Published on November 8, 2025 8:25 AM GMT

I saw Wagner’s Parsifal a couple weeks ago with a bunch of Twitter opera nerds.

Parsifal has a reputation among opera fans for being long, melodramatic, self-indulgent, and having a slow-moving plot; but given that these are opera fans, perhaps these should be taken as compliments. One should also note that "opera" may not be the correct term; according to Wikipedia, Wagner preferred to describe it as Ein Bühnenweihfestspiel. For over thirty years it was only performed at the Bayreuth Festival, which is sort of like a 19th-century Burning Man for Wagner diehards.

According to one of the Twitter nerds, Wagner deliberately designed the theater at Bayreuth with uncomfortable wooden chairs, in order to heighten the audience's awareness of their bodies and make them conscious participants in a sacred ritual rather than mere disembodied watchers. (There are two intermissions, lest the audience become too aware of their bodies.) SF Opera did not choose to replace their comfortable cushioned seats with wooden ones, so I am forced to dock them some authenticity points. I also suspect that Bayreuth 1882 didn't have a screen with live English subtitles.

One of my friends observed that the score was "mostly leitmotifs", which is maybe to be expected; Wagner (or more accurately, his fans) popularized the term and concept of a leitmotif. I wasn't listening for this, but I did start to get a funny feeling in the third act that the music had run out of surprisal. The score is actually fairly intricate, but its predictability smooths out the experience.

The general style of opera imposes some harsh constraints on pacing; it's hard for much to happen when every line of dialogue takes a minute to sing. Many operas are adapted from plays, and abridged ruthlessly in the process. Parsifal is loosely based on two versions of the story of Sir Percival and the Holy Grail. You may be expecting Parsifal to go in quest of the Grail; this happens in one of the sources, but Wagner opts for the version where the Grail remains safely under the protection of a company of Grail Knights for the duration. Instead, the drama centers around the Holy Spear (Lance of Longinus), to the extent that it centers around a MacGuffin at all; arguably it centers around Parsifal's mommy issues. (SF Opera, in a decision completely in line with everything in the libretto, gave Parsifal's love interest Kundry and the ghost of his dead mother identical costumes.)

Between the general demands of the format and the characters' tendency to communicate everything in the form of an agonized soliloquy about their past misdeeds, not a whole lot happens. Parsifal consists essentially of half a dozen conversations; two happening over lunch, three while Kundry is trying to take a nap, and one interrupted by someone throwing a sharp object at Parsifal. Go read the Wikipedia plot summary if you want to know more; it contains nearly every detail of the Bühnenweihfestspiel. Most of the plot happens in backstory; Act I Scene I is in large part a compressed infodump, which I thought was a neat way to fit the square peg of convoluted Arthurian myth into the round hole of endless dialogue. On the other hand, it's easy to miss things; Amfortas spends the better part of an hour bemoaning his sinful unworthiness, which comes across as a bit unwarranted if you didn't quite catch that bit of the backstory. (He was seduced by Kundry and lost control of the Spear.)

That's not to say it's boring. Between the intense emotions, the stirring music, the (over)complicated symbolism, and the visual spectacle, I was sometimes overwhelmed, but mostly locked into a sort of trance or fugue state. Films and plays are consumed sequentially; the Bühnenweihfestspiel is consumed in parallel. It washes over you for four or five hours (SF Opera's version was on the shorter side), and then you find yourself with new, inarticulable opinions on guilt, redemption, comparative religion, and magic dinnerware.

The SF Opera made some interesting staging decisions. I enjoyed Parisifal's bright-red medieval-Japanese-inspired armor in the second act, and Amfortas's pope-hat shenanigans in the first and third. I was amused by the overwhelming number of triangles and circles, attached to anything associated with the Holy Spear and Holy Grail (respectively); this reminded me inescapably of The Da Vinci Code. I was pleasantly befuddled by the pairs of squires in the first act, with their long braids joined to one another at the ends. The costumes were absolutely gorgeous. (Someone in our party complained that the flower maidens' dresses looked silly; this is true, but it's also one of the criticisms leveled at the very first showing of Parsifal, so maybe silly dresses are traditional.)

I poked through Google Images afterwards to see some of the costumes from other Parsifal stagings. (This was partly in preparation for my Amfortas Halloween costume, which was a bit of a flop. As it turns out, Berkeley millennials aren't huge Wagner buffs, and "he's basically the Fisher King" didn't really help. I eventually gave up and started introducing myself as King Arthur. My glowing, fake-blood-adorned Grail was a big success, though -- "props" to online communion-cup suppliers for that one -- and I got to sing a few bars of German for one of my more inquisitive friends.) There's a lot of variety! One is soon tempted to start dreaming up one's own staging of Parsifal. The Twitter nerds turned this into a game -- I think "Muppets Parsifal" was the uncontested winner, although I would happily pay money to see "Parsifal and RENT, but the settings are swapped".

Most of the characters in Parsifal are highly preoccupied by their guilt about their past sins, and desperate for redemption. Kundry and Amfortas get it. Contrary to the usual tropes, they don't actually do anything to earn their redemption; it is brought on abruptly by external forces. The exception, "innocent fool" Parsifal, is also the only character who really does anything. The two Holy MacGuffins function in the plot mechanically as a layer of indirection between noble deeds and spiritual rewards; this allows the more agentic characters (Titurel in backstory narration, Parsifal on stage) to obtain them (through faith and works, respectively), carry them around, and use them to fix their depressed friends. In this way, Parsifal presages the psychiatric profession.

Something about Parsifal encourages a parasocial orientation towards the characters. Perhaps it's because there's so few of them: six named characters, and Titurel (at least in this staging) yells his few lines from offstage. It might also be the pacing: watching Parsifal is a lot like spending an afternoon with a few friends. A few things happen, but not many; your friends complain about their lives, inquire about each others' health, tell rambling anecdotes about their exes and parents, eat, drink, engage in a quick duel to the death, &c. Somewhere in the second or third hour of the Bühnenweihfestspiel, you stop watching for plot beats and simply start marinating in the characters' general vibe. You find yourself wondering if you should congratulate Parisfal and Kundry on their engagement, ask Gurnemanz for advice, or get dinner with Amfortas. He must be lonely what with his dad passing, and he's out of the house a lot more now that the chronic pain thing is gone -- and he's a great sommelier -- ah, wait, that's right. Fictional.

Parsifal is famous for its incoherent soup of symbolism and themes from different religions. (The Chronicle's review is titled "A 'Parsifal' so gorgeous you don't care what it means".) Despite being centered on the Holy Grail and Holy Spear, it never mentions Jesus by name, instead saying "the Redeemer" or similar. (SF Opera opted to double down on this by ignoring the stage direction for Parsifal to wave the Holy Spear around and make the Sign of the Cross with it.) Kundry has apparently been reincarnating as various femme fatales for at least two millennia, unless that line was metaphorical. I have perhaps lived in the Bay Area too long to appreciate the Westernized Buddhist themes. On the way out, I complained to one of the Twitter nerds that I hadn't picked up on much Buddhism. He looked confused. "Did you not notice all the times they were singing about the unbearable suffering borne of desire?" Now that he mentioned it, I had. "But that's how everyone talks!"

But out of all the religious lenses one might use to interpret Parsifal, I kept finding myself coming back to the one I know best. Something about Amfortas, who bears the burden of standing before a sacred vessel and bringing forth redemption for his people, reminded me of the High Priest entering the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur, standing before the Ark of the Covenant, and trembling in awe as he intones the Tetragrammaton. Maybe it was the hat. The Grail Knights, separated by their religious mission from most of their countrymen, hesitant to accept converts, felt somehow familiar. Parsifal's quick rejection of the flower maidens began to make more sense -- what would his late sainted mother think, after all, if he married some shiksa? Kundry, on the other hand, is canonically (the reincarnation of) a Jewish princess. The show begins with an old man kvetching, a second character humblebragging about her Birthright trip (while still jetlagged), and a third character describing their health problems ad nauseum. It continues with an exploration of the guilt-based neuroses of everyone and their mother. It ends, for all intents and purposes, with challah and Manischewitz.

I hesitate a bit, before publicly singing the praises of a Wagner Bühnenweihfestspiel. The guy has a bad reputation. I get it, I get why; Wagner was perhaps not a perfect mensch, he maybe had a lot of chutzpah, he was perhaps not overflowing with love for his fellow man in some instances. A good name, it is written, is above riches; a bad one is -- I don't know the Midrash on this one -- it's like a thorn in your side. Like a wound that won't heal.

But I have the cure. A wound caused by chutzpah can be cured by chutzpah. If Parsifal is dogged by any spiritual malaise, any ancient burden of guilt, I think I know just the staging and costuming choices that can fix it.