And there is now a new Bayreuth, where, almost as well as at Bayreuth itself, one can see and hear Wagner’s music as Wagner wished it to be seen and heard.  The square, plain, grey and green Prinz-Regenten Theatre at Munich is an improved copy of the theatre at Bayreuth, with exactly the same ampitheatrical arrangement of seats, the same invisible orchestra and vast stage.  Everything is done as at Bayreuth:  there are even the three “fanfaren” at the doors, with the same punctual and irrevocable closing of the doors at the beginning of each act.  As at Bayreuth, the solemnity of the whole thing makes one almost nervous, for the first few minutes of each act; but, after that, how near one is, in this perfectly darkened, perfectly quiet theatre, in which the music surges up out of the “mystic gulf,” and the picture exists in all the ecstasy of a picture on the other side of it, beyond reality, how near one is to being alone, in the passive state in which the flesh is able to endure the great burdening and uplifting of vision.  There are thus now two theatres in the world in which music and drama can be absorbed, and not merely guessed at.

II.  THE LESSON OF PARSIFAL

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.