The whole affair is a spectacle which I must say is disgusting to healthy minds.  The insinuations are frightful.  Consider, reader, seriously for a moment:  Parsifal—­Siegfried grown to manhood—­knows and cares nothing about womankind.  As soon as he knows what a woman is he revolts, learns through that knowledge and by his acquaintance with suffering—­acquaintance, I say, because he himself has never suffered—­that there are two cures for all the woes of humanity.  Discard women and pity the men.  The thing is absurd, and suggests that the mighty genius was on the verge of imbecility.  But the desire to please mad Ludwig accounts for it all in a very undesirable fashion.

Of the music it is not necessary to say more than that some of it is fine.  For the most part it lacks virility, though there are passages of marvellous loveliness.  The flower-maidens’ waltz shows what Wagner could do in that way; the Good Friday music, dating back to the Lohengrin days, is sweet and fresh.  But the quasi-religious music has no charms for me.

Of course the prelude is in its way, but only in its way, a beautiful thing.  One almost hears the beating of angels’ wings; the remnant of old church melody, fitted into the most modern of modern rhythms, sings out; the old Tannhaeuser and Rienzi Dresden Amen comes out pompously if not very effectively.  On the whole a splendid tour de force is accomplished.  But as soon as the singers are introduced we feel the lack of the inspiration of former days; the writing is not vocal writing at all; it is simply notes chosen at will or at random to fit in with the chord sequences that were constantly shaping themselves in Wagner’s brain—­not sequences that sprang, as he himself would have expressed it, from “the feeling.”  The woes of Amfortas are described by the orchestra with a coldness that would have surprised or stunned Wagner in his Tristan days:  had Meyerbeer done it no paper would have carried his hot words.  When Parsifal shoots the Swan, Gurnemanz has two or three moments of true emotion:  the rest ought to be silence and is rubbish.  The parody of the Lord’s Supper is deplorable:  we have already heard enough of the music in the prelude without having to go through it again.  Klingsor’s magic music is mere theatricalism; about Kundry’s account of Parsifal’s mother I remain in some doubt:  it is certainly beautiful, but to those of us who know the corresponding scene in Siegfried it is rather beggarly.  Parsifal’s denunciation of Kundry after she has kissed him has not a word of the old truthful Wagner in it:  Wagner had written so magnificently about the ecstatic state of Palestrina and such of the other church composers as he knew, that he must, absolutely must, have realised that his Parsifal stuff was essentially untrue.  Theatrically, the end of the Second Act sounds true; but it will not bear rehearing.  The opening of the Third Act, again, is false; and the ending of the whole business is tawdry stuff such as Meyerbeer might have been proud to sign.  Technically, the old man retained his hand; but to compare this decrepit stuff with the music of the Valkyrie would be preposterous, and I have no wish to write more about it.