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Parsifal the Opera

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Parsifal (WWV 111) is an opera in three acts by German composer Richard Wagner, who wrote both the music and the words. The opera is loosely based on the poem Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach, an early 13th-century epic poem about the Arthurian knight Parzival (Percival) and his quest for the Holy Grail, together with other medieval sources. Wagner conceived the work in the spring of 1857 but did not finish it until 25 years later. It was his last completed opera and composed for the particular acoustics of his Festspielhaus (opera house) in Bayreuth. Parsifal was produced, by the composer himself, for its first performance at the second Bayreuth Festival in 1882.

This web site presents and assesses a wide range of views about, and reactions to, Wagner's Parsifal, together with some primary material, some source material, comparisons of the opera with that source material, and even some background to the source material. It is an attempt to help those who are intimidated by Parsifal and a guide through the controversy and confusion surrounding it. The web site was conceived as a single hypertext document, in which internal links will take the reader to related material, or to a glossary, to biographical notes or to the bibliography. After following a link, you can use the back-button of your web browser to return to the page you were reading earlier. You will also find some navigation links at the top and bottom of each page.

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The story in a nutshell

A sheltered youth leaves home and gets lost in a forest, where he stumbles upon a strange religious community. He kills a bird, for which an old knight condemns him. Parsifal shows remorse, at which he is taken into the hidden temple. There he sees an old king, a wounded king, and a ritual of which he understands nothing. The old knight decides that the boy is nothing but a fool, and kicks him out of the door. In the second act, Parsifal fights his way into the castle of Klingsor the magician, where a bunch of flowers flirt with him, and the beautiful Kundry tries to seduce him. When she kisses him, the youth experiences a flash of enlightenment. He realises that he has a mission to accomplish. Kundry curses him to wander. The magician tries to block his escape but (in the same way as Josaphat defeated another magician), Parsifal makes the sign of the Cross, at which the castle falls down and the flowers wilt. In the final act, after wandering for years, he returns to the domain of the Grail, where the old hermit Gurnemanz hails him as the new Grail King, and anoints him. A transformed Kundry does penance by washing his feet. They enter the Grail temple, where Parsifal heals the wounded king, and takes over his office. More details can be found in the synopsis.

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Further reading: An introduction to Parsifal.

About fonts: see my note concerning fonts.

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It is often said that Wagner's Parsifal is based on the medieval Grail romances, and in particular Wolfram's Parzival (although Chrétien's Perceval and the Welsh Peredur are often mentioned too, and it is known that Wagner studied these romances). This tends to lead the reader of, for example, an opera program into believing that Parsifal is a work of Arthurian romance, which the opera-goer expects to see shining in Celtic twilight. As Carl Suneson has pointed out, however, Wolfram's colourful medieval world, full of contrasts, with its tumble of characters, tournaments and battles, is marked by its almost total absence in Wagner's drama.

Wagner's increasingly emphatic and often bad-tempered denials that he had based his Parsifal drama on Wolfram's epic poem, while they might overstate the case, confirm that he had not simply followed in the footsteps of the medieval poet (I could just as well have been influenced by my nurse's bedtime story, he said to Cosima). Wolfram's Parzival is a story about constancy or fidelity, whereas Wagner's Parsifal is a story about the importance of compassion. Wolfram's Parzival is the story of a foolish and ignorant young man who becomes a perfect knight; but Wagner's Parsifal is the story of a foolish and ignorant young man who becomes a saint. The fool becomes a sage, and the wise old knight, who gives the foolish lad moral guidance in the first act, has (according to Wagner's Prose Draft) become a childish old man by the third act, when the perfected knight and sage returns to Monsalvat and finds his mentor again.

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