A new production of Richard Wagner's Parsifal will celebrate its premiere at the opera house on May 18, 2025. The cast is promising: GMD Thomas Guggeis is the musical director and Brigitte Fassbaender is working on the production.
Amfortas, head of the Knights of the Grail, has lost the sacred spear to the wizard Klingsor. In doing so, he has received a wound that refuses to close. As long as he regularly performs his duties and reveals the Grail, Amfortas cannot die. Kundry, a mysterious double being, serves the knights; she procures medicine to alleviate his pain, but it can do little. Then Parsifal appears. He has committed the sacrilege of shooting a swan in the sacred precinct. Gurnemanz rebukes him. But then a thought occurs to him: is the young daredevil perhaps the promised "pure fool" who could bring redemption to the community? For this to happen, Parsifal would first have to become "knowledgeable through pity". In Klingsor's magical realm, he once again encounters Kundry, who appears here as a seductive woman. Can he defeat Klingsor and take the spear back from him, the only way to heal Amfortas' wound?
Richard Wagner wrote his last work for the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, which he had designed and opened in 1876 with the Ring des Nibelungen . He continued the leitmotif technique tried and tested in the Ring , but in a different way. Whereas in the tetralogy, as in earlier music dramas, the plot was often determined by violent confrontations in dramatic intensification, the events in Wagner's "Weltabschiedswerk" unfold in a different time scale. The music transcends the pseudo-religious setting and penetrates areas that no composer had previously dared to bring to the opera stage.
Premiere May 18, 2025
Further performances: May 24 and 29, June 1, 7, 9, 14 and 19, 2025
