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 the virtue which makes him a redeemer? The data of Parsifal when considered closely appear the most incoherent that Wagner ever collected, and it is only the theatrical beauty of the decorative images accompanying them that save this incoherence from being unbearable when the work is performed. We are not forgetting that the music of the religious scenes in Parsifal will remain among the finest creations of universal art. But that is no sort of reason for respecting what calls for derision, or if you prefer it a yawn. I mean the ideology, the spurious hermetism of this work. This hermetism is nothing but an impressionism, often puerile, putting on airs of deep thought. It is concentrated in the figure of the enigmatic Kundry, over whom the simplicity of some commentators has exhausted its efforts, without their perceiving that the ease with which a hundred meanings each more elusive than the last can be found in Kundry must have some explanation, and an unfortunate one. Kundry is the amorphous conglomeration under one proper name of a thousand confused scraps of sensations, abstractions and dreams. It must be noted that already in some parts of Tristan, Wagner had adopted a form of utterance that does not seek to have any particular sense, but aims only at the voluptuously vague impression engendered by a certain mellowness of sound in the words and syllables. Kundry is created by the same process. And it was this aspect of Wagner that exercised some attraction over our symbolist school of 1890.

There is one idea that one finds again and again in all Wagner's works; it occupies a dominant place