Overture Magazine: 2017-2018 Season September-October 2017 | страница 25

WAGNER’S QUEST
SELECTIONS FROM PARSIFAL
Richard Wagner
Born in Leipzig, Germany, May 22, 1813;
died in Venice, Italy, February 13, 1883
Of Richard Wagner’s ten operas — or
music dramas as he preferred to call
them — that endure today in the
classical repertoire, his last, Parsifal, had
by far the longest gestation — 37 years.
Wagner was only 32 in the summer of
1845 when he first read Wolfram von
Eschenbach’s early-13 th -century epic
poem Parzival while taking a water
cure at the famous spa of Marienbad.
At this point in his career, he was still
a financially struggling composer who
had just completed Tannhäuser. He
was captivated by von Eschenbach’s
legendary story of a quest for the
mysterious Holy Grail — a sacred object
(Wagner made it into a crystal chalice)
that sustained the physical and spiritual
lives of a community of religious
knights at Monsalvat, hidden away in
the mountains of northern Spain.
Wagner knew he would write an opera
on this subject, and in fact, his next
opera, Lohengrin, touched on the story:
its eponymous hero was Parsifal’s son.
But he realized the time was not yet ripe
to tackle it. In 1857, while he was writing
Tristan und Isolde, he returned to the story
and made a first sketch for the libretto.
Again he set it aside for almost a decade
and didn’t enlarge it into a full draft until
1865. Once more, other concerns took
over, and a full libretto did not appear
until 1877 after Wagner had completed
and premiered his four-opera Ring cycle at
his newly built opera house at Bayreuth.
Another four years was needed to
write the music. Completed in January
1882, Parsifal was premiered on July
26 of that year at the Festspielhaus
in Bayreuth. Wagner called Parsifal a
Bühnenweihfestspiel— a “stage-consecration
play”— and audiences flocked to it
as a combined religious and musical
experience. Seeing Parsifal became a
cult pilgrimage, for Wagner stipulated
it could only be performed at Bayreuth,
and his widow, Cosima, maintained
this until 1913.
The Story
Wagner combined several medieval leg-
ends in his Parsifal libretto. The Knights
of the Grail are a religious/chivalric
community founded by Titurel to bring
virtue to the world and to guard the Holy
Grail and the sacred spear — believed to
be the one that pierced Christ’s side at his
crucifixion. Titurel’s son, Amfortas, how-
ever, has lost the spear to the evil sorcerer
Klingsor, who used the weapon to give
him an agonizing wound that will never
heal. With this disaster, the community is
in decline as the curtain opens.
The story centers around the appearance
of the youth Parsifal, whom the knight
Gurnemanz believes may be the “pure
fool” (reine Tor) who has been prophesied
to bring redemption to the brotherhood.
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