I have found in a motet of Vittoria
one of the motives of "Parsifal," almost note for note, and there is no
doubt that Wagner owed much to Palestrina and his school. But even the
sombre music of Vittoria does not plead and implore like Wagner's. The
outcry comes and goes, not only with the suffering of Amfortas, the
despair of Kundry. This abstract music has human blood in it.
What Wagner has tried to do is to unite mysticism and the senses, to
render mysticism through the senses. Mr. Watts-Dunton has pointed out
that that is what Rossetti tried to do in painting. That mysterious
intensity of expression which we see in the faces of Rossetti's latest
pictures has something of the same appeal as the insatiable crying-out
of a carnal voice, somewhere in the depths of Wagner's latest music.
In "Parsifal," more perhaps than anywhere else in his work, Wagner
realised the supreme importance of monotony, the effect that could be
gained by the incessant repetition of a few ideas. All that music of
the closing scene of the first act is made out of two or three phrases,
and it is by the finest kind of invention that those two or three
phrases are developed, and repeated, and woven together into so splendid
a tissue.
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