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Updated: May 24, 2025
We see this notion working in Wagner's mind continually in the prose writings, and in his last opera we see Parsifal, the "pure fool," "redeeming" an over-civilised world. To glorify the idiot absolute in this fashion was to out-Rousseau Rousseau though Wagner would have scorned the suggestion. In Siegfried he goes by no means so far; but he goes quite far enough.
Whereupon Parsifal flies at her and seizes her by the throat; but Gurnemanz holds him back, and Kundry sinks down exhausted. Parsifal answers to the "Thor," but it remains to be seen whether he is the "reine Thor."
He had heard Catholics aver, while approving of the performance of "Parsifal," that they would not wish to see the piece performed out of Bayreuth. But he failed to understand this point of view altogether. It seemed to assume that a parody of the Mass was unobjectionable at Bayreuth, though not elsewhere.
One finds it difficult to understand how ever the thing came to be tolerated by musicians. Of course the desire to find a counter-blast to Wagner has done much for Verdi; but while one can understand how Dr. Stanford and others hoped to sweep away "Parsifal" with "Otello" and "Falstaff," it is not so easy to see what on earth they proposed to do with "Traviata."
There is another, and by this second departure from the old legends which furnished forth his subject, Wagner made "Lohengrin" and "Parsifal" forever irreconcilable. The whole fabric of the older opera rests on the forbidden question: Nie solist du mich befragen, noch Wissen's Sorge tragen, woher ich kam der Fahrt, noch wie mein Nam' und Art.
Wagner's mind was the mind to which all legend is sacred, every symbol of divine things to be held in reverence; but symbol, with him, was after all a means to an end, and could never have been accepted as really an end in itself. I should say that in "Parsifal" he is profoundly religious, but not because he intended, or did not intend, to shadow the Christian mysteries.
Of course I do not really mean that he would be catching flies; I only mean that the usual operatic gestures which consist in reaching first one hand out into the air and then the other might suggest the sport I speak of if the operator attended strictly to business and uttered no sound. This present opera was "Parsifal." Madame Wagner does not permit its representation anywhere but in Bayreuth.
But these Germanised Scotchmen and Englishmen work hard for Bayreuth: now they whisper in awestruck tones of the beauty and significance of "Parsifal"; now they howl at the unhappy writers in the daily and weekly Press who dare to find little significance and less beauty in the Bayreuth representation; and, to do them bare justice, until lately they have been fairly successful in persuading the world to think with them.
He feels himself for a moment identified with Amfortas, whom the woman had kissed as she kissed him. Amfortas's wound burns in his own side. Not only that: the sinful, disorderly, unsubduable passion torturing Amfortas, for a moment tortures equally Parsifal, whose nature is thrown by it into a horror of self-hatred, and casts itself upon frenzied prayer for deliverance and pardon.
Old-school Wagnerites and anti-Wagnerites will have gone off together into the night, and the echo of the noise of all their feuds will have died away. No one will venture to talk of the "teaching" of "Parsifal" or any other of Wagner's works; the legends from which he constructed his works will have lost their novelty.
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