Wagner's Parsifal: Budapest Spring Festival

About the Event

The Budapest Spring Festival presents Richard Wagner's monumental opera 'Parsifal'.

“The most profound symbol that could ever have been invented as the content of the physical–spiritual kernel of any religion,” wrote Richard Wagner of the mythical Holy Grail. The figure of Parsifal, which he came to know through the medieval epic of Wolfram von Eschenbach, was to intrigue Wagner throughout almost his entire career. The Belgian saint eventually became the compassionate title character and redeeming hero of the composer’s last opera, or what he preferred to call “a festival play for the consecration of the stage.” Religious and philosophical lines of thought were to inform the work, written for and premiered in the Bayreuth Festival Theatre in 1882, to such an extent that the self‐confident author prohibited its performance in opera houses, which he deemed irredeemably profane—a ban that was maintained until 1914.


A joint programme with the Hungarian State Opera.