I've found the holy grail of the knights of Monsalvat, from Wagner's Parsifal. And I found it not in northern Spain, as per Wagner's libretto, but in the far north-west of Scotland, and one of the world's greatest mountain-forms, Suilven – at least according to the last stanza of Norman MacCaig's poem Moment Musical in Assynt:
I listen through my eyes and see through that
Mellifluous din of shapes my masterpiece
Of masterpieces:
One sandstone chord that holds up time in space –
Sforzando Suilven reared on his ground base.
That is the single most compact and complete verse about the relationship between Gurnemanz sings to Parsifal, just before the grail scene in the first act of Wagner's Parsifal:
"Du siehst, mein Sohn,/ zum Raum wird hier die Zeit." ("You see, my son,/here time becomes space").
Wagner never made it to the Highlands of Scotland; if he did, he would have found a place that sings a millennia-old song of time becoming space – the holy grail of his last, and most conceptually and spiritually ambitious opera.
