Festival Drama à la Wagner: Parsifal, Bayreuth, and the European Theater

In 1882, Richard Wagner oversaw Parsifal’s première at the second edition of his Bayreuth Festival. Not only was the work composed to consecrate the theater’s stage—Wagner even labelled it a Bühnenweihfestspiel (Festival Stage Dedication Piece) and not an opera—, but he composed it with the theater’s acoustical capacities in mind. Although the Festival was launched to permit complete performances of the Ring cycle, this paper argues that it was Parsifal that “made” the Festival. Its artistic and financial success in subsequent Festival iterations made possible the Festival’s development into an essentially annual event at which, in time, all of Wagner’s mature stage compositions were performed. Until 1914, the Festival enjoyed a complete monopoly over Parsifal. Furthermore, for many Wagnerians, a pilgrimage to Bayreuth culminated with the ritual performances of the composer’s swan song.

With the opera’s passage into the public domain on January 1, 1914, a wave of Parsifal mania hit Europe. Theaters cleared their programs to showcase the once forbidden fruit. Through their scheduling choices, they also expand the notion of Parsifal as “festival drama,” planning performances above all on established, Christian feast days (e.g., Good Friday, Pentecost, All Saints’ Day). Moreover, when the outbreak of war closed the Bayreuth Festival House in 1914 (only to reopen in 1924), it was as part of Munich’s Wagner Festival that Parsifal ’s ties to formal operatic festivals was maintained.

The final section of the paper examines Parsifal and the efforts to depoliticize the “new,” postwar Bayreuth Festival. At the same time that Wieland Wagner’s minimalist, 1951 production established a new standard for Parsifal, it promoted the opera’s demystification and new conceptions of the work as festival drama.