Parsifal | Page 8

seizes it--it is the sacred talisman, one
touch of which will heal even as it inflicted the king's deadly wound.
With a mighty cry and the shock as of an earthquake, the castle of
Klingsor falls shattered to pieces, the garden withers up to a desert, the
girls, who have rushed in, lie about among the fading flowers,
themselves withered up and dead. Kundry sinks down in a deathly
swoon, while Parsifal steps over a ruined wall and disappears, saluting
her with the words: "Thou alone knowest when we shall meet again!"
* * * * *
The long shadows were stealing over the hills when I came out at the
second pause. Those whom I met and conversed with were subdued
and awed. What a solemn tragedy of human passion we had been
assisting at! Not a heart there but could interpret that struggle between
the flesh and the spirit from its own experiences. Not one but knew the
desperately wicked and deceitful temptations that come like
enchantresses in the wizard's garden, to plead the cause of the devil in
the language of high-flown sentiment or even religious feeling.
Praise and criticism seemed dumb; we rather walked and spoke of what
we had just witnessed like men convinced of judgment, and
righteousness, and sin. It was a strange mood in which to come out of a
theater after witnessing what would commonly be called an "Opera." I
felt more than ever the impossibility of producing the Parsifal in
London, at Drury Lane or Covent Garden, before a well-dressed
company of loungers, who had well dined, and were on their way to
balls and suppers afterward.

I would as soon see the Oberammergau play at a music-hall.
No; in Parsifal all is solemn, or all is irreverent. At Bayreuth we came
on a pilgrimage; it cost us time, and trouble, and money; we were in
earnest--so were the actors; the spirit of the great master who had
planned every detail seemed still to preside over all; the actors lived in
their parts; not a thought of self remained; no one accepted applause or
recall; no one aimed at producing a personal effect; the actors were lost
in the drama, and it was the drama and not the actors which has
impressed and solemnized us. When I came out they asked me who was
Amfortas? I did not know. I said "the wounded king."
As the instruments played out the Faith and Love motive for us to
reenter, the mellow sunshine broke once more from the cloud-rack over
city, and field, and forest, before sinking behind the long low range of
the distant hills.

Act III
The opening prelude of the third and last act seems to warn me of the
lapse of time. The music is full of pain and restlessness--the pain of
wretched years of long waiting for a deliverer, who comes not; the
restlessness and misery of a hope deferred, the weariness of life without
a single joy. The motives, discolored as it were by grief, work up to a
distorted version of the Grail subject, which breaks off as with a cry of
despair.
Is the Grail, too, then turned into a mocking spirit to the unhappy
Amfortas?
Relief comes to us with the lovely scene upon which the curtain rises.
Again the wide summer-land lies stretching away over sunlit moor and
woodland. In the foreground wave the forest trees, and I hear the ripple
of the woodland streams. Invariably throughout the drama, in the midst
of all human pain and passion, great Nature is there, peaceful,
harmonious in all her loveliest moods, a paradise in which dwell souls

who make of her their own purgatory.
In yonder aged figure, clad in the Grail pilgrim robe, I discern
Gurnemanz; his hair is white; he stoops with years; a rude hut is hard
by. Presently a groan arrests his attention, moaning as of a human thing
in distress. He clears away some brushwood, and beneath it finds,
waking from her long trance, the strange figure of Kundry. For how
many years she has slept we know not. Why is she now recalled to life?
She staggers to her feet; we see that she too is in a pilgrim garb, with a
rope girding her dress of coarse brown serge. "Service! service!" she
mutters, and, seizing a pitcher, moves mechanically to fill it at the well,
then totters but half awake into the wooden hut. The forest music
breaks forth--the hum of happy insect life, the song of wild birds. All
seems to pass as in a vision, when suddenly enters a knight clad in
black armor from top to toe.
The two eye him curiously, and Gurnemanz, approaching, bids him lay
aside his armor and his weapons. He carries