For all these beings, and behind them Wagner, and behind him his time,
yearn for the past, the pre-natal, the original sleep, and find in such
a return their great fulfilment. Siegmund finds in the traits of his
beloved his own childhood. Siegfried awakes on the flame-engirdled hill
a woman who watched over him before he was born, and waited unchanged
for his ripening. It is with the kiss of Herzeleide that Kundry enmeshes
Parsifal. Brunhilde struggles for the forgiving embrace of Wotan, sinks
on the breast of the god in submission, reconciliation, immolation. And
it is towards an engulfing consummation, some extinction that is both
love and death and deeper than both, that the music of his operas
aspires. The fire that licks the rock of the Walkyrie, the Rhine that
rises in the finale of "Goetterdaemmerung" and inundates the scene and
sweeps the world with its silent, laving tides, the gigantic blossom
that opens its corolla in the Liebestod and buries the lovers in a rain
of scent and petals, the tranquil ruby glow of the chalice that suffuses
the close of "Parsifal," are the moments toward which the dramas
themselves labor, and in which they attain their legitimate conclusion,
completion and end. But not only his finales are full of that
entrancement.
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