The poetic fragments known as Titurel are actually a revisitation by Wolfram von Eschenbach of his Parzifal legend. Wolfram's audience would have already been familiar with Titurel's main characters, the lovers Sigune and Schionatulander, and with their tragic fate. For Sigune is encountered four times in the longer legend, and the last time she is met the dead Schionatulander lies in her lap.
The story related in Titurel tells of the intimate connection of love, fate, and death. The fate of the lovers seems predetermined by their relationship to death: Sigune loses not only her mother, Schoysiane, through her own birth, but her stepfather, Tampuntiere, as well; Schionatulander has lost both his father, Gurzgri, and later, in the Orient, Gahmuret, the man whom he has squired throughout his younger life.
With the tone of death setting the scene, Wolfram unfolds the story of Sigune and Schionatulander's love. The lovers discourse at length about the nature of love itself, and then each discusses their particular love with their mentors: Sigune with her stepmother, Herzeloyde; and Schionatulander with his liege lord, Herzeloyde's husband, Gahmuret.
Ruling all of this is an elaborate geneology of the house of Titurel, first king of the Grail, which opens the fragments (not performed tonight). The search for the Grail, woven as it is with many tales of heavenly love and knightly death, would have further enhanced the tone in Titurel itself for Wolfram's audience.
Titurel is set out in two fragments. The first concerns itself with the history of the lovers, their encounter, and the development of their love. It ends with Schionatulander away on Crusade. The second section tells the strange story of a magical dog leash, and how it came into Sigune's hands.
The audience would have known that this leash was the eventual cause of Schionatulander's death, as he pursued the dog in order to finally prove himself to Sigune and died in knightly combat while in its pursuit.
Wolfram seems to have invented the poetic form used in Titurel. It follows, inconsistently, a basic strophe of four long lines:
1. 8 stresses with caesura after the 4th stress
2. 10 stresses with caesura after the 4th stress
3. 6 stresses with no caesura
4. 10 stresses with caesura after the 4th stress
The first and second lines rhyme, as do the third and fourth lines, and occasionally there is an internal line in the first two lines as well.
This form was codified, and may be seen in its unadulterated state in a completion of Titurel, known as the Jungerer (Younger) Titurel, composed some thirty years after Wolfram's fragments by a certain Albrecht. The Jungerer Titurel was thought, until the nineteenth century, to be Wolfram's own completion and fuller telling of the story of Sigune and Schionatulander.
Why Wolfram himself chose to tell only a partial saga is unknown, but it may be conjectured that he found the complicated poetic form unwieldy. It is possible that the tune used tonight, which is that found in the Jungerer Titurel, is in fact by Wolfram himself.
Whether Wolfram did write the melody cannot be known, as we have so little information about him, mostly inferences from various autobiographical asides in his poetic works.
From these we have his claim that he was a knight, that he suffered some financial hardship, that he had a daughter, and, from the historical events sited in his works, we know his creative life to have been from about 1195 to 1225.
Beyond that there are his two epic poems, Parzival and Willehalm, the masterpieces of the genre; a handful of love poems; and the important fact that his contemporaries accorded him the highest esteem among the Minnesingers, a position we concur with today.
—Drew Minter
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