What keeps Parsifal alive? Unlike the earlier oeuvre, Wagner’s final work doesn’t bluster its way to us, but slinks in a bit feebly—in the vexing, spectral questions that have typically inflamed philosophers more than operagoers. Cloaked predictably enough in the Wagnerian garb of a medieval religious allegory, Parsifal’s proper subject is pain. The agonies of guilt, grief, resentment, injury, and aging cripple every character and nearly every moment in the score, offering them up in a dubious, possibly absurd wager: namely, that an evening at the opera—maybe a frivolous venture in the 2020s—can induce our awakening to the shared pain of humanity and invoke the spiritual movement that transcends it. It’s a tall order.
Completed and first performed in 1882, less than a year before the composer’s death, Parsifal stills the rancorous wind of the Ring cycle or Die Meistersinger into a funereal vapour, suggesting Wagner’s gathering doubt over his own wager. Throughout the piece, the aging despot seems to wonder whether this pained world has—or should have—a future, and what value the ardent, authoritarian travail of his own life—the very Artwork of the Future—might have in it. Suffused with Schopenhauer’s quasi-Buddhist vision of earthly existence as suffering, Parsifal challenges us to transcend the fruitless labour of enjoying the world—quite possibly including the artwork itself.
Because Parsifal addresses itself to a world somewhere after beauty and enjoyment, and thus risks sabotaging the tolerability of life, Wagner’s early sketches of the work rankled his one-time friend Nietzsche, in whose advancing, hated illness had grown to prefer the uncomplicated joie de vivre of Carmen. Since then, theory’s grand tier—among them Adorno, Žižek, and Badiou—have agitated as to whether Wagner’s chilliest work holds out for western culture a measure of redeeming progress or a total catastrophe. Obviously, these are concerns not shared by most contemporary operagoers, for whom Parsifal’s abstractions and the vast, static tracts of singing which bear them outmay be merely—exceptionally—unrewarding. New productions must therefore face the considerable challenges of either making their audiences philosophers, discovering aesthetic appeal in a work basically divested from sensuality, or proposing entirely new interpretive frameworks. It’s a grim business otherwise.
Indeed, several tombs are prepared and even longed for in Parsifal. It’s the story of a wasted, moribund world whose only hope for redemption lies, strangely enough, in the prophecy of a teenaged fool’s realization of compassion and the very negation of his own will—the icy core of Schopenhauer’s ethical program. Wagner’s insistence that the redemption and renewal of a declining world are achieved only in negation, won from an ascetic stripping-down of whatever once made life (and art) good, can make sitting through Parsifal a wretched experience, belying a troubling uncertainty over the value of even continuing to live, of reinvesting in life. Still, it’s unlike anything else in opera, in the weird music-poetic atmosphere that sustains this philosophical overburden.
In the first act, we learn that the spiritual stewardship of our world by an order of reclusive knights, keepers of the Holy Grail and Spear, has been in decline ever since an unspeakable erotic catastrophe sullied their king, Amfortas. In his misadventure, Amfortas lost the Spear to the perverted sorcerer Klingsor and sustained an agonizing, disgusting wound. The health and wholeness of the world are sundered by this defilement, this disordering of the ritual repertoire that sustains them, and things henceforth have been merely kept alive in a state of pain, through the compromised ministrations of the Grail. Amfortas’ father, the ancient Titurel, clings desperately to life by drinking from the Grail while the king himself, in the impossibility of being healed, yearns simply to die.
Into this hidden, family-dramatic nucleus of the suffering of the world—its tortuous oscillations between the wills to life and death—stumbles the beautiful young idiot Parsifal. In his disarming blankness he suggests to the Grail Knights the prophesied “Pure Fool By Compassion Made Wise,” and they perform for him the ritual of the Grail, exhibiting to the young man with almost lascivious anticipation their king’s agony. But Parsifal the fool is more bewildered than moved by this vision of suffering, and at the end of Act One they cast him out to wander in what must remain a broken world.
Wagner’s score bears out the wasting of the world with a music that’s shocking precisely for its ascetic gravity and stillness. There is almost nothing here of the sumptuous momentum and colouring that clothes earlier Wagnerian forms, like so many velvet capes. In a sharp yet surprisingly tender appraisal of “The Score of Parsifal” from 1957, Adorno writes that the piece’s musical motives “are much more naked than in Tristan, for example, much less interwoven, less drawn into the course of the composition and also subjected to less variation” (51). This slashed, stripped quality appears in Wagner’s almost total avoidance of polyphony, his insistence on melodic lines delivered in jarring unison or uncannily doubled, drained of sensuality, severe as open lacerations.
In fact, the meteorological mutability and bombast of Wagner’s characteristic “unending melody” is replaced here by a music resembling early church modes, not so much progressing through shades of affect as strung together at times in plain discordancy. Climax—the normal Wagnerian objective—is eschewed, with the music at the conclusions of Acts One and Three, the most critical moments in the narrative, given to the thin lineaments of precisely delimited, unchanging, endlessly repeatable rituals. The only thing that carries forward in this music is a faint but troubling echo: “It is as if the style of Parsifal attempts not only to present the musical ideas, but also to compose their aura to accompany them. This aura forms not in the moment of the event but in its aftermath” (50).
In its unnerving, denuded archaism, suggestive of refusal, Adorno ends up celebrating the score of Parsifal as progressive, even revolutionary. Its style reveals and lets stand bare the latent problems of its musical material, sounding out a world that’s fissured, maybe irreparably. “The magnificent process of erosion applied to the musical language which… is dissociated into unconnected expressive moments, threatens the traditional harmonic structure. Parsifal makes a historical point. For the first time, the multilayered, unstable sound is emancipated and allowed to stand alone” (Adorno, 53). Even when overtly gesturing toward the static, immutable aura of an ancient ritual, then, Wagner’s technique exposes Parsifal’smusic to the possibility that things may never resolve.
Indeed, that Parsifal does eventually feel Amfortas’ pain, recover the spear, and redeem this world in the ritual that concludes the final act does not meaningfully invert the work’s inclination toward the grave, or at least its lingering shade of grief. The outlook of Parsifal is so bleak—the pain of its world’s long wait for salvation, of not succumbing to its death, so prolonged and intense—that the fool’s slow, similarly painful transformation into its redeemer seems almost superfluous. When the prophecy is finally fulfilled, in the peculiar, glacially slow ritual that closes the piece, we’re left wondering how its redemption is even possible, or what this could possibly entail. After all, its patriarch Titurel is by now already dead, freshly installed in his tomb, and the very renewal of his world releases its most vivid, human representative, the damned woman Kundry, by killing her. This might not be an acceptable resolution. At the redemption of the world, one tomb gapes open, and a fresh one must be dug.
Meanwhile, the fact that Wagner composed Parsifal expressly for his Bayreuther Festspielhaus, insisting that it only be performed in the cavernous theatre he had built, perhaps in anticipation of it, makes the work’s very staging there from year to year suggestive of last rites and laying to rest—no matter how many times this entombment is repeated, no matter the work’s own nominal investment in redemption and renewal. The original taboo prohibiting Parsifal’s performance elsewhere lends the Festspielhaus itself a further sepulchral air, even if today the work is produced elsewhere.
Yet Parsifal keeps surviving its own burials, with major new productions in Bayreuth, Munich, Vienna, and Glyndebourne in the last ten years alone. I’m interested in what’s made the work live beyond its own tendency to exhaust itself—and its audiences. Certainly, if it’s true that Parsifal’s layered heaviness and metaphysical murk, its tendency to talk its audience to death, or its questionable sanctimoniousness can be stultifying, if not punishing, it’s also true that these same qualities hold out the possibility for thoughtful interpreters to make the piece really galvanizing—a welcome exception in the run of what might be becoming an inert repertoire.
This was true of the Met’s 2013 Parsifal, probably the most celebrated production in recent memory. French Canadian director Francois Girard’s vision of Wagner’s twilight world was appropriately stripped down, discovering a jarring elegance by letting the work’s philosophical and musical challenges breathe freely. With sets by Michael Levine, costumes by Thibault Vancaenenbroek, and video projections by Peter Flaherty, coherent in their restraint and austerity, the production amplified the chilly thinness and haunted, echoic aura of Parsifal’s score to create a clear, singularly sublime onstage world, a scorched, barren, and bleeding horizon opening onto dark space, lined with clouds and occasional glimpses of a ravishing beyond.
In this environment, the lengthy, ornate dialogical passages that elaborate Parsifal’s philosophical program—its doubts about the values of life, family, sex, and beauty, and its poetics of redemption in negation—were allowed to stand and move in the open, lit up in superbly sung and acted performances by Jonas Kaufmann, René Pape, Peter Mattei, Katarina Dalayman, and Evgeny Nikitin. This is no small feat.For example, the long, circuitous portion of the second act in which the cursed woman Kundry reveals to Parsifal her wavering between sin, yearning for love and redemption, and simply wanting to die can be one of the most dismal passages in opera. Yet Dalayman’s richly psychological interpretation, rousing visible distress in Kaufmann’s gentle Parsifal, exposed an intense ambivalence—raw, bare, unresolvable—that required no stagecraft hijinks to be gripping and disturbing.
At the pivotal moments that conclude the first and third acts, meanwhile, Girard pushed both the gathering gloom and enigmatic, precarious ceremonialism of Wagner’s poem into stark mutual relief, suspending the frankly harrowing questions of redemption and resolution—for Amfortas, Kundry, and Parsifal himself—in the weird, indeterminate atmosphere of ritual. Eschewing any straightforwardly ecclesiastical references during the first act’s grail ritual, for instance, Girard slowly peopled the desert onstage with ample, anonymous crowds of plainly clad men and women, patiently forbearing the agonizing end of things—played out in an unforgettable performance by Peter Mattei as the tortured Amfortas—with a simple sequence of assiduously choreographed, unfamiliar gestures, delivered in absorbing, almost yogic unison. The uncanny frisson of the ritual—the unnameable something happening, the resolution which isn’t closure—stood most bare in the opera’s bright final moments, athwart an open sky, as Parsifal in the same stroke heals Amfortas and lets Kundry die.
Not shying away from the painful slowness of these passages, the frustrating deferral of any resolution, or indeed the disturbing ambivalence of redemption when it finally comes, Girard’s choices discovered a living demand in the spare, stripped exposure of Parsifal’s questions, holding open the work’s mystery at its most compelling, or even strangely thrilling. If not straightforwardly enjoyable, this stark intensity rescued the work from the danger of its own exhaustion, initiating the unsuspecting operagoer into the rare, unsettling depth of a sublime vision—of what might lie beyond pain.
It’s hard to know where to take Parsifal from here. At the time I’m writing, the freshest interpretation of the work is onstage at San Francisco Opera, in a production by Matthew Ozawa. This is the second season in a row that SF Opera has featured a new interpretation of one of Wagner’s major works, with Paul Curran’s very fine production of Tristan und Isolde crowning their 2024-2025 run. There was much to admire in that staging of Tristan, with Curran’s emphasis on the acted performances of Simon O’Neill and Anja Kampe in the title roles—in an otherwise unembellished, uncluttered production—exposing rewarding colours and dimensions from the poem. Such an overtly naturalistic approach allowed the cast to directly, playfully explore the innate, consumptive violence of erotic love which—like pain in Parsifal—lets Tristan ask its important questions.
From this precedent, I had looked forward to a Parsifal that might lean into the exceptionally subtle psychological dynamics underlying even its most blazing displays of anguish. Ozawa’s production, however, takes a different approach, seeking to engage its audience with a sumptuous, novel visual world, perhaps to shift their focus from a potentially challenging confrontation with Wagner’s philosophical and musical abstractions. While Parsifal could gain much from a deft onstage vision, and even from a deliberate thematization of discord, the result here is cluttered and incoherent, without a specific grasp on what might make Parsifal’s relentless exhibition of pain interesting or rewarding, spiritually or otherwise.
Indeed, the production’s visual flair was not especially generative. Certain visually arresting elements—the red gowns of three celebrants during the grail ritual, the crisp geometric arrangement of gold, black, and blue that framed the grail itself, focal point of the work’s most pivotal passages—got lost in the onstage world’s quagmire of references and palettes. Robert Innes Hopkins’ kinetic set was uncomplicated enough, transforming itself in acts one and three into the vaguely gothic ecclesia of the grail temple, but hosted an overload of costume and movement that ultimately gave the impression of cramped staginess, in awkward contrast with the unnerving spaciousness of the piece itself.
Perhaps gesturing at Wagner’s longstanding interest in Buddhism, whose expression is most pronounced in Parsifal, Jessica Jahn’s costumes were largely derived from Japanese references, adapting the garb of Buddhist monks, the headgear of Shinto priests and festival dancers, the mane-like wig of Kabuki performers, and the armour of samurai. Apart from their being “Japanese,” and somewhat cartoonish in their exaggerated dimensions and saccharine colouring, there was little sense of cohesion or contribution to narrative, particularly as they were framed by the more restrained, traditional grail temple environment. It strikes me as possible that this pairing intended a sort of East-meets-West theme consistent with Parsifal’s exploration of Buddhist and Christian tropes, but if this is the case, it was more superficial and distracting than illuminating. (The extreme restraint of Girard’s production, for instance in the neither orientalizing nor overtly ecclesiastical movements of his plainly dressed choruses, was far more effective in suggesting a shared spiritual and ritual language.)
All this distracted somewhat from an admirable if not particularly adventurous musical interpretation, with fine performances from Brandon Jovanovich, Kwangchul Youn, Brian Mulligan, Tanja Ariane Baumgartner, and especially Falk Struckmann in the role of Parsifal’s antagonist, the sorcerer Klingsor. The greatest disservice done to these performers, in my opinion, was the frequent intrusion of balletic choreography—wielded presumably in acknowledgement of the difficulty of the work, as a means of keeping audiences engaged—during some of the potentially richest dramatic moments in the piece. For example, a single female dancer appears during Kundry and Parsifal’s long dialogue in Act Two, interpreting rather frantically—and possibly distracting from—the extremely nuanced, complex dynamics between these two characters. Richly felt singing and stage presence alone could have brought these shades into clearer focus.
In a last-ditch attempt to deflect from Parsifal’s characteristic, potentially transgressive refusal to be straightforwardly enjoyed, Ozawa opted in the piece’s final moments to keep Kundry alive, having Baumgartner sip from the grail and stand beside Jovanovich’s Parsifal in a triumphal stance as the curtain fell. As Wagner wrote it, Kundry’s death at the apparent redemption of the world (in contrast with Amfortas’ survival) poses a significant question within the Parsifal’s philosophical storyworld: namely, if existence is suffering, can we survive the transcendence of our pain? By having both Kundry and Amfortas survive the work’s final ritual—to give the impression of a happy ending—Ozawa fumbled the affective and conceptual charge of Wagner’s finalchallenge.
Whereas Girard acceded to Parsifal’s spiritually unsettling visions of death-in-life, exposing from it the precarity of hope after the end, and producing something of a thriller, Ozawa’s attempt to reanimate the work as a more pleasant night at the opera by contrast only exposed its refusal to co-operate. It’s an awkward task, to package a work this spacious and vague. Indeed, pulling focus from Parsifal’s fixation with anguish and its related philosophical trial can only take us so far from what remains ultimately, subversively operative in the work: its lack of resolve.
No amount of stagecraft or tinkering with the libretto can efface the fact, palpable in Parsifal’s pained, terminally evasive score, that it’s still a somehow broken work, whose very faith in its own form—the bombastic Wagnerian music drama, the artwork of the future—seems compromised. Even if Kundry survives, we still have to deal with the piece’s resistance to sensuality, climax, and resolution; its refusal to confirm life or death, one way or another. This refusal itself might ironically account for the survival of the work’s eerie, indeterminate flickering.
Adorno concludes his essay on “The Score of Parsifal” with a terse yet incisive reflection on just this theme, on what doesn’t work in Parsifal, on the inner fault in its foundations which throws its spiritual thrust into doubt—and which for him ends up ironically justifying the work. For Adorno, Wagner’s overt, sanctimonious, and perhaps vain aim to deploy music-dramatic form to meditate on, awaken to, and ultimately transcend the pain of existence is sabotaged from within, or perhaps doomed from the start by the weakness of the artist’s materials.
He writes, “What survives in Parsifal is its expression of the frailty of invocation itself.” In other words, Parsifal plays out with poignant clarity the unlikelihood that opera—no matter how gussied up with the philosophical ideals of Wagnerian music-drama—might actually transform the pained condition of our earthly existence. Parsifal falls short of its mark, and this disappointing drift into uncanny indeterminacy might be what’s ultimately stimulating about it—at least for the critical theorist of art. There are certain things that art, no matter how exalted, cannot achieve, but a work that exposes this frailty, that shows its own weakness, its ability only to gesture, might be treasured for just this naked clarity. (With Adorno, who never managed to shake an ironic admiration for the composer, I choose to believe that Wagner himself knew this, and that this bared weakness and inconclusiveness is the inner theme and testament of his final work.)
Whether “the frailty of invocation itself” could be stimulating for anyone else in the audience remains a vexing question. That being said, New York-based experimenter Jay Scheib’s recent production of Parsifal, first staged at Bayreuth during the 2023 Festspiel and remounted there during the 2025 season, leaned heavily, spectacularly—uproariously—into the troubled trope of invocation, using augmented reality technology to quite literally conjure a visionary world exceeding and in a sense exploding the onstage narrative. In the bombast of this novel storytelling dimension, frailty might mean a loss of coherence: a spirituality perhaps, but one without a telos, a gorgeous yet possibly senseless stream of presence.
Indeed, the import of the volatile three-dimensional image-realm that appeared through my AR headset—found under my seat, specifically adjusted to my ophthalmological metrics, and giving me the appearance of a glass-eyed praying mantis—still feels uncertain to me. Invocation here was blatant, but its compelling relationship with spirit, its ability to move, heal, and transcend according to Wagner’s stated project remains unclear. Nevertheless, Scheib’s transformation of a night at the Festspiel into a sort of technoshamanic affair, bursting with gigantic, cryptic hallucinations, shifting Parsifal into a new, as-yet untranslated set of symbols, seeming to simultaneously fragment and enrich the narrative, made this work—so at risk of exhaustion—feel unnervingly, maybe unmanageably alive.
Of course, it’s possible that without donning the goggles, as many in the audience didn’t, the Parsifal that appeared onstage might have felt like another awkward repackaging, a transposition of the work into a quirky new storyworld which—at best—might draw out certain of its themes more effectively than the last, but which—more likely—might simply feel ill-fitting and inept. Without AR intervention, however, this flesh-and-blood Parsifal nevertheless reached toward the trippy, nonsensical poetics of a post-computer world, going significantly further down a trajectory of dissociation or defamiliarization than for instance Ozawa’s production, not so much locating the work as flirting with its opposite. For me this was exciting, but I gathered at intermissions that for many Festspiel-goers, it was merely uncomfortable.
With stages designed by Mimi Lien, the production seemed to take place within the metaphysical nightmare of a broken iPhone, a lurid, fluorescent landscape replete with fractured screens, industrial flotsam and jetsam, and murky pools. Complementing these engaging setpieces, Meentje Nielsen’s loud, irreverent costuming likewise flickered at the verge of incoherence: think grail knights in brocaded camo print caftans, flower maidens in candy-coloured pantsuits, and Parsifal himself in a t-shirt emblazoned in glittery red cursive with the words Remember me. Similarly defamiliarizing were the sinewy, asymmetrical tableaux created by chorus members during ritual sequences, and the verypeculiar accoutrements used to minister them. (In surprising accord with the thirteenth-century poem by Wolfram von Eschenbach on which Parsifal is based, the Grail here was not a vessel at all but a large, blue-black stone.)
These gestures toward disintegration and perhaps re-symbolization were carried out to their fullest extent by the AR display. At its safest, its imagery straightforwardly extended the postapocalyptic atmosphere of Lien’s setpieces or played out familiar moments in Parsifal’s narrative. Discarded plastic bags drifted like tumbleweeds through a clearing of bleached, skeletal trees, framing the stage’s (toxic) wasteland. As in the poem, the appearance of a swan shot through with Parsifal’s arrows immediately precedes the fool’s ungainly entry into the Grail Realm in Act One—only this time, the swan is crisply digital and hovers massively above the singers as similarly oversized arrows zoom toward us, one or two piercing and bloodying its high-def breast.
At other moments, Scheib’s visual poetics got a little looser but retained sensible resonances with the narrative, varying in function from solemnly suggestive metaphor (sickly molecules flurry as Amfortas writhes in pain) to campy pantomime (crowds of tiny jelly babies join the grail knights during the final grail ritual and hug, pressing together squishy bellies).
Most often, however, the AR apparitions seemed less like poetic embellishments than luminous visitations from an unrecognizable symbolic lexicon, or irruptions of an unsensed, unconscious narrative stratum. An immense haloed rabbit lounged with evident disinterest above the Grail Temple in Act One. A ribbonlike streak of pink light coiled into a spiral in Klingsor’s castle in Act Two, as the backdrop to a sort of joust between cackling chrome skulls. Clusters of cobalt blue hatchets, severed limbs, lilies, or all three fell from the sky in Act Three. At its most vibrant moments, then, this Parsifal moved with the grammar of a dream, not merely illustrating the work’s assumed themes (as in Ozawa’s interpretive dance inserts) but pivoting, inflecting, or transforming them in the tomb-like darkness of the Festspielhaus—termed “the mystic abyss” by Wagner himself—into vexing portents that seemed to speak from an unforeseen, perhaps other work.
Yet what became of the Parsifal sung onstage—the story of pain and its painful transcendence—in the face of this invoked, spectral, re-symbolized reality? It’s possible that the production’s apparently disintegrative poetics reflected and amplified the schizoid nature of the work’s central roles—holy fool, wounded king, penitent temptress, lascivious eunuch—and their potentially hopeless quests for wholeness. In this world, where Kundry’s tortured vacillations between guilt, resentment, and attempted seduction are coolly disregarded by the apparition of a red fox in the ruins of a lithium field, little adds up—and this weird aura of delusion, of coherence evaporating before our eyes, both trivialized and heightened the work’s latent sense of desperation. It was at once alienating and strangely moving.
While they sang admirably, however, it was a little difficult with my goggles on to tell how ably singers Andreas Schager, Michael Volle, Ekaterina Gubanova, and Jordan Shanahan navigated these complexities. Among these, it was Shanahan’s campy interpretation of Klingsor as a prancing, demented hermaphrodite that burned most vividly through the superimposed digital trip—apt, since Klingsor is the very master of delusion, warping reality to keep the grail knights enmeshed in their own spiritual shortcomings. Musically, meanwhile, it was the Festspiel Orchestra itself, under the baton of Pablo Heras-Casado, that most forcefully carried the “old” Parsifal forward into the digital fray, giving moments such as Titurel’s funeral march, close to the end of Act Three, an irresistible gravity and pathos that cut through Klingsor’s net and brought the entire theatre back into an awareness of the work’s anguished core.
In the final moments of Scheib’s Parsifal, however, instead of seizing and transforming this pain, refusing Klingsor’s delusions and returning the world to wholeness, the hero lifted the crystalline grail high above his head only to throw it down, shattering with it the possibility of healing Amfortas and letting the world resurface into purity—and keeping an unredeemed Kundry alive indefinitely. Scheib thus seemed to give the final victory to samsara, to the magical display that keeps us ensnared in turmoil.
Exceeding in obstinacy Ozawa’s decision to keep Kundry alive, Scheib’s interpretation is also more sophisticated and provocative: by literally destroying the fetish of enlightenment and abandoning once and for all the agonizing quest for transcendence, it proposes—or enforces—a spirituality in the affirmation of discord, incoherence, turmoil. This gesture tosses Wagner’s wagered transcendence of life and the artwork aside with what might as well be either an accession to Nietzsche’s imperative enjoyment of fate or, somewhat differently, a nod to Chögyam Trungpa’s Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. If there’s to be any redemption, it won’t be in the hard-won, transcendent escape or extinguishing promised by Schopenhauer’s cynical metaphysics of purity and embodied in the grail. Instead, our only path might lie in reinvesting with their own, newly invented spiritual values the bewildering flow of images and motivesthat keep us in motion somewhere between birth and death.
Even while subverting the drive for purification, transcendence, and extinction crystallized in the grail, then, this Parsifal was slyly charged with the deeper Wagnerian missive, that a night at the opera might at least force a certain perspective on living, if not make us live a little differently. At the same time, however, Scheib’s production also freshly realized the frailty of this project—the risk that the work of art will fall short of any spiritual operation. In all its emphasis on invocation, its insistence on alterity and discord, cloaked in confectionary, hallucinatory bombast, this production’s apparent attempt at resignification may have only flickered as just that—a fascinating, broken impulse, in other words a profoundly, distressingly uncooperative work of art.
With the closing remarks of his essay Wagner’s score, Adorno faintly suggeststhat even in falling short of its overtly transformative, transcendent aim—or perhaps especially in these moments of failure, for him so diagnostic of modernity—that Parsifal does its vital work on us. If we expect from Wagner’s funerary monument either its touted spiritual operation or merely a pleasant evening at the opera, we will likely be disappointed—and this disappointment is potentially very fertile. The task of Parsifal’s interpreter, then, might lie in facing the enigmatic, unwieldy force which is so special to the work, and allowing it to become palpable—and perhaps meaningful.
Girard’s severe, discerning vision allowed the uncanny precarity of Parsifal’s rituals—and indeed the dubiousness of transcendence—to resonate troublingly throughout his production, transforming it into a sort of spiritual thriller, offering no closure. Can the quest for purity ever be successful? At what cost? The ironic success of this productionas a sort of twisted crowd-pleaser is telling. I suspect that Ozawa’s production experienced its difficulties because it didn’t seize—and in fact deflected from—the risk and ultimate doubtfulness of Wagner’s wager.
Scheib’s interpretation, meanwhile, experimented provocatively with the danger that invocation—if given free rein—might become a gorgeous but unmanageable stream of distortion, a derailment of the assumed narrative of spiritual accomplishment, a new problem demanding new solutions. This gleeful embrace of Parsifal’s uncooperative potential granted its crippled rituals a new intensity of ambiguity that certainly vexed many in the Festspiel audience.
At the first intermission, this was easy enough to ignore. Bemused operagoers spilled out of Wagner’s theatre onto terraces and lawns, where they chatted over glasses of champagne—or bratwurst and beer—about the fit of their AR goggles or the gigantic floating bunny. By the end of the night, around four hours later, after the tiny, hugging jelly babies and the destruction of the grail, we were almost silent, sheepishly guarding our own private distresses, like people leaving a party where something—what was it, exactly?—has gone terribly wrong. In that lingering vexation lay Scheib’s success. His production will be performed at Bayreuth for a third and final time in summer 2026.
Sources and further reading:
Theodor W. Adorno. 2009. Night Music: Essays on Music 1928-1962. Translated by Wieland Hoban. University of Chicago Press.
Alain Badiou. 2010. Five Lessons on Wagner. Translated by Susan Spitzer. Verso.
Catherine Clément. 1999. Opera, or the Undoing of Women. Translated by Betsy Wing. University of Minnesota Press.
Friedrich Nietzsche. 2022. The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche Contra Wagner. Translated by Ryan Harvey and Aaron Ridley. Edinburgh University Press.
Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar. 2002. Opera’s Second Death. Routledge.
Julian Butterfield 