Parsifal

Wagner's 1877–1882 'Bühnenweihfestspiel' (sacred festival play) — the redemptive Grail-drama

Tradition: Wagnerian music-drama / Christian-Schopenhauerian syncretism / Grail legend

Wagner's 1882 farewell music-drama — the holy fool, the wound, the spear, the Grail

Wagner's last completed work, composed 1877-82 expressly for the Bayreuth Festspielhaus and premiered 26 July 1882 (with Wagner himself supervising the final rehearsals; he died six months later in Venice). The score is described as a 'Bühnenweihfestspiel' — a 'stage-consecrating festival play' — and Wagner regarded its performance outside Bayreuth as a desecration; only after the thirty-year copyright expired in 1913 was it generally performed elsewhere. Drawing on Wolfram von Eschenbach's medieval romance 'Parzival' (c. 1210) and Wagner's late Schopenhauerian-Christian register, the three acts trace the Pure Fool's path from ignorance (Act I: the wounded Grail-king Amfortas, the failed kiss-of-Kundry warning) through the Kundry-encounter at Klingsor's enchanted garden and rejection of erotic temptation (Act II) to the regained spear, the healing of Amfortas's wound, and the unveiling of the Grail (Act III). The score's most-quoted passage — Gurnemanz's Good Friday Music ('Karfreitagszauber') in Act III — has been read as Wagner's final aesthetic-religious statement. The work's reception is studded with controversy: Nietzsche broke definitively with Wagner over what he saw as Parsifal's Christian-pacifist surrender, declaring it 'a work of perfidy, of vengefulness, of a secret attempt to poison the presuppositions of life' (Genealogy of Morals, III); but Hans Sachs in Die Meistersinger and Brünnhilde in the Ring had been moving toward Parsifal all along.