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Guntram gratefully accepted his hosts invitation, and when he had supped he conversed with the old man, whom he found well-informed and cultured. You appear to be fond of music, said the knight, indicating a harp which lay in a corner of the room.
But ere she was buried she disappeared from her coffin and was seen no more. When the story was ended they had arrived at the door of the knights chamber, and in bidding him good night the attendant counselled him to say his paternoster should anything untoward happen. Guntram wondered at his words, but at length fell asleep.
When at length the wedding day arrived everything seemed propitious, and there was nothing to indicate the misfortune which threatened the bridegroom. The couple approached the altar and the priest joined their hands. Suddenly Guntram fell to the ground, foaming and gasping, and was carried thence to his home.
But the interest of the act does not lie in this anticipated dénouement, which since Parsifal has become rather common; it lies in another scene, which has evidently been inserted at the last moment, and which is uncomfortably out of tune with the action, though in a singularly grand way. This scene gives us a dialogue between Guntram and his former companion, Friedhold.
For this is the world of Gregory of Tours, of which you may read in his History of the Franks. The rule under which it lives is the rule of the horrible Merovingian kings. Side by side with the villas barbarism spreads and flourishes like a jungle growth. Learning is dying hardly the ghost of a university is left and Gregory himself who came of a great Gallo-Roman family and was a bishop bewails his ignorance of grammar. The towns are shrinking, crouched behind their defences. The synagogues are flaming, and the first step has been taken in that tragic tale of proscription and tallage, tallage and expulsion which (it seems) must never end. As to politics, the will of the leader and his retinue is the rule of the Franks, and purge and bloodbath mark every stage in the rivalry of the Merovingian princes. The worst of them are devils like Chilperic and Fredegond, the best of them are still barbarians like that King Guntram, who fills so many indulgent pages in Gregory of Tours. He is a vaguely contemporary figure, a fat, voluble man, now purring with jovial good nature, now bursting into explosions of wrath and violence, a strange mixture of bonhomie and brutality. It is an ironic commentary on what has happened to civilization that Gregory should regard him with affection, that he should be known as 'Good King Guntram' and that the church should actually have canonized him after his death. Good King Guntram; Michelet has summed him up in a phrase 'Ce bon roi
One May morning, while Liba was seated at a window of the castle watching the ships pass to and fro on the glassy bosom of the Rhine, she beheld Guntram riding up the approach to Falkenburg, and hastened to meet him. The gallant knight informed his betrothed that he was on his way to the Palsgrave to receive his fief, and had but turned aside in his journey in order to greet his beloved.
But while Strauss had been travelling in the East he had conceived a sudden horror for this Christian annihilation of will, and Guntram revolts along with him, and refuses to submit to the rules of his Order.
Guntram was the cause of bitter disappointment to its author. He did not succeed in getting it produced at Munich, for the orchestra and singers declared that the music could not be performed. It is even said that they got an eminent critic to draw up a formal document, which they sent to Strauss, certifying that Guntram was not meant to be sung.
The chief difficulty was the length of the principal part, which took up by itself, in its musings and discourses, the equivalent of an act and a half. Some of its monologues, like the song in the second act, last half an hour on end. Nevertheless, Guntram was performed at Weimar on 16 May, 1894.
Friedhold had initiated him in former days, and he now comes to reproach him for his crime, and to bring him before the Order, who will judge him. In the original version of the poem Guntram complies, and sacrifices his passion to his vow.
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