On Sunday the illiterate part of the audience insisted on applauding Acts II. and III. of Parsifal, in spite of all the protests of the cultured hearers; and the effect was most distressing and shocking. The allusions to the Eucharist are of such a nature that it was almost as unseemly as it would be to clap a church choir during the Communion Service; and putting aside the gross irreverence and unseemliness of such conduct, it is an outrage and fraud on the public, who are at these moments wrapped in religious thought, and whom it is brutal and shameful to disturb by a revolting noise.
In his diary for 1891, Bute notes that he had written a letter to Frau Wagner, begging her to take steps to prevent any applause during the representation of Parsifal; but it is not recorded if this appeal had the desired effect.
Incognito in Sicily
The travels on the Continent were carried out without any sort of ostentation; and Bute found it even expedient occasionally to preserve his incognito when abroad. Thus he wrote on one occasion to one of his oldest friends:
Ascension Day, 1882.
Aci Reale, Sicily.
The outside of your letter gave me, I confess, less pleasure than any I have ever had from you. You know the state of Sicily, and the way brigands have with people whom they believe to have money. Consequently, when ordered here by the doctors I was urged both in Naples and Messina to drop my title absolutely; and I am known here only as "B. Crichton Stuart." You may thus imagine the discontent with which I saw "The Marquess of Bute" staring me in the face out of the letter-rack in the hall.
Pray be most careful both to address me only as B.C.S., and also to keep your knowledge of my whereabouts most strictly to yourself. I need not point out the great annoyance and possible danger to which you might otherwise expose me.
I have been very ailing for more than a year. Sometimes I feel as though the horizon of life were closing in, and wish I could recall the rest of the verse beginning:
When languor and disease invade
This trembling house of clay....[[5]]
But the warmth and sunshine here are helping me. I propose, when my "cure" is over (for good or evil), to go to Greece, and look for quarters in Athens where I may spend the winter with my wife and child.