The performance of "Parsifal," as I saw it at Bayreuth, seemed to me the
most really satisfying performance I had ever seen in a theatre; and I
have often, since then, tried to realise for myself exactly what it was
that one might learn from that incarnation of the ideas, the theoretical
ideas, of Wagner. The music itself has the abstract quality of Coventry
Patmore's odes. I cannot think of it except in terms of sight. Light
surges up out of it, as out of unformed depths; light descends from it,
as from the sky; it breaks into flashes and sparkles of light, it
broadens out into a vast sea of light. It is almost metaphysical music;
pure ideas take visible form, humanise themselves in a new kind of
ecstasy. The ecstasy has still a certain fever in it; these shafts of
light sometimes pierce the soul like a sword; it is not peace, the peace
of Bach, to whom music can give all he wants; it is the unsatisfied
desire of a kind of flesh of the spirit, and music is but a voice.
"Parsifal" is religious music, but it is the music of a religion which
had never before found expression. I have found in a motet of Vittoria
one of the motives of "Parsifal," almost note for note, and there is no
doubt that Wagner owed much to Palestrina and his school. But even the
sombre music of Vittoria does not plead and implore like Wagner's. The
outcry comes and goes, not only with the suffering of Amfortas, the
despair of Kundry. This abstract music has human blood in it.
What Wagner has tried to do is to unite mysticism and the senses, to
render mysticism through the senses. Mr. Watts-Dunton has pointed out
that that is what Rossetti tried to do in painting. That mysterious
intensity of expression which we see in the faces of Rossetti's latest
pictures has something of the same appeal as the insatiable crying-out
of a carnal voice, somewhere in the depths of Wagner's latest music.
In "Parsifal," more perhaps than anywhere else in his work, Wagner
realised the supreme importance of monotony, the effect that could be
gained by the incessant repetition of a few ideas. All that music of
the closing scene of the first act is made out of two or three phrases,
and it is by the finest kind of invention that those two or three
phrases are developed, and repeated, and woven together into so splendid
a tissue. And, in the phrases themselves, what severity, what bareness
almost! It is in their return upon themselves, their weighty reiterance,
that their force and significance become revealed; and if, as Nietzsche
says, they end by hypnotising us, well, all art is a kind of hypnotic
process, a cunning absorption of the will of another.
"Parsifal" presents itself as before all things a picture. The music,
soaring up from hidden depths, and seeming to drop from the heights, and
be reflected back from shining distances, though it is, more than
anything I have ever heard, like one of the great forces of nature, the
sea or the wind, itself makes pictures, abstract pictures; but even the
music, as one watches the stage, seems to subordinate itself to the
visible picture there. And, so perfectly do all the arts flow into one,
the picture impresses one chiefly by its rhythm, the harmonies of its
convention. The lesson of "Parsifal" is the lesson that, in art, rhythm
is everything. Every moment in the acting of this drama makes a picture,
and every movement is slow, deliberate, as if automatic. No actor makes
a gesture, which has not been regulated for him; there is none of that
unintelligent haphazard known as being "natural"; these people move like
music, or with that sense of motion which it is the business of painting
to arrest. Gesture being a part of a picture, how should it but be
settled as definitely, for that pictorial effect which all action on the
stage is (more or less unconsciously) striving after, as if it were the
time of a song, or the stage direction: "Cross stage to right"? Also,
every gesture is slow; even despair having its artistic limits, its
reticence. It is difficult to express the delight with which one sees,
for the first time, people really motionless on the stage. After all,
action, as it has been said, is only a way of spoiling something. The
aim of the modern stage, of all drama, since the drama of the Greeks,
is to give a vast impression of bustle, of people who, like most people
in real life, are in a hurry about things; and our actors, when they are
not making irrelevant speeches, are engaged in frantically trying to
make us see that they are feeling acute emotion, by I know not what
restlessness, contortion, and ineffectual excitement. If it were once
realised how infinitely more important are the lines in the picture than
these staccato extravagances which do but aim at tearing it out of its
frame, breaking violently through it, we should have learnt a little, at
least, of what the art of the stage should be, of what Wagner has shown
us that it can be.
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. How that solitary
figure at the side, merely looking on, though, unknown to himself, he is
the centre of the action, also gives one the sense of remoteness, which
it was Wagner's desire to produce, throwing back the action into a
reflected distance, as we watch someone on the stage who is watching it!
The beauty of this particular kind of acting and staging is of course
the beauty of convention. The scenery, for instance, with what an
enchanting leisure it merely walks along before one's eyes, when a
change is wanted! Convention, here as in all plastic art, is founded on
natural truth very closely studied. The rose is first learned, in every
wrinkle of its petals, petal by petal, before that reality is
elaborately departed from, in order that a new, abstract beauty may be
formed out of those outlines, all but those outlines being left out.
And "Parsifal," which is thus solemnly represented before us, has in it,
in its very essence, that hieratic character which it is the effort of
supreme art to attain. At times one is reminded of the most beautiful
drama in the world, the Indian drama "Sakuntala": in that litter of
leaves, brought in so touchingly for the swan's burial, in the old
hermit watering his flowers. There is something of the same universal
tenderness, the same religious linking together of all the world, in
some vague enough, but very beautiful, Pantheism. I think it is beside
the question to discuss how far Wagner's intentions were technically
religious: how far Parsifal himself is either Christ or Buddha, and how
far Kundry is a new Magdalen. 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. His music, his
acting, are devout, because the music has a disembodied ecstasy, and the
acting a noble rhythm, which can but produce in us something of the
solemnity of sensation produced by the service of the Mass, and are in
themselves a kind of religious ceremonial.