(In maddest tumult, by sin defiled, my blood back on itself doth turn and rage within me; to the world where sin is lord in frenzied fear is it surging; again it forces the door, in torrents it poureth forth, here through the spear-wound, alike to His, and dealt me by the self-same deadly spear that once the Redeemer pierced with pain, and, tears of blood outpouring, the Holy One wept for the shame of man, in pity's god-like yearning,-- and from this my wound, the Grail's own chosen, the holy relics' guardian, of redemption's balm the warder, the sinful fiery flood wells forth, ever renewed from the fount of longing that, ah! never penance more may still!)
So hofft sein sündenreu'ger Hüter, da er nicht sterben kann, wann je er ihn erschaut, sein Ende zu erzwingen, und mit dem Leben seine Qual zu enden.
(Thus hopes its sin-repentant guardian, since he can perish not while on it he doth gaze, by force to draw death to him, and with his life to end his cruel torment.)
How incredibly careless is the construction here--the long, involved sentences, the parentheses, the separation of substantive and verb by several lines! It is this absence of poetic concentration that makes _Parsifal_ a trifle _langweilig_ at times; for no matter how expressive Wagner may make the orchestral music, he cannot quite reconcile us to the frequent flatness of the vocal writing and the difficulty we often have in getting the sense, or even the grammatical construction, of the words. That Wagner at the end of his life could put together a text like _Parsifal_ after having made the poems of _Tristan_ and the _Ring_ is not in the least a proof of mental collapse, but only of the almost insuperable difficulties in the way of finding a perfect compromise between music and dramatic poetry. He was fortunate enough, in the case of _Tristan_, to hit upon a subject that was comparatively easy to concentrate. Two duties, it must be remembered, an operatic poem has to perform: it has to provide the composer with opportunities for emotional expression, and it has to make a story clear to the spectator. The ideal text would be that in which the action was implicit in the emotion, that is to say, one in which there was no need for any explanation, through the mouth of this or that actor, of events that were happening off the stage or that had occurred before the drama began. It is when the composer has to interrupt his purely emotional outpouring in order to allow the poet to become explanatory that he realises the difficulty of making his opera musical throughout. Even in _Tristan_ Wagner could not wholly dispense with a certain amount of explanation, in the first act, of the events in Ireland and Cornwall that have led up to the situation in which Tristan and Isolde now find themselves. The music in consequence halts decidedly at times; all the art of the composer cannot disguise the fact that he is momentarily being held up by the exigencies of the stage poet. In the _Ring_, as it was first drafted, Wagner was faced with the same problem, but he solved it in another way. _Siegfried's Death_ was to be merely the climax of a long sequence of tragic events. Without some knowledge of these events, however, the spectator would be unable to understand the final tragedy. So Wagner resorted to the device of making the characters themselves recapitulate the earlier stages of the story, in much the same way that Isolde, in the first act of _Tristan_, tells Brangaene--for the benefit of the audience, of course--all about the coming of Tristan to Ireland, his slaying of Morold, her nursing of the wounded Cornish hero, his wooing her as bride for King Marke, and so on. In the opening scene of _Siegfried's Death_ the Norns tell each other--again for the benefit of the audience--how Alberich ravished the gold from the Rhine, made a ring from it, and enslaved the Nibelung race; how the ring was stolen, and Alberich himself became a thrall; how the giants built Valhalla for the gods, and, denied their promised reward, got possession of the ring that the gods had stolen from Alberich; how there was born a free hero, destined to redeem the gods from _their_ bondage; how Siegfried slew the dragon and wakened Brynhilde from her sleep. Having made all this clear in an introductory scene, Wagner raises the curtain upon Siegfried and Brynhilde.