ABSTRACT
Real love for Wagner entailed a pilgrimage to Bayreuth; and probably the worshippers who in the' eighties and nineties made the trip to the small German town were driven by the same hopes that had spurred an earlier generation up Rydal Mount. He would have known of the importance of Bayreuth and with it of Parsifal, and also of the near-religious awe in which the master was held. In very general terms, Parsifal presents the opposition between Christian and Pagan forces. For Wagner's work is a version of the grail legend, and it relies for most of its details on the thirteenth-century Parsifal by Wolfram von Eschenbach. Briefly, this is the situation with which the music-drama opens. In an essay called Not Listening to Music, which he also wrote in 1939, Forster wryly confesses that his delight in Wagner springs from the fact that his music is explicit.
