Parsifal

Abstract

Abstract The first performances were given at Bayreuth on 26 and 28 July 1882 for members of the Society of Patrons, followed by 14 further performances in July and August. In an agreement with his patron, King Ludwig II, designed to pay off the deficit incurred by the first Bayreuth festival, Wagner was obliged to employ the Munich Hoftheater personnel to perform the work, which meant that he had to accept the Jewish Hermann Levi to conduct it. Wagner’s intention of consecrating the Festspielhaus with Parsifal is indicated by the term Bühnenweihfestspiel, which may be translated ‘festival play for the consecration of a stage’. In spite of the thirty-year embargo placed on performances outside Bayreuth, Parsifal was occasionally given elsewhere in those years: Ludwig II had it put on privately in Munich in the years after Wagner’s death; it was seen by members of the Wagner Society in Amsterdam in 1905, and again in 1906 and 1908; and in the face of bitter hostility from Bayreuth it was mounted by the Metropolitan in 1903 under Alfred Hertz.