Simon Mattacks
speaker
2,981 appearances
17 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 13 Sep
Simon Mattacks’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 14 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Then, right around the end of that time, the great composer Wagner devoted his final work to the production of a three-part music drama on the topic.
And he started by looking farther back than Tennyson did for his source material.
Wagner's piece was based on the Percival stories by both de Troyes and von Eschenbach.
The product of 25 years' work, his piece was criticized by some for being too religious, and it did reference the Grail.
The play would eventually become widely performed and was even adapted to the screen during the 20th century.
In 1904, there was a silent film made based on it.
Then again, in 1922, a silent movie called The Light in the Dark resurrected the tale.
As the new century dawned, a Frenchman authored a pamphlet that linked up the Grail and the Knights Templar with a religious sect called the Cathars.
In it, he suggested they were all part of a secret society called the Order of the Grail, which guarded the object.
A novelist named Josephin Paladin implied that the Cathar Castle at Montségur in France was actually the same as Castle Montsalvat from von Eschenbach's Parzival.
This spawned an impression that the Cathars were in possession of the Grail, having taken it with them when their castle at Montségur fell in the 13th century.
Had it not been for an eager German medievalist, this pamphlet might have just become a blip on the radar of Grail history.
However, nearly three decades later, its contents attracted the notice of a scholar named Otto Rahn, who was writing a thesis on mysticism, medieval poetry, and their influence on the Germans.
Merging Pelladin's thoughts with other influences he encountered along the way, he wrote a book called Crusade Against the Grail, which was published in 1933.
Falling back on many suppositions and descriptions from the age-old von Eschenbach text, he reinforced the idea that Monsegur had hosted the Grail and suggested that the character of Parzival represented a real Cathar named Troncavel.
This dubious theory picked up steam in his next book, which expanded upon the philosophies of the Cathars and their history.
Then at some point, he developed a theory that the Cathars were part of a so-called Aryan race, and that they possessed what he considered to be the True Grail, one even greater than the supposed cup from The Last Supper.
At this point, you would be justified in wondering why it would be necessary to make an object more precious than the cup from The Last Supper.
But that was how outlandish Ran's ideas became.
According to British historian Richard Barber, Rahn visited Montségur and may have sent a package of his discoveries to the infamous Nazi Heinrich Himmler.
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