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Updated: May 24, 2025
By reason of its subject it stands apart, and performed as it is at Bayreuth and there, save for sacrilegious New York, alone, with the utmost splendour of mounting, interpreted by artists devoted heart and soul to its cause, and listened to by an audience of the elect assembled from the four corners of the earth, 'Parsifal, so to speak, is as yet surrounded by a halo of almost unearthly splendour.
Distance from the accidents of real life, atmosphere, the space for a new, fairer world to form itself, being of the essence of Wagner's representation, it is worth noticing how adroitly he throws back this world of his, farther and farther into the background, by a thousand tricks of lighting, the actual distance of the stage from the proscenium, and by such calculated effects, as that long scene of the Graal, with its prolonged movement and ritual, through the whole of which Parsifal stands motionless, watching it all.
But when he forgot, and pleased himself just for a moment, the enemy got the Spear and wounded him with it. No one could cure him till poor Parsifal came along a poor simpleton who had been brought up in the desert. And the only reason he could win back the Spear, and cure the king, and bring back the symbol of God's Presence on earth again, was that he was so sorry for the king.
In 1845 his new opera, "Tannhäuser," proved at first a comparative failure. The subject, one which had been proposed to Weber in 1814, attracted Wagner while he was in Paris, and during his studies for the libretto he found also the first suggestions of "Lohengrin" and "Parsifal."
The artiste and the vulgarian held each other's hands for the first time; they gasped a mutual wonder at their own perception and their unsuspected nobility of soul. "Parsifal," he declared, with true Celtic love of exaggeration, "to be the oiliest flattery ever poured down the open throat of a liquorish humanity."
Parsifal may be a new idea in horses, but the next time I go buggy riding it will be in a street car. When we reached home that afternoon I found a note from Bunch which cheered me up wonderfully. The note read as follows: CITY, Sunday Morning. DEAR JOHN Sorry we had the run in but it was all my fault. Am sending you two rosebuds this evening as a peace offering. Yours, BUNCH. "Two rosebuds!"
"Who is the Grail?" asks Parsifal, as they walk. "That may not be put into words," replies Gurnemanz, "but, if you are of the chosen, you cannot fail to learn. And, see now! I believe I know who you are.
The development of the themes of "Tristan" and "Die Meistersinger" and "Parsifal" out of single kernels; the fine logical sequence, the expositions of the thematic material of "Parsifal" in the prelude and in Gurnamanz's narrative, and its subsequent reappearance and adventures and developments, are something like a summit of symphonic art as Beethoven made it to be understood.
Wagner could have said of you, had he so wished, what Haendel is reported to have said of the composer from whom he borrowed, "Of what use is such a good idea to a man like him?" One must indeed go to Wagner for the appreciation of many of the inventions, the Siegmund and Sieglinde, the Parsifal and Kundry, music, which you cast from you so carelessly.
And they go away refreshed, and again spread the report of the artistic and moral and religious supremacy of Bayreuth; and the world listens and goes up joyfully to Bayreuth to be taxed one pound sterling per head per "Parsifal" representation.
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