Wagner's last musical monument

The love affair between Barcelona and the music of Richard Wagner is well exemplified by what happened with the premiere in the city of Parsifal, the German composer's last score. In 1914 the exclusive rights to the work held by the Bayreuth Festival expired, and so from that year onwards it could be performed anywhere; the Gran Teatre del Liceu ran faster than anyone, and at midnight on 31 December 1913 the chords of the opera began to sound. So this year, 2023, it will be one hundred years ago. And what better way to celebrate it than to re-programme the opera. A total of six performances will be staged between 25 May and 7 June, a revival of Aglaja Nicolet with Claus Guth as stage director, Josep Pons conducting the Orquestra Simfònica del Gran Teatre del Liceu, and with tenor Nikolai Schukoff and soprano Elena Pankratova as the leading lights on stage. The production is by the Opernhaus Zürich and the Liceu itself.

Parsifal, defined as a "sacred festival in three acts", is a work of symbolic character around the concept of redemption. Its protagonist is the personification of innocence and compassion, a hero who ignores his origins and even his name. The starting point is the medieval legends about the Holy Grail and the spear of Longinus, but Guth's staging reinterprets and places the plot in a more recent context: the quest of the Grail Knights relates it to the disorientation and search for meaning in the years after the First World War, and finally reflects the events leading up to 1930s Germany.

For more information and tickets, click on the link.