It is telling that Wagner did not call Parsifal, his last stage work, an opera or a music drama, but rather a stage-consecrating festival drama. Unlike earlier works, Parsifal does not center on redemption through love; it is fixed on redemption through suffering, atonement and compassion in the context of a religious drama. To Wagner, this drama was not an entertainment; it was sacred theater similar (in his mind) to that of ancient Greece, where philosophy, religion and ideals were consecrated through words and music.
The seeds for this culminating work were first sown when Wagner read Wolfram von Eschenbach's thirteenth-century poem, Parzifal in 1845. For years afterwards, this powerful text both intrigued and puzzled him with contradictions and dramatic problems. Finally, on a visit to the Wesendonck estate near Zurich in the spring of 1857, he awoke and looked out upon the garden. As he recounts in his autobiography, "The garden was breaking into leaf, the birds were singing, and at last, on the roof of my little house, I could rejoice in the fruitful quiet I had so long thirsted for. I was filled with it, when suddenly it came to me that this was Good Friday, and I remembered the great message it had once brought me as I was reading Wolfram's Parzifal ... out of my thoughts about Good Friday I swiftly conceived an entire drama in three acts, of which I put a hasty sketch on paper."
While the music for this drama was not finished until 1879, Good Friday remained the emotional and spiritual crux of the entire drama, and evoked some of Wagner's most sublime musicGurnemanz is the key -- it's for him we must feel compassion; that is, him as Everyman -- or perhaps every good man who deserves favour.
Compassion: emotional cognition through music; and throhugh our emotional cogntion WE - the audience - must achieve wholeness and completion.
Overwelming
emotionally draining the climax of Act II, with Simon O'Neill's Parsifal holdinf off the seductive advances of Kundry's electrifying -- you could almost feel the sir crackling with the raw xxxx
Difficult, but immensely rewarding
Landmark - singers, auditorium (timber, interior) Arrival of some major international talents (al NZers)
LINKS: Monsalvat Parsifal site
Parsifal at the Michael Fowler Centre - William Dart, NZ Herald
A splendid Parsifal - Lindis Taylor, Dominion Post
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