Clear exposition on Richard Wagner's last but least understood music drama
Experts and enthusiasts agree: Parsifal ranks among the finest music Richard Wagner has left us. At the same time, his final music drama is considered one of his most controversial and least understood works. Friedrich Nietzsche, once an ardent admirer of the maestro, suspected Wagner of "a genuflection before the cross". What inspired the artist, who was once known as atheistic and left-wing, to write a religiously charged drama or Bühnenweihfestspiel? This volume in the Operatheek series examines the great substantive and musical complexity of Wagner's artistic and philosophical testament and clarifies the multitude of sources the composer drew from: Christianity, Buddhism, the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, … A return to the sources inevitably leads us also to Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach, the medieval chivalric epic that provided the narrative thread for Wagner's opera.
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