The second act opens with the exhibition of Klingsor, as already noted. He is as unreal as the purple light which illumines Kundry when he summons her from the trapdoor in the stage. She rises like Mother Erda in "Siegfried," Act III., but, oh, so different! Away with such cheap and paltry claptrap as this scene! Poor Wagner, he had to write it to explain himself; and in "Parsifal" he needed a lot of explanation. Not all the Ellises nor Wolzogens in the world could blot out the Drury Lane stain of this one scene. Even the exclamatory "Ha, ha!" of the time-dishonored stage villain is not spared us.
The second scene of the act is the magic garden of flower-maidens, Venusberg, No. 2. No. 1 is much better, both dramatically and musically. This one is "Tannhäuser" and water, and very poor water at that. Yet it is the scene which will please the populace most, when the flower-girls are pretty and graceful, for their music is languorous and suggestive of Leo Delibes raised to the seventh power.
But there is nothing human in this whole scene. Kundry, unlike Venus, does not love the man she tempts. Venus is at the heart a passionate, despairing woman. Kundry is the deputed and bewitched instrument of a Wahnfried Cagliostro. Her deed is that of a woman of the pavement; her extenuation the pitiful and transparent fact that she plies her trade in a trance and under an irresistible spell. We see her put in the trance; we see her come out of it. Before and after it she is a rough and revolting yokel with tangled black locks and a gunny bag for her garb. In the trance she is transformed by the power of the magician to a beautiful blonde in a diaphanous décolleté gown.
The symbolism of the whole scene is weak and tottering. The logic of the enlightenment of Parsifal by the long-drawn kiss with wind and string accompaniment (see "Siegfried," Act III.) is beyond finite conception. The symbolism of the waking of a sleeping Valkyr maiden by the first kiss of love is something that even the most hardened society woman might understand; but the employment of a courtesan's salute to enlighten a pure fool by pity is a device which swings futile between heaven and earth.
The last act is a flat desert of tedium, with oases of musical verdure. Gurnemanz has more opportunities to lecture on Amfortas, Good Friday, and similar topics, but even with the aid of Wagner's own musical illustrations he is uninteresting. The foot-washing episode is a pitiable and shocking plagiarism from the life of Christ. The central figure, with its beard, its long hair, and its light-tinted robe, is so like the Good Shepherd of the paintings that it suggests an automaton replica. And this is all so inessential. It is dragged in to give the thing a sacred atmosphere.
The really beautiful places in the first scene of the last act are the splendid proclamation of the Grail theme after the baptism of Parsifal—one of the few bursts of power which recall the Wagner of "Die Walküre"—and the ineffably lovely peacefulness of the Good Friday music. This indeed is an inspired page in the score; but it was written twenty-five years before the drama was produced.
The final scene is a weak and diluted repetition of the second scene of the first act. This time Parsifal unveils the Grail. The music is necessarily built of the same materials. It does not achieve its effect. Neither is the pictorial impression as deep. We have seen it all before. The gorgeous, pealing brass passage at the second entrance to the Grail hall is the most muscular thing in the whole act, but it stands by itself. It seems to have no logical place in the musical scheme.
The score of this drama is mostly a long, faint echo of Wagner's greatest works. Siegfried vainly strives to animate this Parsifalian puppet of renunciation with the blood of the Volsung woe. Cloudlike shreds of "Tristan und Isolde" struggle to float sunset tints across this pallid sky. All is copying, futile, without inspiration, without newness,—a hotch-potch of the old marketable materials made over with much constructive skill, but with commercial thrift and inartistic insincerity. There is hardly a note of honest æsthetic conviction in the whole thing. One is inclined to think that Wagner did not believe in it himself.
These, then, are the conclusions gathered from performances in a common opera-house of Wagner's religious, symbolical, ethical, philosophical, and highly gilded summary of his artistic creed. When this work is played in Baireuth, where churchly airs are assumed and the people robe their spirits in sackcloth and ashes, the impression is different. But now that "Parsifal" has come out into the light of morning and faced the cold glare of the work-day world, it must be measured by the artistic standards which are applied to Wagner's other dramas. Weighed in the balance with "Tristan und Isolde" or any of the "Ring" works, except perhaps "Rheingold," to which it is artistically not a stranger, it must be found wanting. Beside "Tannhäuser," which treats the same subject, it is a mass of glittering artificialities. Wagner was wise in wishing that this drama should be preserved for home consumption.