks to see Parzival’s relatives who were held captive at Klingsor’s castle, saying that was the other reason she was there five years before, besides denouncing and shaming Parzival. In Wolfram’s ending, Parzival is reunited with his wife and forswears questing on behalf of women (though he says enmity against them will never arise in him) for humility serving the Grail.
“Since Kundry represents the most radical departure from her counterpart in the medieval poems, it is well to conclude discussion of erotic love in Parisfal with a reutrn to the consideration of Wagner’s changes in her depiction. In Chetien’s Perceval and Wolfram’s Parzival, Cundrie is not Klinsor’s agent, but quite the contrary: the Grail company’s messenger. This role is in effect what Wagner’s seductress yearns for, with part of her being…As seductress, Kundry’s medieval counterpart was not Cundrie but Orgeluse, the proud beauty who sought proof of the power of her riper, no longer virginal charms in men’s eagerness to suffer humiliation and mortal danger out of passionate desire to possess her. It was Orgeluse of whom Wolfram’s Anfortas became enamoured, thereby violating his calling as Grail King and suffering the poisoned wound that will not heal… To be sure, Orgeluse expresses regret in the end over her activities as a femme fatale, but she does not do so out of piety; she is not torn between a passion to seduce and a yearning for purity as is Wagner’s Kundry. Similarly, while the Grail messenger Cundrie displays wounded vanity in the fashionable was she dresses to hide her ugliness, she is not depicted as struggling between pride and humility.” (McGlathery 78)
The unique quality in Wagner’s Kundry is her implicit wish to be defeated as a seductress, to find a man worthy of her (who will, by definition, reject her). Therefore, her answer to Parsifal’s rejection is that he will find her again even as he seeks Amfortas, and her death at the healing of the Wound and confirmation of Parsifal as Grail King suggests she wanted more to be Parsifal’s beloved than to serve the Grail Knights, even with him as King.
“It was this tragic paradox, that the path undertaken on the search for salvation leads to destruction, so similar to his conception of the Ring, that kindled Wagner’s enthusiasm for the subject. Kundry, too, is caught in an analogous trap: in her search for absolution, she yearns for Parsifal’s embrace, but if Parsifal succumbs to her as Amfortas did she will only plunge even deeper into the damnation from which she is trying to escape.
O, Elend! Aller Rettung Flucht!
O, Weltenwahns Umnachten:
in hoechsten Heiles heisser Sucht
nach der Verdammnis Quell zu schmachten!
O misery! flight of all deliverance!
Enveloping night of world’s delusion!
In the heated search for highest salvation,
to thirst for the source of damnation!” (Dahlhaus 145)
Knowing him as a child
Kundry’s telling of the tale of Herzeleide, Parsifal’s mother, is related to the seduction scene, besides tying him to her as the only woman he’s known.
She approaches him as a maternal figure because he has never met any women, in contrast to Perceval/Parzival, who are surrouinded with beautiful women and remain innocent, and who are great warriors to win the favors of women. She tries several approaches, recalling his mother. It’s less strange than someone from our perspective would think, as Parsifal has most likely never met a woman besides his mother. The Freudian implications are difficult to unravel, as are the repercussions of her kiss; it makes him welthellsichtig, which in the Parsifal seciton of Wagner’s Music Dramas Dahlhaus’s translator renders as “cosmically clear-sighted” but in a more literal mind might be “worldly-clear-sighted,” which brings the idea of worldiness into the picture.
“It is at this point in her attempt to seduce Parsifal that, impersonating his mother, Kundry plants her long passionate kiss on his lips. That he does not reject the kiss immediately suggests that he is indeed in a reverie about his deceased mother; when he then leaps up and cries out ‘Amfortas!’ it soon becomes clear that Kundry has idneed succeeded in awakening sexual desire in him, desire that he experiences as sinful and associates—correctly—with Amfortas’s bleeding wound that will not heal. Indeed, Amfortas’s susceptibility to Kundry’s seductive wiles, like Parsifal’s, may have been owing not least to his inexperience with women, as Grail King, and to his apparent separation from his mother, which must have occurred at some point between his birth and his arrival at manhood.” (McGlathery 77-8)
Wagner’s take on Kundry’s motivation concentrates on her sphinx-like qualities in the face of his foolish purity. She is inimitably drawn to him, and doesn’t know why until after he comes to Klingsor’s realm. In a letter to Mathilde Wesendonck he identifies her necessity as both Grail servant and agent of evil: she can only seek redemption by continuing her corruptive work, because only the pure fool she knows of, who will be seen among the Grail knights, can redeem her. Still, Wagner claims no conscious motive on her part, just the instinct of an indefatigable (and evil) dog. He’s making her motivations mysterious, perhaps so that we will not notice her inconsistency. Then again, in practical dramatic terms, a woman old and magical enough to have tempted John the Baptist, laughed in the face of Christ, been discovered by Titurel and caused the downfall of Amfortas has got to be immensely wise and certainly insane. She is the figure of Eve, containing even aspects of the apple and the snake.
Nattiez finds in Kundry an amalgamation of Wagner’s misogynist and anti-Semitic tendencies, since she is both purveyor of original sin and doomed to wandering cultureless and eternally cursed. “That Wagner is guilty of a fundamental misogyny throughout his works, from Der fliegende Hollaender to Parsifal, and that it is left to womankind to sacrifice herself in order for men to be redeemed, is all too evident.” (Nattiez 168)
“Thus, for Kundry, Parsifal creates a bridge to that other sphere, the realm of the undisclosed redeemer. Regarded in this way, Kundry’s death at the end of Parsifal stands for her disappearance from the level of visible action to another, metaphysical level, not so unlike Isolde’s seemingly inexplicable death at the end of Tristan und Isolde, when she joins Tristan in the realm of Night.” (Kinderman 25)
Alternative; she does become Parsifal’s, but in heaven.
Musical representation
Very first time we see Kundry, she’s come from unimaginably far away, and then flings herself to the ground to sleep (from the exhaustion of her trip, or some other, more sinister reason? Leitmotifs say sinister. Dahlhaus says “the galloping figure and the violent descending figure suggestive of collapse are musical illustrations of her mode of entry” (148)).
p. 40 in full score, also p. 228 beg. of Act II
chromaticism, as Stephan so fully discussed, is the representative of evil, foreignness, Islam, Judaism, Amfortas’s suffering/wrongness (derived from his association with Kundry), and womanhood. Therefore, there is a connection between deception and suffering.
The Sorcery motive (Dahlhaus likens it to the Tarnhelm motive from the Ring) and Klingsor’s motive (which contains the Sorcery motive’s first bar) contain mirror images.
She may be related to the Flowermaidens, as after her seduction fails, her music reverts to their motive; p. 394
When she dies, the crescendo at shift from major triad to minor 3rd lower, corresponds to revelations of the Grail; when Amfortas sets it down in Act I, and after her kiss in II when Parsifal says “das Heislgefass” (the healing cup). p. 587-8
sleep=death
Disc 2, Track 7
p. 228 in score
full of Kundry’s falling motive
Chromatic
Track 8 2:18
p. 251 top, starting at
“The most dangerous”
Act II opening
from Wagner's text:
Klingsor
The time has come. My magic castle lures the fool, whome I see approaching from afar, shouting boyishly. In deathly sleep the woman is held fast by the curse whose grip I have the power to loosen. Up then1 To work!
Come up! Come up! To me! You master calls you, nameless one, primeval witch, rose of hell! You were Herodias, and what else? Gundryggia there, Kundry here! Come here! Come hither, Kundry! Your master calls: obey!
(Kundry’s shape arises in the bluish light. She seems asleep. Gradually however she moves like one awaking. Finally she utters a terrible scream.)
Are you waking? Ha! To my power you fall again today, at the right time. (Kundry utters a loud wail that subsides to a frightened whimper.) Say, where have you been roaming again? Fie! There among the knights and their circle where you let yourself be treated like a beast! Do you not fare better with me? When you captured their master for me—ha ha—that chaste guardian of the Grail—what drove you forth again?
Kundry (hoarsely and brokenly, as if striving to regain speech) Oh!—Oh!
Blackest night! Frenzy! O rage! O misery! … Sleep…sleep…deep sleep! …death!
Klingsor Did another awaken you? Eh?
Kundry Yes…my curse!... O yearning…yearning!
Klingsor Ha ha! There, for the saintly knights?
Kundry There…there I served.
Klingsor Yes, to make good the wrong that you had maliciously done them? They will not help you; if I bid the right price, they are all venal; the steadiest will fall when he sinks into your arms, and so be brought low by the spear which I myself seized from their master. Now today we have the most dangerous to meet; he is shielded by his foolishness.
Kundry I …will…not…oh!…oh!
Klingsor You will, because you must.
Kundry You…cannot…force me.
Klingsor But I can hold you.
Kundry You?
Klingsor Your master.
Kundry By what power?
Klingsor Ha! Since only with me does your power avail you nothing.
Kundry (laughing shrilly) Haha! Are you chaste?
Klingsor (furiously) Why do you ask this, accursed witch? (He sinks into gloomy brooding) Dire distress! So now the fiend mocks me that once I strove after holiness?. Dire distress! The pain of untamed desire, most horrible, hell-inspired impulse which I had throttled to deathly silence – does it now laugh aloud and mock through you, bride of the devil? – Beware! One man already repents his contempt and scorn, that proud man, strong in holiness, who once drove me out. His race I ruined; unredeemed shall the guardian of the holy treasure languish; and soon – I know it – I myself will guard the Grail – Haha! How did you like the hero Amfortas whom I ensnared to your charms?
Kundry O anguish!...Anguish! He too was weak! … weak are they all! All fall victim to my curse! – O endless sleep, only release, how can I win you?
Klingsor Ha! He who spurns you sets you free: attempt it with the boy who is drawing near!
Kundry I…will not!
Klingsor (hastily mounting the tower wall) He is already mounting the tower!
Kundry Alas! Alas! Did I wake for this? Must I? Must I?
Klingsor (looking down) Ha! The boy is handsome!
Kundry Oh! – Oh! Woe is me!
Oh, and by the way, though I am by no means over Mika yet (I ordered his album this afternoon), I will just say that the Squirrel Nut Zippers are cooler than I had expected.
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