Sexual love
has undergone a change, it is no longer love in the true sense, but the
unconditional love of the mystic. The enigmatical figure of Kundry is
not the impersonation of one woman, she is woman herself. The
incarnation of everything female, she embodies the sensuous, seductive
and destructive element together with the contempt of the man who falls
under her spell, as well as the motherly, and finally the
humbly-administrative principle, which so far had not yet become a part
of the erotic ideal. She is both positive and negative, a blind tool of
the element of evil which prompts man to forget his higher mission
(reminiscent of the second mediaeval period), and passionately yearning
for salvation. She dies before the Holy Grail, the religious ideal made
visible. Beside Kundry there are the flower-maidens, naively sensuous
beings, who blossom like the flowers and fade again, unconscious and
irresponsible. I refrain from a discussion of this work, which would
lead too far, and only maintain that the music, corresponding to the
text, is entirely unerotic and unsentimental, absolutely pure and
religious.
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