Parsifal | Page 8

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 a long spear. In silence the knight un-helms, and, sticking the spear into the ground, kneels before it, and remains lost in devotional contemplation. The "Spear" and "Grail" motives mingle together in the full tide of orchestral sounds carrying on the emotional undercurrent of the drama. The knight is soon recognized by both as the long-lost and discarded Parsifal.
The "guileless one" has learned wisdom, and discovered his mission--he knows now that he bears the spear which is to heal the king's grievous wound, and that he himself is appointed his successor. Through long strife and trial and pain he seems to have grown into something of Christ's own likeness. Not all at once, but at last he has found the path. He returns to bear salvation and pardon both to Kundry and the wretched king, Amfortas.
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