And so, the Grail was nothing other than the Black Stone of the Ka'aba, the central shrine of the world's last religion, purified judaeo-christianity, Islam. Makkah is named in the Qur'an as the Mother of Cities, and thus the 'birthplace of all nations' and the Ka'aba is named the 'primal shrine of all mankind'. Embedded in one corner of the Ka'aba stands the Black Stone which every muslim raises his lips to and kisses when he arrive dusty and exhausted as a pilgrim, kisses as if quenching his thirst. This is the extraordinary tale that Wagner has, partly despite himself, and partly aware, chosen to tell the world in his farewell revolutionary message. Both the Bey of Tunis and Abd al-Hamid II , Caliph of Islam, contributed to the foundation of Bayreuth, they had not yet heard Parsifal , but their hearts drew them to this most spiritual of men among men in an age of darkness. When Parsifal ends in its vast serenity, 'One of the most beautiful ...
Comments
Does the answer lie here?
One of the pieces that I'm doing is the Schoenberg/Marx brother's tennis match. Who was the person who always wanted to be Schoenberg's student? I can never remember.
Adolf Weiss?
No. No. No. The populist. Gershwin! Gershwin, Harpo, Oscar Levant, and Schoenberg used to play tennis every Wednesday. If not Harpo, then Groucho and sometimes Chaplin...blah blah blah. That was the standard foursome. I always understood that John Cage was the ball boy. Is it possible that it's him. Yes, but then I suspect Schoenberg's finger is in the pie there somewhere.
Schoenberg used to apparently carry around, I didn't know this either, he used to travel round with a violin case. People would actually query him, "Arnie, I didn't know you were a fiddler." He was not a fiddler. He had table tennis paddles and a net in the violin case. He was a maniac table tennis player.
Whatever, I bet it wasn't Toscanini.