Leaving Bayreuth: Reflections on the Local Appropriation of Richard Wagner's Parsifal

Richard Wagner’s final stage work, Parsifal, occupies a unique place in the Wagnerian opus.  Not only was it the sole piece composed to take into account the acoustical conditions and stage technologies of a specific theater, namely the festival house at Bayreuth, but prior to its premiere in 1882 Wagner announced his wish that it only be performed at that theater. After his death in 1883, Wagner’s widow zealously upheld this request; with few exceptions, Bayreuth enjoyed a monopoly of public presentations of Parsifal until 1913. During this time, Parsifal emerged as the centerpiece of a Wagner movement that celebrated the composer as the epitome of Germanness. For these “perfect” Wagnerites, coming to Bayreuth to experience Parsifal was a quasi-religious experience, a pilgrimage whose high point was the ritual of hearing and seeing the Grail ceremonies that began and closed the drama. In December 1913, however, Bayreuth’s Parsifal monopoly came to an end with the expiration of the work’s copyright status. In the ensuing months, theaters across Germany, indeed across the world, clamored to mount new productions. This paper considers what it meant for Parsifal to leave Bayreuth in 1914. The performances of Parsifal in German-speaking Europe can be read as an effort to realize Wagner’s earlier vision of drama as national art by making quality performances more widely available to the German people. The vast majority of German theater managers felt that they needed to hold as closely as possible to the original Bayreuth staging; we can well speak of these productions as local transpositions of a national script. Outside of German-speaking Europe, the local appropriation of Parsifal could be read in two, slightly dissonant fashions. Parsifal’s ecstatic embrace by non-German audiences in 1914 represented the international viability of high art that was also understood to be avowedly German.