Parsifal at the Metropolitan Opera House Ticket

Wagner’s final opera is a musical journey unlike any other. The composer preferred to call his mature works “music dramas,” but he set Parsifal even further apart by naming it a Bühnenweihfestspiel, a “festival play for the consecration of a stage”—the stage in question being that of his Bayreuth Festival House. The opera tells the tale of a young man who is destined to renew a brotherhood of knights charged with guarding the relics of Christ’s last days. The psychological, mythical, and mystical possibilities of such a story are obvious, and Wagner’s accomplishment results in an air of reverence that surrounds this piece. Parsifal takes place in and around the sanctuary of the knights of the Holy Grail, at the mythical location of Monsalvat in Spain, during the Middle Ages. The Met’s current production, directed by François Girard, places the action in an unspecified, timeless setting.