I wish Wagner had been more
careless, less German, and left more. It was through his endeavours to
get unity, to show the close relation of each incident to every other
incident, that he nearly came to utter grief. The drama was so
gigantic, to secure sympathy for Wotan it was so necessary to secure
sympathy for the minor characters whose story helps to make up Wotan's
story, that Wagner seemed perpetually afraid that the real, main
drama would be forgotten. And it is true that the story of Siegmund
and Sieglinde, or of Siegfried and Bruennhilde, absorbs one for a time
so completely that one forgets all about Wotan and his woes. So Wagner
came near to spoiling one of the most tremendous achievements of the
human mind, by shoving old Wotan on to the stage again and again to
recapitulate his troubles. But of these interruptions "The Dusk of the
Gods" has none. The story proceeds swiftly, inevitably to the end;
from the first bar to the last, the music is as splendid as any Wagner
ever wrote. It is the fitting conclusion to the vision of life
presented in the "Ring": it is a funeral chant, mournful, sombre, but
triumphant. The seed has been sown, the crop has grown and ripened and
been harvested, and now the thing is over: a chill wind pipes over the
empty stubble-land where late the yellow corn stood and the labourers
laboured: there is nothing more: "ripeness is all" that life offers or
means.

"PARSIFAL"

"Parsifal" is an immoral work. One cannot for a moment suppose that
Wagner, who had written "Tristan" and "Siegfried," meant to preach
downright immorality, or that he meant "Parsifal" to stand as anything
more than the expression of a momentary mood, the mood of the
exhausted, the effete man, the mood which follows the mood of
"Tristan" as certainly as night follows day. Nevertheless, in so far
as "Parsifal" says anything to us, in so far as it brings, in
Nonconformist cant, "a message," it is immoral and vicious, just as in
so far as "Siegfried" carries a message it is entirely moral,
healthful, and sane. It is useless to quibble about this, seeking to
explain away plain things: the truth remains that "Siegfried" is a
glorification of one view of life, "Parsifal" of its direct opposite
and flat contradiction; and anyone who accepts the one view must needs
loathe the other as sinful. To me the "Siegfried" view of life
commends itself; and I unhesitatingly assert the sinfulness of the
"Parsifal" view. The tw