[Musical excerpt—­“Komm, Komm, holder Knabe,” The seductive song of the Flower maidens]

But they fail of their purpose, as does also an unwilling siren whom the magician invokes with powerful conjurations.  It is Kundry, who is half Magdalen, half wicked sorceress, a messenger in the service of the pious knights, and as such hideous of aspect; a tool in the hands of the magician, and as such supernaturally beautiful.  It was to her charms that the suffering king had yielded.  To win the youth she tells him the story of his mother’s death and gives to him her last message and—­a kiss!  At the touch of her impure lips a flood of passion, hitherto unfelt, pours through the veins of the lad, and in its surge comes understanding of the suffering and woe which he had witnessed in the castle on the mountain.  Also a sense of his own remissness.  Compassionate pity brings enlightenment; and he thrusts back the woman who is seeking to destroy him.  Finding that the wiles of his tool have availed him naught, the wicked magician himself appears to give battle, for he, too, knows the oracle and fears the coming of the king’s deliverer and the loss of the weapon which he hopes will yet enable him to achieve the mystical talisman.  He hurls the lance at the youth, but it remains suspended in midair.  The lad seizes it, makes the sign of the cross, speaks some words of exorcism, and garden, castle, damsels—­all the works of enchantment disappear.

Now the young hero is conscious of a mission.  He must find again the abode of the knights and their ailing king, and bring to them surcease of suffering.  After long and grievous wanderings he is again directed to the castle.  Grief and despair have overwhelmed the knights, whose king, unable longer to endure the torture in which he has lived, has definitively refused to perform his holy office.  In consequence, his father, no longer the recipient of supernatural sustenance, has died, and the king longs to follow him.  The hero touches the wound in the side of the king with the sacred spear, ends his dolors, and is hailed as king in his place.  The temptress, who has followed him as a penitent, freed from a curse which had rested upon her for ages, goes to a blissful and eternal rest.

* * *

Such is the story of Wagner’s “Parsifal.”  It is the purpose of this book to help the musical layman who loves lyric drama to enjoyment.  Criticism might do this, but a purpose of simple exposition has already been proclaimed, and shall be adhered to lest some reader think that he is being led too far afield.  In this case the exposition shall take the form of a marshalling of the elements of the story in two aspects—­religious and legendary.  Careful readers of English literature will have had no difficulty in recognizing in it a story of the quest of the Holy Grail.  Tennyson will have taught them that the hero is that