Parsifal (Wagner) - Music The Music of Parsifal An Opera by Richard Wagner One hesitates to write about the music of Parsifal" without having actually heard it. It is rash to judge any composer merely by the written notes, and it is peculiarly rash in the case of Wagner. Taking, however, the score itself and placing it alongside the printed impression of those who have been fortunate enough to hear the work at Bayreuth, one cannot well go far astray in attempting a few brief notes. Libretto for Wagner's Parsifal (Mainz, 1877) It is certainly safe to say, at the outset, that in "Parsifal" the music is everything. The libretto has been described as "a farrago of odds and ends, the very dust-bin of Wagners philosophies, beliefs, vegetarian, anti-vivisection, and other fads." It does, indeed, smell of the lamp. It lacks spontaneity and dramatic "go." Nothing happens for several hours -- nothing but discourses, philosophical and retrospective.

Yet the glorious music carries it all off: floats this inorganic medley on its great waves of sound, making the listener forget entirely the imperfections of the "book." Music has not known such fervour since the days of Palestrina. A holy and solemn grief pervades it. We seem to be constantly reminded of the great tragedy of Calvary. Wagner wrote once to Liszt: "In all my relations to the suffering world, I feel led and guided by one thing alone -- compassion." And, listening to this fascinating, luxuriant, mellow, soothing music, it would really seem as if compassion had been the one thought in the composers mind all through. "The muted pauses, the golden stream of tone, and the almost miraculous musicianship fill the listener with awe," writes one who has been at Bayreuth. Much has been said of the "miraculous musicianship," of the deft way in which Wagner has here, as elsewhere, woven his thematic material. The score is indeed built up in a masterly fashion; but the dramatic influence of the music is so overpowering that all thought of the technical side of the work may be entirely dismissed. The "mood pictures" are the really potent factors.

The First Act, like the last, partakes somewhat of the nature of a grand Communion service, the music being rich and tender, and charged with a noble passion. The short orchestral Prelude, a favourite concert number, attunes the mind to the fundamental thoughts of the drama. Here the principal "motives" which recur throughout are enunciated: among others the Love and the Grail themes, and the Saviours Lament theme, which contains some of the most poignant bars Wagner ever wrote. In the last part of the Act a profound impression is made by the clangour of the cathedral bells, at first heard faintly, then working up to a grand peal. The choral music and the "tonal panorama" of boys voices are particularly fine, Wagner having here emulated with striking success the service of Rome. The Sorcery motive arrests by its Chopin-like chromatics; and when Parsifal enters we hear again the Swan motive from "Lohengrin" -- a fine conception. The sensuous beauty of the Second Act, devoted to the presentation of the working of the evil element, is in marked contrast to the First and Third Acts.

It is full of rich, luscious melody, dance-like in form and colour, and "asking nothing of the hearer but self-relaxation." The Prelude, again short, is of a passionate, stormy, almost sinister nature, and is based chiefly on the Klingsor and Kundry themes heard in the previous Act. The crowning scene of this Second Act -- perhaps of the whole work -- is the duet between Parsifal and Kundry. Herein "the entire gamut of passion, maternal, exquisite, voluptuous, is traversed by a master hand." So, too, with the wonderful choral scene for sopranos only in the lovely magic garden of Kilngsors castle. This is written in as many as eighteen separate groups, and frequently in twelve real parts. Its sweet, plaintive melody and graceful rhythm cannot escape notice; any more than the enchanting waltz and Kundrys tender recital of the woes and sufferings of Parsifals mother, and the glissando passage of the harps (through two octaves) to express the act of hurling the spear at Parsifals head.

One phrase of Kundrys description of her sin and punishment has been often cited as the most astonishingly unvocal specimen in all Wagners writings: No wonder an early critic remarked that the singers parts are peculiarly trying and thankless! In the Third Act the gloom deepens to an almost distressing degree. Yet there is some glorious music in it; notably the Good Friday music, also familiar in the concert-room. The Prelude is again short. Its vague rhythm and darkly-tinted intricate harmonies are probably to be taken as illustrating the blind wanderings of Parsifal in search Monsalvat. The last scene is gorgeously led up to-a fitting close to the great life -- work of the last of our really great composers of the nineteenth century. Search this Site My dream Wagner | Classical-Music.com Past Issues My dream Wagner Seven leading musicians – including Sir Mark Elder and soprano Deborah Voigt – tell us the operas by Wagner that inspire them most 22 May 2013 - 9:28am Rating: 0 Today, 22 May 2013, marks Richard Wagner’s 200th anniversary.

And to mark the occasion, we asked six people from the classical world to tell us about the works by the great opera composer that have most inspired them. Here’s what they had to say… Sir Mark Elder, conductor In 1968 I had the opportunity of going to Bayreuth, along with many other young British musicians, and one of the productions we saw was Wieland Wagner’s incredible production of Parsifal. I remember it vividly – all of it – to this day. It made an enormous impact on me. I’d never seen Parsifal before, but I found it mesmerisingly beautiful, although difficult to understand – and that still stands all these years later. I think it’s a fascinating, electrically beautiful work which has so many different images, resonances and metaphors in it from so many different parts of world culture. The Ring is a clear, exciting adventure story: Parsifal is a mystical, dramatic legend and I love it more and more. The music has a special glow about it, a special quality in the orchestration that Wagner perfected in his theatre of Bayreuth.

The section I most look forward to conducting is the Good Friday music, because there’s nothing like it in the rest of the opera. It expresses the glory of Nature’s rebirth, mirroring Parsifal’s own development and flowering. I think that is one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written. Sir Mark Elder conducts the Hallé Orchestra and a cast led by tenor Lars Cleveman at the BBC Proms on Sunday 25 August. Deborah Voigt, soprano I’d have to say the Ring is the work by Wagner that most inspires me. My first encounter with the cycle was when I came to the Metropolitan Opera in New York. My contract for my first season was to cover one of the Valkyries, Ortlinde; it was also to sing the role of Amelia in Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera. I have to be honest and say that I was really hoping that I wouldn’t go on as Ortlinde because I wanted my Met debut to be as Amelia. So now I always have a special affection for whoever’s singing Ortlinde in the cast I’m in.

The challenge of playing the lead Valkyrie, Brünnhilde, is to connect all three of the operas she’s in so that we can see her development. the most difficult part of the role is definitely the ‘Hojotohos’ [Act II, scene I from Die Walküre]. They’re the first thing we hear of Brünnhilde and are iconic – so that’s very nerve-wracking. But the reward of the role is that when you get through the whole cycle, if it’s gone well, you really feel you’ve accomplished something. This is a role I will sing hopefully for many many years and still discover new nuances. Deborah Voigt has just performed in Wagner’s Ring cycle as the Valkyrie Brünnhilde at New York’s Metropolitan Opera Martin Roscoe, pianist Tristan und Isolde is what kicked me off with Wagner. When I was 14, I got it out on LP from the Liverpool record library and also had the full score. I made the mistake of putting it straight on from Act I – I found it totally boring and mystifying, and didn’t get anything out of it at all.

However, I thought I ought to stick with it, and listened to bits here and there from the other two acts… and began to find bits that I liked, such as the Liebestod, for instance. At that point, I decided to have another go from the beginning. By the time I had to return the discs after two weeks, I was hooked! It still has a magical mysterious feeling about it for me. I wouldn’t say I adore every single note, but there’s both a sensuality and tremendous agony about it that, in the best performances, can leave you absolutely breathless. Susan Bullock, soprano I think for me, the work that most inspires me would have to be Götterdämmerung because it’s such a complete piece, and you can actually understand the whole story of the Ring if you just see Götterdämmerung. The relationships between all the characters are so finely drawn and you’ve got everything in this opera – evil, good, greed, power, love, deception – and then there’s the bigger philosophical idea of the redemption of the world. And it’s fantastic to sing.

For me, personally, it’s the highlight of the Ring because you by this point Brünnhilde is just a woman without any powers, any godliness – she’s just a woman in love. To go through all the plot twists and turns of the cycle and then to be able to look beyond her own situation and make the ultimate sacrifice in the hope that there will be a renewal and a better place for others, is magnificent. Brünnhilde has got everything you could wish to play. Susan Bullock will perform this evening, 22 May, at the Royal Festival Hall, in a Wagner 200 celebration concert broadcast live on Radio 3 and available for seven days afterwards on iPlayer Jonathan Dove, composer It was an act of youthful hubris to agree to adapt the Ring for chamber forces and make it shorter, but it was how I got to know the work. The big lesson was in re-scoring it, thinking about every sound and trying to achieve the same in chamber terms. I realised how important colour was in Wagner’s music: you think of his work as being about scale. But in fact the thing that really makes an impact is the extraordinary detail with which he colours every element in the Ring.

His use of orchestral colour as a way of telling a story had a huge impact on me as a composer, the way he puts the building blocks of music right on the storyline – the Rhine represented as an arpeggio and so on. That means there’s going to be a musical satisfaction in his work that absolutely synchronises with dramatic satisfaction. Jonathan Dove has re-scored Wagner’s ‘Ring’ cycle for 18 players and condensed the work into around 9 hours from the original 16 David Pountney, opera director Such is the richness of Wagner’s work and its susceptibility to continual re-interpretation, it is tempting to reply that the most inspiring is the next one you are about to engage with. In this case, that is Lohengrin which opens on Thursday at Welsh National Opera. Actually, up to now this has never been one of my favourite Wagner operas, but after a spell-binding dress rehearsal on Monday I changed my mind. There is a particular transcendent clarity about the soundworld of this opera, a visionary purity associated with the character of Elsa, but I have always been a trifle impatient with the narrative device that no-one may know the secret of Lohengrin’s antecedents.

Now it makes sense to me! From the political point of view, this is the revolutionary character who demands to be accepted for what he does, not who his parents were or where he went to school. And from the personal point of view, he is an idealist demanding blind devotion. As always with Wagner, this represents a disturbing but stimulating mix of the divine and the dangerous. David Pountney is artistic director of Welsh National Opera and Intendant of the Bregenz Festival in Austria. ‘Lohengrin’ runs at WNO from 23 May Richard Farnes, conductor The first time I heard Tristian und Isolde was when I was at school. It was the Wilhelm Furtwängler recording and I found that the opera had this power to it. It’s the sort of music that you can’t imagine not being there – you can’t imagine a time before it existed. The thing I find most extraordinary about Tristan is the choice of thematic material that Wagner can just transform into anything he wants. The Tristan chord is the obvious example – it can go to any key within a few bars, and the same is true of the leitmotif system in the Ring cycle.

That raw material that Wagner uses is so pliable that he can shift it in terms of harmony, key, direction, to give himself an enormous palette of possibilities. Richard Farnes conducts Wagner's 'Siegfried' at Opera North from 15 June In the June issue of BBC Music Magazine – on sale now – we examine Wagner's ten operas that changed classical music forever. Plus, on your free cover CD the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra performs the Prelude from Act of Parsifal. CD of the week: Wagner: The Opera Collection | Music | The Guardian (Decca, 4 CDs) ***** £39.99 Georg Solti, who died in 1997, would have been 90 this year, a fact that Decca has chosen to commemorate with a monumental reissue entitled Wagner: The Opera Collection. It consists of six recordings made over a period of 35 years. You can buy them all together (for £159.50) - in which case you get an additional disc of Solti rehearsing Tristan und Isolde - or you can get them individually, which, thanks to Decca's pricing system, will cost you considerably more. The whole enterprise seems perverse.

Serious Solti admirers probably own these recordings already - and although the rehearsal disc (only 30 minutes in length) is fascinating, it doesn't warrant re-purchasing the entire collection unless you are fanatical. Some Wagnerians, meanwhile, won't want all six, since Solti's approach is for many an acquired taste. His primary aims were to desanctify the composer's output and to render him both viscerally exciting and more human. He succeeded, but often at a price. At times he tended to concentrate on the moment, rather than thinking in terms of extended spans, provoking frequent charges of making Wagner sound disjointed. Solti also sometimes let slip the spiritual elements in Wagner's work. These inequalities detrimentally affect his view of Tristan und Isolde, in which sexuality and spirituality are fused. Wagner equates orgasm with death and the subsequent absorption of the individual soul into the cosmic flux that moves creation. In Solti's reading, however, the numinous vistas don't open up, leading to a four-hour frenzy that spends itself.

The casting is also strange, with Birgit Nilsson's Isolde and Fritz Uhl's Tristan sounding like an operatic pair of praying-mantises - a devouring female and a timid male - going through a destructive mating ritual. Yet when Solti got the balance right, the results were extraordinary. The great recordings here are Tannhäuser and Parsifal, ambivalent operas that present flesh and spirit in warring opposition, a conflict dramatically resolved in favour of spirituality, though the music says something different. Baudelaire deplored the redemptive ending of Tannhäuser, arguing that sexual eternity in the Venusberg was infinitely worth the price of any man's soul. Solti seemingly follows suit, as torrential erotics are wedged against the cold, moralistic condemnation of the Wartburg. In his unsettling Parsifal, meanwhile, Solti charts the similarities of texture and harmony that bind the Grail Kingdom to the erotic world of Klingsor's garden, in ways that hint that the Grail Knights' purity is founded on chronic sexual repression.

Both sets are flawlessly cast and the orchestra is the luxurious Vienna Philharmonic, but when Solti came to record Der Fliegende Holländer in 1976, he opted to work with the altogether cooler Chicago Symphony. The performance doesn't cohere. Solti's fondness for emphasising the moment at the expense of shape is excessively evident, while his cast often give the impression of singing at each other rather than to each other. Norman Bailey's Dutchman lacks the necessary Byronic glamour. Janis Martin is the hyper-neurotic Senta. Casting problems also beset Solti's Lohengrin, the main defaulters being Siegmund Nimsgern, struggling as Telramund, and Jessye Norman, whose Elsa exudes matronly calm, when Wagner was after someone akin to a psychic visionary. On the plus side, however, there's Placido Domingo in the title role - an exotic, sorrowing outsider caught in the lethal conflict between the values of Christian militarism and pagan duplicity. In 1987, when the recording was made, Solti's approach was changing.

His conducting is carefully paced and subtly nuanced as Wagner's initially serene orchestral palette is gradually strewn with intimations of emotional and spiritual darkness. Late in his career Solti concentrated on Mozart and Verdi, only returning to Wagner, right at the end, for the version of Meistersinger included here - his second recording of the piece, taped live during concert performances in Chicago in 1995. In place of the usual stentorian grandeur, he came up with an autumnal interpretation, full of diaphanous textures and gentle humour. He located the emotional centre of the work in the relationship between Walter and Eva and caused controversy by making Hans Sachs (the wonderful Jose van Dam) wittily reflective rather than imposingly moral. Some people hated it, but it represents Solti's Wagner at its iconoclastic best and - like his Tannhäuser and Parsifal - is essential listening. The other three operas have been bettered elsewhere, which makes the full collection redundant.

Wagner Opera Excerpts | gramophone.co.uk Home » Reviews » Wagner Opera Excerpts Wagner Opera Excerpts View record and artist details Record and Artist Details (Der) Fliegende Holländer, '(The) Flying Dutchman', Wie aus der Ferne Richard Wagner Composer Parsifal, O Gnade! Höchstes Heil! Richard Wagner Composer Parsifal, Du wuchest mir die Füsse (Good Friday music) Richard Wagner Composer Tannhäuser, Dich teure Halle (Elisabeth's Greeting) Richard Wagner Composer (Die) Meistersinger von Nürnberg, '(The) Masters, Wahn! Wahn! Uberall Wahn! (Wahnmonolog) Richard Wagner Composer (Die) Meistersinger von Nürnberg, '(The) Masters, Grüss Gott, mein Junker! Richard Wagner Composer (Die) Meistersinger von Nürnberg, '(The) Masters, Abendlich glühend Richard Wagner Composer (Der) Fliegende Holländer, '(The) Flying Dutchman', Wie aus der Ferne Parsifal, O Gnade! Höchstes Heil!

Parsifal, Du wuchest mir die Füsse (Good Friday music) Tannhäuser, Dich teure Halle (Elisabeth's Greeting) (Die) Meistersinger von Nürnberg, '(The) Masters, Wahn! Wahn! Uberall Wahn! (Wahnmonolog) (Die) Meistersinger von Nürnberg, '(The) Masters, Grüss Gott, mein Junker! (Die) Meistersinger von Nürnberg, '(The) Masters, Abendlich glühend Buy from Amazon Here is a welcome souvenir of McIntyre, for his many admirers, in some of his notable Wagnerian assumptions. One of his earliest Bayreuth roles was the Dutchman, already in 1969 a vital reading. With the years McIntyre has become more conscious of the importance of words which he uses here to project the disbelief that he has found an apparent saviour. No, the voice isn't as secure as it once was, but enough remains to carry off the taxing climaxes of the long encounter with Senta. He is excitingly partnered by the powerful Marc who, on this form, could be the heroic soprano Wagnerites have been praying for.

But if she is to succeed in this field she must learn that voice alone isn't enough: the text must be attended to. Her consonants here are non-existent and she finds few more in ''Dich teure Halle'' taken from her Delos recital. McIntyre's Gurnemanz is represented complete on the Goodall Parsifal (EMI, 10/85—nla), but it is good to hear how he has refined and developed his portrayal, giving the elderly knight a gnarled, wise profile. Here in the Good Friday music he is partnered by Doig's poetic and lyrical Parsifal. The pair team up again in the long extract from Act 3 of Die Meistersinger. McIntyre once told me that he was chary of a role so closely associated with all things German. Happily he has overcome his scruples and made a success of the role in the Antipodes. Again, the thought behind the performance is appreciable, poet and cobbler nicely combined. Doig sings the trial songs with easy, unforced grace. A pity such a musical tenor, who began his career in Austria, has never been invited to sing Wagner at Covent Garden.

Wallberg is a well-routined Wagnerian, who gets confident playing from the New Zealand Symphony. The concert-hall acoustics are too reverberant for my taste, with almost an echo added at times to the voices. No texts or translations are provided.' Wagner: Die Walküre/Parsifal - Leopold Stokowski | Songs, Reviews, Credits | AllMusic Wagner: Die Walküre/Parsifal ©2017 AllMusic, member of the RhythmOne group | All Rights Reserved OPERA NEWS - Grail Crazy March 2013 — Vol. 77, No. 9 Grail Crazy The Met premiere of Parsifal, in 1903, was headline news all over the musical world. JEFFERY S. McMILLAN traces the U.S. performance history of Wagner's opera, which will be presented in a new staging this month by The Met: Live in HD. Cosima and Richard Wagner OPERA NEWS Archives Defying the concerted opposition of the composer's widow, not to mention numerous other parties and factions, the Metropolitan Opera produced the U.S. premiere of Richard Wagner's Parsifal on Christmas Eve in 1903.

Wagner wrote Parsifal, his final opera, to be performed in the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth, where the rarefied atmosphere and unique acoustics of the house's "invisible orchestra pit" were critical to his realization of the work. It was Wagner's stated wish that performances of Parsifal be restricted to Bayreuth, but he was also open to circumstances, especially financially lucrative ones, that might require its presentation elsewhere. Above all, his preoccupation was that Parsifal be presented correctly, and while he still lived, that was possible only under his direct supervision in Bayreuth. After his death, on February 13, 1883, Cosima Wagner held that the restrictions on Parsifal were intractable: the composer's final decree must be observed in perpetuity. Though the law was on her side in Europe, it was the moral imperative to respect the master's wishes that was most effective in establishing Parsifal as an exclusive, almost sacred, property of Bayreuth. In spite of the official restrictions on it, New Yorkers knew Parsifal well from two decades of performances on its concert stages.

The great transgression of 1903 occurred only once it was clear that the Metropolitan produced Wagner as well as, or better than, Bayreuth, and it was, therefore, meeting the Master's wishes to present Parsifal correctly — in New York. Considering the great distance between New York and Bayreuth, the amount of press coverage and the number of daily extras devoted to the 1882 premiere of Parsifal were extraordinary. The work's synopsis, examples of its themes and lengthy analyses appeared regularly in New York newspapers, allowing those who could not make the trip to follow along with the premiere vicariously. The premiere of the "stage consecrating" work, on July 26, 1882, under Wagner's fastidious direction, had achieved the triumph the composer had desired for his massive Der Ring des Nibelungen, which had opened the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876 to ruinous financial losses and less than satisfactory artistic results.

(He spent much of the intervening years trying to recover from the setback.) For the new work, he enlisted his ideal interpreters: Amalie Materna, the original Brünnhilde from the Ring Festival, would be Kundry; bass Emil Scaria — who would have created Hagen in the first Götterdämmerung had his salary requirements been more modest — was Gurnemanz; and Hermann Winkelmann, a rising talent and future star of the Vienna Opera, assumed the title role. As with the Ring Festival, this second Bayreuth Festival was the cultural happening of the day and attracted devoted Wagnerites, outspoken contrarians and curiosity-seekers "from China and California," as one critic reported. Among the American delegation was Walter Damrosch, son of Dr. Leopold Damrosch, one of America's most important musical figures. Wagner presented the young Damrosch with a manuscript of the Act I finale of Parsifal to take back to his father for presentation in New York. Dr.

Damrosch, indeed, performed the Act I scene on November 4 at New York's Academy of Music, but another American maestro, Theodore Thomas, presented the opera's third act in Brooklyn on the same night. Local papers scrambled to have reporters in both places to get the scoop on Wagner's newest music drama. Damrosch's final dress rehearsal attracted several hundred eager observers, but it did not bode well: many of his choristers failed to show up, and the soloist assigned Amfortas's tortured monologue arrived late, forcing the conductor to murmur the Grail King's words from the podium with a different sort of anguish. Thomas had better luck with Act III, and the Brooklyn audience applauded heartily. New Yorkers did not have to wait long to hear more of the new opera. Four days after it was learned that Wagner had died, Dr. Damrosch hastily added the funeral march from Götterdämmerung to a program that already included the "Good Friday Spell" from Parsifal, so his next concert could memorialize the composer. Thomas gave his own tribute with the New York Chorus Society, which included the Flowermaiden scene from Act II.

Parsifal was out of the news for several months while a new musical story dominated New York headlines — the erection of the new Metropolitan Opera House, on the corner of Broadway and Thirty-ninth Street, and the ensuing war between its Italian company and the Academy of Music. Curiously, Wagner's Parsifal once again entered the fray on the day after the conclusion of the Metropolitan's inaugural season in 1884. Thomas rented the opera house for a series of Wagner concerts featuring three vocal soloists with unimpeachable Wagnerian credentials — Winkelmann, Materna and Scaria, the original Parsifal, Kundry and Gurnemanz from Bayreuth. Thomas and his imported crack team presented the music of Wagner as it had never before been presented in the Western Hemisphere. Materna was the most familiar of the three. Having visited the U.S. in 1882 for Thomas's May Festival tour, she told reporters at the time of the difficult new role she was studying for the upcoming Bayreuth Festival. Two days after the Bayreuth trio's arrival in 1884, their concerts were sold out, and a second series was added. "Ah!

How my heart warms to America," Materna remarked upon her return. After years of piecemeal, usually Italianized presentations, New York audiences finally heard extracts from the Ring, Tristan, Meistersinger and Parsifal sung by the voices Wagner declared ideal for his revolutionary music of the future. These heavy doses of legitimate Wagnerian art had dramatic repercussions. Within a few months, the board of directors of the new opera house had jettisoned its expensive Italian company for an all-German one that would feature the works of Wagner. To Thomas's profound disappointment, Dr. Damrosch received the nod to direct the nascent company. Damrosch's German Opera got off to an auspicious start, and when Materna appeared as Brünnhilde in the Metropolitan Opera premiere of Die Walküre on January 30, 1885, it was clear that a new age had dawned. Definitive performances of the music dramas swept aside memories of the indulgent Italian operas with their more idealized, poetic truth. Though Damrosch would not live to see it, all but one of Wagner's mature stage works had their premieres at the Met within the next few seasons.

Attempting to capitalize on New York's craze for all things Wagner, Damrosch's son Walter rented the house in March 1886 for his Oratorio Society to present the U.S. concert premiere of the only holdout, Parsifal. The move to perform the various parts of the opera in order was welcomed by the public, though at just over three hours it was hardly a complete performance. Critics admired the work's choral scenes, but reactions could be summed up by one newsman's observation: "Parsifal in its entirety is a protracted series of more or less slow and dismal recitatives." Audience interest in Parsifal encouraged the Metropolitan's general manager to explore the possibility of staging the opera during a future season, but the company's reigning diva, Lilli Lehmann, dissuaded him on the grounds that it would be injurious to Bayreuth and would put German artists working at the Met in an awkward position. Damrosch's concert premiere had another unforeseen consequence: it provoked the ire of the Metropolitan's new chief conductor, Anton Seidl.

Damrosch had recruited Seidl for the Met after his father's death, but when the new conductor emerged shortly thereafter as the greatest exponent of the art-religion of Wagnerian music drama that New York had ever seen, Walter found his role in the company drastically diminished. Presenting Parsifal, in fact, sealed Damrosch's fate at the Met with Seidl, because it had violated the master's wishes, and because it preempted Seidl from introducing the work himself — though Parsifal hardly needed an introduction at this point. Seidl conducted his own concert version of Parsifal in 1890 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music amid lush floral decorations and a backdrop depicting the Temple of the Grail painted by the Metropolitan's scenic artists. His starry cast included Lehmann, in her only performance as Kundry, and Theodor Reichman, the original Bayreuth Amfortas. Unable to recruit and train a chorus in time for the concert, Seidl was forced to omit Parsifal's choral scenes in Acts I and III; so his Temple of the Grail lacked knights.

Critics, as ever, admired Seidl's performance, but they noted that the performance was "at a disadvantage compared with that offered by the Oratorio Society under the direction of Walter Damrosch in March 1886." The comparison to an old event by his less distinguished colleague no doubt infuriated Seidl. A new generation of Wagnerian stars in the late 1890s helped Parsifal remain a semi-regular concert presentation at the Metropolitan Opera House, while artists of different stripes popularized the opera in novel forms. Throughout the decade Eugene Ysaye played his "Parsifal Paraphrase," a rhapsodic arrangement for violin soloist with orchestra, and John Philip Sousa arranged the opera's grail scenes for his fabulously popular concert band. The Rubicon was definitively crossed early in 1903 when the Met's incoming general manager, Heinrich Conried, announced that the main attraction of his first season would be a fully staged production of Wagner's Parsifal. The push-back was immediate and frantic, but ultimately Cosima did not have a case, and her lawsuit and an appeal to the mayor by local Wagner societies to halt the production failed.

Hoping to curse the effort with mediocre talent, she threatened that any artists who participated in Conried's "Rape of the Grail" would never work in the Festspielhaus again, but Bayreuth's claim of primacy had long since lost out to the Metropolitan's superior performances. Undeterred, conductor Alfred Hertz and singers Alois Burgstaller, Milka Ternina, Anton van Rooy and Robert Blass enthusiastically answered the call to make stage history. Only the esteemed Wagner conductor Felix Mottl balked, but even he assisted the effort from behind the scenes with score preparations and help at rehearsals. In order to meet Wagner's own specification — that the work be presented correctly — Conried went to extravagant measures, spending lavishly to modernize the Met's stage and fly galleries so that the scene changes and transformation effects would not only be convincing but set a new standard for stagecraft and theatrical illusion. Though it may be hard to imagine Parsifal as a tremendous commercial hit, Conried's production was a box-office sensation like no other.

Even at the astronomical price of $10 a seat (regular orchestra seats were $5), the opera was given twelve times during the 1903–04 season as a special non-subscription event, and crowds filled every performance. The following season, Conried offered it eight more times at the same inflated price and took it on the road for an ambitious tour that covered major cities from Boston to San Francisco but also included numerous stops in smaller cities not known for opera, such as Nashville and Birmingham. In some cases, these locales probably have not witnessed a performance of Parsifal since 1905. A rival impresario named Henry Savage saw Conried's success and took his own English-language Parsifal production on the road with his Metropolitan English Grand Opera Company. Without stars such as Olive Fremstad and Lillian Nordica, Savage's production did not approach the Met's vocal glamour, but some felt it was superior in terms of scenic presentation. Savage's efforts to cultivate a Bayreuth-like aesthetic with a makeshift invisible pit and trumpeters playing the themes during intermission to recall audience members to their seats were also appreciated. The Parsifal rage eventually subsided.

When the dust settled, the Met had amassed forty-three performances in three seasons, and Savage's tour added another 200. Peripheral entertainments such as minstrel shows and comedic parodies briefly attempted to cash in on the Grail craze, but following the retirement of Fremstad and the final performances of her Kundry, the work was consigned to a small but distinguished corner of the repertory, being regularly programmed on Thanksgiving and Good Friday. Parsifal has never fallen far from standard-repertory status in New York. True to her word, Cosima spurned many of the artists who had participated in Conried's rogue production. Singers could work in both places, but once they sang in the Met's Parsifal, they rarely found themselves welcome at Bayreuth. But producing opera is a business, and even Cosima Wagner's hard idealism eventually caved: Burgstaller, the Met's first Parsifal, was hired for the Festivals of 1908 and 1909. JEFFERY S. MCMILLAN, formerly an archivist at the Metropolitan Opera, is currently a writer and arts administrator in San Francisco. Send feedback to OPERA NEWS .

Wagner Overtures and Orchestral Music | gramophone.co.uk Home » Reviews » Wagner Overtures and Orchestral Music Wagner Overtures and Orchestral Music View record and artist details Record and Artist Details Parsifal, Good Friday music (concert version) Richard Wagner Composer Wagner Overtures and Orchestral Music (Das) Liebesverbot, Overture Buy from Amazon The opening moments of the Rienzi Overture (the first item on the disc) are certainly gripping: hushed string responses to the opening trumpet and a vivid sense of presence and deep perspectives. But it soon turns into a bullish, noisy, all-stops-out performance, with the brass exciting huge swathes of reverberation from the recesses of the Lukaskirche (or is it from a machine?). Turn to Bohm and the Vienna Philharmonic or the recent Norrington for a more varied slow build, a greater measure of dignity, and acknowledgement of the piece’s antecedents (French and Italian opera) and hints of the Dutchman just around the corner. I regret the decision to mike and mix the Dresden orchestra as a glamorous luxury product.

Tannhauser’s opening Pilgrims Song, and its second strain, are harmonized with varied solemn colourings which would have been worth hearing from the Staatskapelle, where the individual timbres are still distinctive, and are fully heard in the recent, more drily recorded account from Barenboim in Chicago, where they are less so. Shockingly distinctive, however, and far from distinguished, is the quick-marched, short-winded trombone blasting that Sinopoli seems to want for the fortissimo statement of the song (where is the dignity in this?). The only merit in the separated-off ‘Paris’ Tannhauser Bacchanale (as opposed to the concert version, which intercuts the Bacchanale before the triumphant return of the Pilgrims) is that it is rarely recorded. Unfortunately the orchestra sound as under-rehearsed here as the engineers (fallible string playing and balances). Sinopoli at last sounds properly engaged in the Parsifal items, and the disc is worth an audition for some exalted playing here – particularly from the cellos in the Prelude – but not worth buying for it.'

Question: Which Wagner opera features the Good Friday music ?
Answer: PARSIFAL