By the time Richard Wagner got to work on Parsifal, his last opera, the conditions of his life had changed utterly from what they had been when he’d started work on The Nibelung’s Ring. A composer of romantic operas who’d set out to make some point in his libretto as inescapable as possible couldn’t have…
Tag: parsifal
Intermezzo: The Ring and the Grail 2
The Holy Grail! Most people think they know a certain amount about it, even if their only exposure to the legends of the Grail come from watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail and some forgettable film or other starring Harrison Ford. You can check this by asking a dozen of your friends to tell…
Intermezzo: The Ring and the Grail I
The end of The Twilight of the Gods, dramatically satisfying as it is, leaves the core questions raised by the tetralogy hanging in midair. The grand hope that motivated Wagner and his fellow radicals when he first sketched out the Nibelung myth as a scheme for a drama—the hope that a mighty upsurge of revolutionary…