text:
Lanford Wilson

Lanford Wilson (April 13, 1937 – March 24, 2011) was an American playwright. His work, as described by The New York Times, was "earthy, realist, greatly admired [and] widely performed." Wilson helped to advance the Off-Off-Broadway theater movement with his earliest plays, which were first produced at the Caffe Cino beginning in 1964. He was one of the first playwrights to move from Off-Off-Broadway to Off-Broadway, then Broadway and beyond.

He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1980 and was elected in 2001 to the Theater Hall of Fame. In 2004, Wilson was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and received the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award as a Master American Dramatist. He was nominated for three Tony Awards and has won a Drama Desk Award and five Obie Awards.

Wilson's 1964 short play The Madness of Lady Bright was his first major success and led to further works throughout the 1960s that expressed a variety of social and romantic themes. In 1969, he co-founded the Circle Repertory Company with theatre director Marshall W. Mason. He wrote many plays for the Circle Repertory in the 1970s. His 1973 play The Hot l Baltimore was the company's first major success with both audiences and critics. The Off-Broadway production exceeded 1,000 performances.

His play Fifth of July was first produced at Circle Repertory in 1978. He received a Tony Award nomination for its Broadway production, which opened in 1980. A prequel to Fifth of July called Talley's Folly (opened 1979 at Circle Repertory) opened on Broadway before Fifth of July and won Wilson the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and his first Tony nomination. Burn This (1987) was another Broadway success. Wilson also wrote the libretti for several operas.

Childhood and education
Wilson was born to Ralph Eugene and Violetta Tate Wilson in Lebanon, Missouri. After his parents divorced when he was 5, he moved with his mother to Springfield, Missouri, where they lived until she remarried. When he was 11, his mother married Walt E. Lenhard, a farmer from Ozark, Missouri, and they both moved in with him. He had two half-brothers, John and Jim, and one stepsister, Judy. He attended high school in Ozark and developed a love for film and art. As a child, Wilson enjoyed writing short stories and going to see plays performed at Southwest Missouri State College (now Missouri State University). A production of Brigadoon had a particularly resounding effect on Wilson, saying that "after that town came back to life on stage, movies didn't stand a chance". He developed an interest in acting and performed in his high school plays, including the role of Tom in The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams.

After graduating from Ozark High School in 1955, Wilson began his collegiate studies at Southwest Missouri State College. In 1956, he moved to San Diego, where his father had relocated after his parents' divorce. He studied art and art history at San Diego State College as well as worked as a riveter at the Ryan Aircraft Plant. His reunion with his father was difficult, but the relationship improved in later years, and Wilson based his play Lemon Sky on their relationship. Wilson left college and moved to Chicago in 1957, where he worked as a graphic artist for an advertising firm. During this time, Wilson realized that the short stories he had always enjoyed writing would be more effective as plays, and began to study playwriting at the University of Chicago extension program.

Early work (1962–1968)
In 1962, Wilson moved to Greenwich Village in New York City. He worked in odd jobs, such as a temporary typist, a reservations clerk at Americana Hotel, at the complaint desk of a furniture store, and at a dishwashing job where a co-worker incorrectly called him "Lance". After that, Wilson's friends all called him by that name. Wilson eventually worked for the subscription office of the New York Shakespeare Festival.

Wilson first encountered the Caffe Cino when he went to see Eugène Ionesco's The Lesson. The experience left him thinking that theatre "could be both dangerous and funny in that way at the same time". After the show, Wilson introduced himself to Cino co-founder and producer Joe Cino, a pioneer of the Off-Off-Broadway movement. Cino encouraged Wilson to submit a play to the Cino. In Cino, Wilson found a mentor who would not only critique his plays, but also stage them.

Wilson's first play to premiere at Cino was So Long at the Fair, in August 1963. His works for Caffe Cino include Ludlow Fair (originally titled Nail Polish and Tampons), Home Free!, and The Madness of Lady Bright. He continued working odd jobs to support himself during these early years. The Madness of Lady Bright premiered at Caffe Cino in May 1964. The play concerns "Lady" Bright, who is a forty-year-old "screaming preening queen". On a sultry summer day in the 1960s, while in his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, "Lady" Bright slowly loses his mind. It is a complex and comic tragedy of striking originality, and one of Wilson's most notable and finest works. At its heart, the work is a penetrating study of loneliness and isolation. It was one of off-off-Broadway's first significant successes, running for over 200 performances. The Madness of Lady Bright set a record as the longest-running play at Caffe Cino.

In 1965, Wilson began writing plays for Ellen Stewart's La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in the East Village. His first full-length plays premiered at La MaMa, including Balm in Gilead, which depicted a doomed romance in an urban greasy spoon diner inhabited by junkies, prostitutes and thieves. Balm in Gilead premiered at La MaMa in 1965, directed by Marshall W. Mason. The play was revived in 1984 by Circle Repertory Company and the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, and directed by John Malkovich. Later in 1965, Wilson wrote and directed Miss Williams for a benefit performance at La MaMa called "BbAaNnGg!".

In 1965, Wilson's plays Home Free! and No Trespassing were produced for La MaMa Repertory Troupe's first European tour. His play This is the Rill Speaking was produced alongside Jean-Claude van Itallie's War and Rochelle Owens' Homo for La MaMa Repertory Troupe's second European tour, in 1966. His play Untitled was produced with work by Sam Shepard, Tom Eyen, Leonard Melfi, Paul Foster, and Owens, all directed by Tom O'Horgan, for La MaMa Repertory Troupe's third European tour, in 1967. In addition to writing his own plays at La MaMa, Wilson did set design for work by other playwrights. In 1966, he designed the set for Foster's The Madonna in the Orchard, directed by O'Horgan at La MaMa. He then designed the set for Donald Julian's In Praise of Folly, directed by Mason at La MaMa in 1969.

Wilson's play The Sand Castle was first produced at La MaMa in 1965, as directed by Mason, and was again directed by Mason at La MaMa in 1967. Wilson participated in the inaugural National Playwrights Conference in 1965 at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center along with Sam Shepard, Edward Albee, and John Guare. His 1966 play The Rimers of Eldritch addressed hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness in a small town in the rural Midwest and won the 1966/1967 Drama Desk Vernon Rice Award for contribution to off-Broadway theatre. It was first produced at La MaMa in 1966, under Wilson's direction. Wilson directed a revival of The Rimers of Eldritch at La MaMa in 1981 in celebration of the theater's 20-year anniversary.

The Rimers of Eldritch was followed by The Gingham Dog (1968) about the breakup of an interracial couple. He returned to the O'Neill Theater Center to develop Lemon Sky in 1968. Wilson described Lemon Sky (1968) as "directly autobiographical". The play's narrator Alan, Wilson's representation of himself, describes his attempt to reconcile with his long-absent father. They fail to meet each other's expectations, and Alan leaves disillusioned by his father's authoritarianism and narrow-mindedness.

Circle Repertory Company and later work (1969–2011)
In 1969, Wilson co-founded the Circle Repertory Company with Marshall W. Mason, Tanya Berezin, and Rob Thirkield. Many of Wilson's plays were first produced at the Circle Repertory and directed by Mason. Also in 1969, Wilson was hired for $5,000 to adapt Tennessee Williams' short story One Arm, about a male hustler, into a screenplay. The day after he finished the screenplay, he was invited to a preview of Midnight Cowboy, and after seeing the film thought "there went that idea down the drain".

His first plays at Circle Repertory, The Great Nebula in Orion, Ikke, Ikke, Nye, Nye, Nye, and The Family Continues, premiered in 1972. The Hot l Baltimore, about lowlifes who face eviction when the decaying hotel in which they live is to be demolished, opened in 1973 and was Circle Repertory's first commercial success. The play also won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and an Obie Award. It then transferred Off-Broadway to the Circle in the Square Theatre and ran for 1,166 performances. The Hot l Baltimore was adapted into a short-lived television series by ABC in 1975, which Wilson pronounced "a disaster".

In 1974, Wilson acted in Circle Repertory's production of E. E. Cummings' Him under the direction of Marshal Oglesby. In 1975, Wilson's The Mound Builders, which The New York Times described as Wilson's "most ambitious work", premiered at Circle Rep. The play concerned an ill-fated archeological dig in the Midwest, and, thematically, contemplated the futility of man's achievements. Circle Repertory then produced Wilson's Serenading Louie in 1976. The play had been unsuccessfully performed in 1970 by the Washington Theater Club, and Wilson revised it for Circle Repertory's production, which is generally regarded as its official premiere.

Sexual identity is among the themes that Wilson explored in his plays. The theme appears in The Madness of Lady Bright, Lemon Sky, Fifth of July, and Burn This. In Fifth of July, a Broadway hit in 1980–1982, members of the Talley family decide whether to sell the family farmhouse in Missouri. The story centers on Ken Talley, a disabled Vietnam veteran, and his lover Jed, who are living in the house. Wilson was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play for Fifth of July. After Fifth of July, Wilson wrote Talley's Folly (1979), a two-person play depicting the Midwesterner Sally Talley and Jewish Matt Friedman falling in love and become engaged despite the objections of Sally's narrow-minded family. Talley & Son premiered as A Tale Told in 1981 but was rewritten and renamed when it opened in 1985. Both are prequels set 30 years prior to Fifth of July. Talley's Folly was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1980 and received a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Play. Around this time, Norman Mailer asked Wilson to adapt The Executioner's Song for a television movie, but Wilson declined.

Angels Fall opened on Broadway in 1983, earning Wilson his third nomination for the Tony Award for Best Play. The New York Times review said, "Mr. Wilson is one of the few artists in our theater who can truly make America sing." In Burn This, a young gay dancer named Robbie and his lover Dom have died in a boating accident before the play begins. Robbie's roommates, his dance partner Anna and the gay, confident Larry, must come to terms with Robbie's death. Anna learns to be independent and self-confident, pursuing her interest in choreography, beginning a relationship with Robbie's grieving brother Pale, and ending her dispassionate relationship with her longtime boyfriend.

In addition to writing plays, Wilson wrote the libretti for several operas. He collaborated with composer Lee Hoiby for Summer and Smoke (1971) and adapted his own play, This is the Rill Speaking, in 1992. Summer and Smoke is an adaptation of Tennessee Williams' play of the same name. Williams gave Hoiby permission to compose an opera based on the play, and Hoiby asked Wilson to adapt the play into a libretto. This is the Rill Speaking is a one-act chamber opera that Wilson adapted from his own play of the same name. In 1984, Wilson wrote a new translation of Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters for the Hartford Stage Company. Wilson attempted to make his translation sound like everyday speech, as he believed that existing translations were linguistically accurate but not inherently theatrical. Reviews of the Hartford production and a subsequent production by the Steppenwolf Theater Company praised Wilson's idiomatic dialogue.

He also became active with the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, where some of his new short plays were produced, including the 1996 world premiere of his comedy Virgil Is Still the Frogboy, commissioned by the Bay Street Theatre and underwritten by Vanity Fair magazine. The title refers to a famous graffiti spray-painted on a railroad bridge that had puzzled people in the Hamptons for years. Directed by Marshall W. Mason, the production starred Arija Bareiikis, Bobby Cannavale, Jennifer Dundas, Thomas McCarthy, and Josh Pais, running from August 14 to September 9, 1996.

Personal life and death
Wilson was openly gay. After moving to New York City in 1962, he settled in an apartment on Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village, where he lived for many years. In the 1970s, he bought a house in Sag Harbor, Long Island. He lived in both places, using his Manhattan apartment primarily when he had a play in production there. When living in Manhattan, he worked with Playwrights Laboratory at the Circle Repertory Company, often attending readings, rehearsals, and productions.

Around 1998, Wilson gave up his apartment in New York to live full-time in Sag Harbor.

Wilson died on March 24, 2011, aged 73, from complications of pneumonia.

Awards, recognition, and legacy
In 1995, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.

In 2004, Wilson received the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a Master American Dramatist. Also in 2004, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In 2009, he shared insights about his friendship with Tennessee Williams at a theatre festival in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

In 2010, Debra Monk presented Wilson with the Artistic Achievement Award from the New York Innovative Theatre Awards. This honor was awarded by the Off-Off-Broadway community "in recognition of his brave and unique works that helped establish the Off-Off-Broadway community and propel the independent theatre voice as an important contributor to the American stage."

Ben Brantley, theatre critic for The New York Times, has said that Wilson's plays reflect "disenchantment with the state of the nation...A couple plays, at least, featured embittered Vietnam veterans. At the same time, he harked back to the era of more sentimental plays – of portraits of losers on the margins of life." Wilson and Marshall W. Mason encouraged method acting and often used Constantin Stanislavski's technique. In addition to John Malkovich, Judd Hirsch, Swoosie Kurtz, William Hurt, Jeff Daniels, David Morse, and Christopher Reeve were among the actors who starred in Wilson and Mason's productions.

Selected works

 * Home Free! (1964)
 * The Madness of Lady Bright (1964)
 * Balm in Gilead (1965)
 * Ludlow Fair (1965)
 * Wandering (1966)
 * The Rimers of Eldritch (1967)
 * The Gingham Dog (1968) (Wilson's first Broadway production in 1969)
 * Lemon Sky (1968)
 * Serenading Louie (1970)
 * The Hot l Baltimore (1973)
 * The Mound Builders (1975)

 * Fifth of July (1978; Broadway 1980–82)
 * Talley's Folly (1979; Broadway 1980)
 * A Tale Told (1981, later revised and renamed Talley & Son)
 * Angels Fall (1982; Broadway 1983)
 * Burn This (1986; Broadway 1987–88)
 * A Betrothal (1986)
 * Abstinence (1989)
 * Redwood Curtain (1992; Broadway 1993; TV 1995)
 * A Sense of Place (1996)
 * Sympathetic Magic (1998)
 * Book of Days (2000)
 * Rain Dance (2002)
 * Brontosaurus (1978)

title: Lanford Wilson


text:
Tannhäuser

Tannhäuser (Tanhûser), often stylized "The Tannhäuser", was a German Minnesinger and traveling poet. Historically, his biography, including the dates he lived, is obscure beyond the poetry, which suggests he lived between 1245 and 1265.

His name becomes associated with a "fairy queen"–type folk ballad in German folklore of the 16th century.

Historical Tannhäuser
The most common tradition has him as a descent from the Tanhusen family of Imperial ministeriales, documented in various 13th century sources, with their residence in the area of Neumarkt in the Bavarian Nordgau. These sources identify him as being descended of an Old Styrian noble family.

The illustrated Codex Manesse manuscript (about 1300–1340) depicts him clad in the Teutonic Order habit, suggesting he might have fought in the Sixth Crusade led by Emperor Frederick II in 1228/29. For a while, Tannhäuser was an active courtier at the court of the Austrian duke Frederick the Warlike, who ruled from 1230 to 1246. Frederick was the last of the Babenberg dukes; upon his death in the Battle of the Leitha River, Tannhäuser left the Vienna court.

Tannhäuser was a proponent of the leich (lai) style of minnesang and dance-song poetry. As literature, his poems parody the traditional genre with irony and hyperbole, somewhat similar to later commercium songs. However, his Bußlied (Poem on Atonement) is unusual, given the eroticism of the remaining Codex Manesse.

Tannhäuser legend

Based on his Bußlied, Tannhäuser became the subject of a legendary account. It makes Tannhäuser a knight and poet who found the Venusberg, the subterranean home of Venus, and spent a year there worshipping the goddess. After leaving the Venusberg, Tannhäuser is filled with remorse, and travels to Rome to ask Pope Urban IV (reigned 1261–1264) if it is possible to be absolved of his sins. Urban replies that forgiveness is impossible, as much as it would be for his papal staff to blossom. Three days after Tannhäuser's departure, Urban's staff bloomed with flowers; messengers are sent to retrieve the knight, but he has already returned to Venusberg, never to be seen again.

The earliest version of the narrative of the legend, not yet associated with name of Tannhäuser, is first recorded  in the form of a ballad by the Provençal writer Antoine de la Sale (c. 1440).

The association of this narrative of La Sale's ballad, which was likely based on an Italian original, with the name of Tannhäuser, appears to take place in the early 16th century. A German Tannhäuser folk ballad is recorded in numerous versions beginning around 1510.

The popularity of the ballad continues unabated well into the 17th century.

The motif became most popular as the principal source for Richard Wagner's large three-act opera Tannhäuser (1845), which changes a few story elements and is known for including a scandalous depiction of the revels of Venus's court in its first scene. The plot of the opera covers both the Tannhäuser legend and the epic of the Sängerkrieg at Wartburg Castle.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Tannhäuser


text:
Diana Wynne Jones

Diana Wynne Jones (16 August 1934 – 26 March 2011) was a British novelist, poet, academic, literary critic, and short story writer. She principally wrote fantasy and speculative fiction novels for children and young adults. Although usually described as fantasy, some of her work also incorporates science fiction themes and elements of realism. Jones's work often explores themes of time travel and parallel or multiple universes. Some of her better-known works are the Chrestomanci series, the Dalemark series, the three Moving Castle novels, Dark Lord of Derkholm, and The Tough Guide to Fantasyland.

Jones has been cited as an inspiration and muse for several fantasy and science fiction authors including Philip Pullman, Terry Pratchett, Penelope Lively, Robin McKinley, Dina Rabinovitch, Megan Whalen Turner, J.K. Rowling and Neil Gaiman, with Gaiman describing her as "quite simply the best writer for children of her generation". Her work has been nominated for several awards. She was twice a finalist for the Hugo Award, nominated fourteen times for the Locus Award, seven times for the Mythopoeic Award (which she won twice), twice for a British Fantasy Award (won in 1999), and twice for a World Fantasy Award, which she won in 2007.

Early life and marriage
Jones was born in London, the daughter of Marjorie (née Jackson) and Richard Aneurin Jones, both of whom were teachers. When war was announced, shortly after her fifth birthday, she was evacuated to Pontarddulais in Wales where her grandfather was a minister at a chapel. She did not live long in Wales due to a family dispute, and thereafter moved several times, including periods in the Lake District, in York, and back to London. In 1943 her family finally settled in Thaxted, Essex, where her parents worked running an educational conference centre. There, Jones and her two younger sisters Isobel (later Professor Isobel Armstrong, the literary critic) and Ursula (later an actress and a children's writer) spent a childhood left chiefly to their own devices.

After attending Friends' School, Saffron Walden, she studied English at St Anne's College, Oxford, where she attended lectures by both C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien before graduating in 1956. In the same year she married John Burrow, a prominent scholar of medieval literature, with whom she had three sons, Richard, Michael and Colin. After a brief period in London, in 1957 the couple returned to Oxford, where they stayed until moving to Bristol in 1976.

Career
Jones started writing during the mid-1960s "mostly to keep [her] sanity", when the youngest of her three children was about two years old and the family lived in a house owned by an Oxford college. Besides the children, she felt harried by the crises of adults in the household: a sick husband, a mother-in-law, a sister, and a friend with daughter. Her first book was a novel for adults published by Macmillan in 1970, entitled Changeover. It originated as the British Empire was divesting colonies; she recalled in 2004 that it had "seemed like every month, we would hear that yet another small island or tiny country had been granted independence." Changeover is set in a fictional African colony during transition, and what begins as a memo about the problem of how to "mark changeover" ceremonially is misunderstood to be about the threat of a terrorist named Mark Changeover. It is a farce with a large cast of characters, featuring government, police, and army bureaucracies; sex, politics, and news. In 1965, when Rhodesia declared independence unilaterally (one of the last colonies and not tiny), "I felt as if the book were coming true as I wrote it."

Jones's books range from amusing slapstick situations to sharp social observation (Changeover is both), to witty parody of literary forms. Foremost amongst the latter are The Tough Guide To Fantasyland and its fictional companion-piece Dark Lord of Derkholm, which provide a merciless (though not unaffectionate) critique of formulaic sword-and-sorcery epics.

The Harry Potter books are frequently compared to the works of Diana Wynne Jones. Many of her earlier children's books were out of print in recent years, but have now been re-issued for the young audience whose interest in fantasy and reading was spurred by Harry Potter.

Jones's works are also compared to those of Robin McKinley and Neil Gaiman. She was friends with both McKinley and Gaiman, and Jones and Gaiman were fans of each other's work; she dedicated her 1993 novel Hexwood to him after something he said in conversation inspired a key part of the plot. Gaiman had already dedicated his 1991 four-part comic book mini-series The Books of Magic to "four witches", of whom Jones was one.

For Charmed Life, the first Chrestomanci novel, Jones won the 1978 Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a once-in-a-lifetime award by The Guardian newspaper that is judged by a panel of children's writers. Three times she was a commended runner-up for the Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book: for Dogsbody (1975), Charmed Life (1977), and the fourth Chrestomanci book The Lives of Christopher Chant (1988). She won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, children's section, in 1996 for The Crown of Dalemark (concluding that series) and in 1999 for Dark Lord of Derkholm; in four other years she was a finalist for the annual literary award by the Mythopoeic Society.

The 1986 novel Howl's Moving Castle was inspired by a boy at a school she was visiting, who asked her to write a book called The Moving Castle. It was published first by Greenwillow in the U.S., where it was a runner-up for the annual Boston Globe–Horn Book Award in children's fiction. In 2004, Hayao Miyazaki made the Japanese-language animated movie Howl's Moving Castle, which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. A version dubbed in English was released in the UK and US in 2005, with the voice of Howl performed by Christian Bale. Next year Jones and the novel won the annual Phoenix Award from the Children's Literature Association, recognising the best children's book published twenty years earlier that did not win a major award (named for mythical bird phoenix to suggest the book's rise from obscurity).

Fire and Hemlock had been the 2005 Phoenix runner-up. It is a novel based on Scottish ballads, and was a Mythopoeic Fantasy finalist in its own time.

Archer's Goon (1984) was a runner-up for that year's Horn Book Award. It was adapted for television in 1992. One Jones fansite believes it to be "the only tv adaptation (so far) of one of Diana's books".

Jones's book on clichés in fantasy fiction, The Tough Guide To Fantasyland (nonfiction), has a cult following among writers and critics, despite initially being difficult to find due to an erratic printing history. It was reissued in the UK, and has been reissued in the United States in 2006 by Firebird Books. The Firebird edition has additional material and a completely new design, including a new map.

The British Fantasy Society recognised her significant impact on fantasy with its Karl Edward Wagner Award in 1999. She received an honorary D.Litt from the University of Bristol in July 2006 and the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2007.

In August 2014, Google commemorated Jones with a Google Doodle created by Google artist Sophie Diao.

Illness and death
Jones was diagnosed with lung cancer in the early summer of 2009. She underwent surgery in July and reported to friends that the procedure had been successful. However, in June 2010 she announced that she would be discontinuing chemotherapy because it only made her feel ill. In mid-2010 she was halfway through a new book with plans for another to follow. She died on 26 March 2011 from the disease. She was surrounded by her husband, three sons, and five grandchildren as she was cremated at Canford Cemetery.

The story in progress when she became too ill to write, The Islands of Chaldea, was completed by her sister Ursula Jones in 2014. Interviewed by The Guardian in June 2013 after she finished the Chaldea story, Ursula Jones said that "other things were coming to light ... She left behind a mass of stuff." In 2013 another book was published posthumously, Vile Visitors.

Selected awards and honours
Jones has been nominated for and also won multiple awards for her various works.

Additional works cited

 * Formerly The Official Diana Wynne Jones Fansite.
 * Formerly The Official Diana Wynne Jones Fansite.

title: Diana Wynne Jones


text:
Parsifal

Parsifal (WWV 111) is a music drama in three acts by the German composer Richard Wagner and his last composition. Wagner's own libretto for the work is freely based on the 13th-century Middle High German chivalric romance Parzival of the Minnesänger Wolfram von Eschenbach and the Old French chivalric romance Perceval ou le Conte du Graal by the 12th-century trouvère Chrétien de Troyes, recounting different accounts of the story of the Arthurian knight Parzival (Percival) and his spiritual quest for the Holy Grail.

Wagner conceived the work in April 1857, but did not finish it until 25 years later. In composing it he took advantage of the particular acoustics of his newly built Bayreuth Festspielhaus. Parsifal was first produced at the second Bayreuth Festival in 1882. The Bayreuth Festival maintained a monopoly on Parsifal productions until 1903, when the opera was performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Wagner described Parsifal not as an opera, but as Ein Bühnenweihfestspiel (a sacred festival stage play). At Bayreuth a tradition has arisen that audiences do not applaud at the end of the first act. The autograph manuscript of the work is preserved in the Richard Wagner Foundation.

Composition
Wagner read von Eschenbach's poem Parzival while taking the waters at Marienbad in 1845. After encountering Arthur Schopenhauer's writings in 1854, Wagner became interested in Indian philosophies, especially Buddhism. Out of this interest came Die Sieger (The Victors, 1856), a sketch Wagner wrote for an opera based on a story from the life of Buddha. The themes of self-renunciation, rebirth, compassion, and even exclusive social groups (castes in Die Sieger, the knights of the Grail in Parsifal) which were later explored in Parsifal were first introduced in Die Sieger.

According to his autobiography Mein Leben, Wagner conceived Parsifal on Good Friday morning, April 1857, in the Asyl (German: "Asylum"), the small cottage on Otto Wesendonck's estate in the Zürich suburb of Enge, which Wesendonck – a wealthy silk merchant and generous patron of the arts – had placed at Wagner's disposal, through the good offices of his wife Mathilde Wesendonck. The composer and his wife Minna had moved into the cottage on 28 April: "... on Good Friday I awoke to find the sun shining brightly for the first time in this house: the little garden was radiant with green, the birds sang, and at last I could sit on the roof and enjoy the long-yearned-for peace with its message of promise. Full of this sentiment, I suddenly remembered that the day was Good Friday, and I called to mind the significance this omen had already once assumed for me when I was reading Wolfram's Parzival. Since the sojourn in Marienbad [in the summer of 1845], where I had conceived Die Meistersinger and Lohengrin, I had never occupied myself again with that poem; now its noble possibilities struck me with overwhelming force, and out of my thoughts about Good Friday I rapidly conceived a whole drama, of which I made a rough sketch with a few dashes of the pen, dividing the whole into three acts."

However, as his second wife Cosima Wagner later reported on 22 April 1879, this account had been colored by a certain amount of poetic licence: "R[ichard] today recalled the impression which inspired his 'Good Friday Music'; he laughs, saying he had thought to himself, 'In fact it is all as far-fetched as my love affairs, for it was not a Good Friday at all – just a pleasant mood in Nature which made me think, 'This is how a Good Friday ought to be."

The work may indeed have been conceived at Wesendonck's cottage in the last week of April 1857, but Good Friday that year fell on 10 April, when the Wagners were still living at Zeltweg 13 in Zürich. If the prose sketch which Wagner mentions in Mein Leben was accurately dated (and most of Wagner's surviving papers are dated), it could settle the issue once and for all, but unfortunately it has not survived.

Wagner did not resume work on Parsifal for eight years, during which time he completed Tristan und Isolde and began Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Then, between 27 and 30 August 1865, he took up Parsifal again and made a prose draft of the work; this contains a fairly brief outline of the plot and a considerable amount of detailed commentary on the characters and themes of the drama. But once again the work was dropped and set aside for another eleven and a half years. During this time most of Wagner's creative energy was devoted to the Ring cycle, which was finally completed in 1874 and given its first full performance at Bayreuth in August 1876. Only when this gargantuan task had been accomplished did Wagner find the time to concentrate on Parsifal. By 23 February 1877 he had completed a second and more extensive prose draft of the work, and by 19 April of the same year he had transformed this into a verse libretto (or "poem", as Wagner liked to call his libretti).

In September 1877 he began the music by making two complete drafts of the score from beginning to end. The first of these (known in German as the Gesamtentwurf and in English as either the preliminary draft or the first complete draft) was made in pencil on three staves, one for the voices and two for the instruments. The second complete draft (Orchesterskizze, orchestral draft, short score or particell) was made in ink and on at least three, but sometimes as many as five, staves. This draft was much more detailed than the first and contained a considerable degree of instrumental elaboration.

The second draft was begun on 25 September 1877, just a few days after the first; at this point in his career Wagner liked to work on both drafts simultaneously, switching back and forth between the two so as not to allow too much time to elapse between his initial setting of the text and the final elaboration of the music. The Gesamtentwurf of act 3 was completed on 16 April 1879 and the Orchesterskizze on the 26th of the same month.

The full score (Partiturerstschrift) was the final stage in the compositional process. It was made in ink and consisted of a fair copy of the entire opera, with all the voices and instruments properly notated according to standard practice. Wagner composed Parsifal one act at a time, completing the Gesamtentwurf and Orchesterskizze of each act before beginning the Gesamtentwurf of the next act; but because the Orchesterskizze already embodied all the compositional details of the full score, the actual drafting of the Partiturerstschrift was regarded by Wagner as little more than a routine task which could be done whenever he found the time. The prelude of act 1 was scored in August 1878. The rest of the opera was scored between August 1879 and 13 January 1882.

Premiere
On 12 November 1880, Wagner conducted a private performance of the prelude for his patron Ludwig II of Bavaria at the Court Theatre in Munich. The premiere of the entire work was given in the Bayreuth Festspielhaus on 26 July 1882 conducted by the Jewish-German conductor Hermann Levi. Stage designs were by Max Brückner and Paul von Joukowsky, who took their lead from Wagner himself. The Grail hall was based on the interior of Siena Cathedral which Wagner had visited in 1880, while Klingsor's magic garden was modelled on those at the Palazzo Rufolo in Ravello. In July and August 1882 sixteen performances of the work were given in Bayreuth conducted by Levi and Franz Fischer. The production boasted an orchestra of 107, a chorus of 135 and 23 soloists (with the main parts being double cast). At the last of these performances, Wagner took the baton from Levi and conducted the final scene of act 3 from the orchestral interlude to the end.

At the first performances of Parsifal, problems with the moving scenery (the Wandeldekoration ) during the transition from scene 1 to scene 2 in act 1 meant that Wagner's existing orchestral interlude finished before Parsifal and Gurnemanz arrived at the hall of the Grail. Engelbert Humperdinck, who was assisting the production, provided a few extra bars of music to cover this gap. In subsequent years this problem was solved and Humperdinck's additions were not used.

Ban outside Bayreuth

For the first twenty years of its existence, the only staged performances of Parsifal took place in the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, the venue for which Wagner conceived the work (except eight private performances for Ludwig II at Munich in 1884 and 1885). Wagner had two reasons for wanting to keep Parsifal exclusively for the Bayreuth stage. First, he wanted to prevent it from degenerating into 'mere amusement' for an opera-going public. Only at Bayreuth could his last work be presented in the way envisaged by him—a tradition maintained by his wife, Cosima, long after his death. Second, he thought that the opera would provide an income for his family after his death if Bayreuth had the monopoly on its performance.

The Bayreuth authorities allowed unstaged performances to take place in various countries after Wagner's death (London in 1884, New York City in 1886, and Amsterdam in 1894) but they maintained an embargo on stage performances outside Bayreuth. On 24 December 1903, after receiving a court ruling that performances in the United States could not be prevented by Bayreuth, the New York Metropolitan Opera staged the complete opera, using many Bayreuth-trained singers. Cosima barred anyone involved in the New York production from working at Bayreuth in future performances. Unauthorized stage performances were also undertaken in Amsterdam in 1905, 1906 and 1908. There was a performance in Buenos Aires, in the Teatro Coliseo, on June 20, 1913, under Gino Marinuzzi.

Bayreuth lifted its monopoly on Parsifal on 1 January 1914 in the Teatro Comunale di Bologna in Bologna with Giuseppe Borgatti. Some opera houses began their performances at midnight between 31 December 1913 and 1 January. The first authorized performance was staged at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona: it began at 10:30pm Barcelona time, which was an hour behind Bayreuth. Such was the demand for Parsifal that it was presented in more than 50 European opera houses between 1 January and 1 August 1914.

Applause
At Bayreuth performances audiences do not applaud at the end of the first act. This tradition is the result of a misunderstanding arising from Wagner's desire at the premiere to maintain the serious mood of the opera. After much applause following the first and second acts, Wagner spoke to the audience and said that the cast would take no curtain calls until the end of the performance. This confused the audience, who remained silent at the end of the opera until Wagner addressed them again, saying that he did not mean that they could not applaud. After the performance Wagner complained, "Now I don't know. Did the audience like it or not?" At subsequent performances some believed that Wagner had wanted no applause until the very end, and there was silence after the first two acts. Eventually it became a Bayreuth tradition that no applause would be heard after the first act, but this was certainly not Wagner's idea. In fact, during the first Bayreuth performances, Wagner himself cried "Bravo!" as the flowermaidens made their exit in the second act, only to be hissed by other members of the audience. At some theatres other than Bayreuth, applause and curtain calls are normal practice after every act. Program notes until 2013 at the Metropolitan Opera in New York asked the audience not to applaud after act 1.

Post-war performances
Parsifal is one of the Wagner operas regularly presented at the Bayreuth Festival to this day. Among the more significant post-war productions was that directed in 1951 by Wieland Wagner, the composer's grandson. At the first Bayreuth Festival after World War II he presented a radical move away from literal representation of the hall of the Grail or the flowermaiden's bower. Instead, lighting effects and the bare minimum of scenery were used to complement Wagner's music. This production was heavily influenced by the ideas of the Swiss stage designer Adolphe Appia. The reaction to this production was extreme: Ernest Newman, Richard Wagner's biographer described it as "not only the best Parsifal I have ever seen and heard, but one of the three or four most moving spiritual experiences of my life". Others were appalled that Wagner's stage directions were being flouted. The conductor of the 1951 production, Hans Knappertsbusch, on being asked how he could conduct such a disgraceful travesty, declared that right up until the dress rehearsal he imagined that the stage decorations were still to come. Knappertsbusch was particularly upset by the omission of the dove that appears over Parsifal's head at the end of the opera, which he claimed inspired him to give better performances. To placate his conductor Wieland arranged to reinstate the dove, which descended on a string. What Knappertsbusch did not realise was that Wieland had made the length of the string long enough for the conductor to see the dove, but not for the audience. Wieland continued to modify and refine his Bayreuth production of Parsifal until his death in 1966. Martha Mödl created a "complex, tortured Kundry in Wieland Wagner's revolutionary production of Parsifal during the festival's first postwar season", and would remain the company's exclusive Kundry for the remainder of the decade.

Act 1
Prelude to act 1

Musical introduction to the work with a duration of c. 12–16 minutes.

Scene 1

In a forest near the seat of the Grail and its knights, Gurnemanz, an elder knight of the Grail, wakes his young squires and leads them in morning prayer ("He! Ho! Waldhüter ihr"). Their king, Amfortas, has been stabbed by the Holy Spear, once bequeathed to him into his guardianship, and the wound will not heal.

Kundry arrives in a frenzy, with soothing balsam from Arabia. The squires eye Kundry with mistrust and question her. They believe Kundry to be an evil pagan witch. Gurnemanz restrains them and defends her. He relates history of Amfortas and the spear; it was stolen from him by the failed knight Klingsor.

Gurnemanz's squires ask how it is that he knew Klingsor. Gurnemanz tells them that Klingsor was once a respected knight, but, unable to cleanse himself of sin, castrated himself in an effort to attain purity, but instead became an evil monstrosity.

Parsifal enters, carrying a swan which he has killed. Shocked, Gurnemanz speaks sternly to the lad, saying that this land is a holy place, not to be defiled by murder. Remorsefully the young man breaks his bow in agitation and casts it aside. Kundry tells him that she has seen that his mother has died. Parsifal, who cannot remember much of his past, is crestfallen.

Gurnemanz wonders if Parsifal might be the predicted "pure fool"; he invites Parsifal to witness the Ceremony of the Uncovering of the Grail, which renews the knights' immortality.

Orchestral interlude – Verwandlungsmusik (Transformation music)

Scene 2

The voice of the retired king Titurel resounds from a vaulted crypt in the background, demanding that his son Amfortas uncover the Grail and serve his kingly office ("Mein Sohn Amfortas, bist du am Amt?"). Only through the immortality-conferring power of the sacred chalice and the Saviour's blood contained therein may Titurel himself, now aged and very feeble, live on. Amfortas is overcome with shame and suffering ("Wehvolles Erbe, dem ich verfallen"). He, the chosen guardian of the holiest of relics, has succumbed to sin and lost the Holy Spear, suffering an ever-bleeding wound in the process; uncovering the Grail causes him great pain. The young man appears to suffer with him, clutching convulsively at his heart. The knights and Titurel urge Amfortas to reveal the Grail ("Enthüllet den Gral!"), and he finally does. The dark hall is illuminated by its radiant light and the round table of the knights is miraculously filled with wine and bread. Slowly all the knights and squires disappear, leaving Gurnemanz and the youth alone. Gurnemanz asks the youth if he has understood what he has seen. As the boy is unable to answer the question, Gurnemanz dismisses him as just an ordinary fool after all and angrily exiles him from the realm with a warning to let the swans in the Grail Kingdom live in peace.

Act 2
Prelude to act 2 – Klingsors Zauberschloss (Klingsor's Magic Castle)

Musical introduction of c. 2–3 minutes.

Scene 1

Klingsor's castle and enchanted garden. Waking her from her sleep, Klingsor conjures up Kundry, now transformed into an incredibly alluring woman. He calls her by many names: First Sorceress (Urteufelin), Hell's Rose (Höllenrose), Herodias, Gundryggia and, lastly, Kundry. She mocks his self-castrated condition but cannot resist his power. He resolves to send her to seduce Parsifal and ruin him as she ruined Amfortas before.

Scene 2

The youth walks into a wondrous garden, surrounded by beautiful and seductive flowermaidens. They call to him and entwine themselves about him while chiding him for wounding their lovers ("Komm, komm, holder Knabe!"), yet the boy in his childlike innocent naïveté doesn't comprehend their temptations and shows only little interest in them. The flowermaidens soon fight and bicker among themselves to win his devotion, to the point that he is about to flee, but a different voice suddenly calls out "Parsifal!". The youth finally recalls this name is what his mother called him when she appeared in his dreams. The flowermaidens back away from him and call him a fool as they leave him and Kundry alone.

Parsifal wonders if the whole Garden is but a dream and asks how it is that Kundry knows his name. Kundry tells him she learned it from his mother ("Ich sah das Kind an seiner Mutter Brust"), who had loved him and tried to shield him from his father's fate, the mother he had abandoned and who had finally died of grief. She reveals many parts of Parsifal's history to him and he is stricken with remorse, blaming himself for his mother's death. Kundry tells him that this realization is a first sign of understanding and that, with a kiss, she can help him understand the love that had once united his parents, wanting thus to awake in Parsifal the first pangs of desire. However, as she kisses Parsifal, the youth suddenly recoils in pain and cries out Amfortas' name: having just felt for the first time material desire with Kundry's kiss, Parsifal finds himself in the same position in which Amfortas had been seduced and he feels the wounded king's pain and suffering of evil and sin burning in his own soul. Only now does Parsifal understand Amfortas' passion during the Grail Ceremony ("Amfortas! Die Wunde! Die Wunde!").

Furious that her ploy has failed, Kundry tells Parsifal that if he can feel compassion for Amfortas, then he should also be able to feel it for her. In a distant past, she saw the Redeemer and mockingly laughed at His pains in malice. As a punishment for this sin she has been cursed and bound by Klingsor and has fallen under his yoke. The curse condemns her to never be able to die and find peace and redemption. She cannot weep, only jeer diabolically. Longing for deliverance, she has been waiting for ages for a man to free her from her curse and yearns to once more meet the Saviour's forgiving gaze, but her search for her redeemer in the end only ever turns into a desire to find her salvation in earthly desire with those who fall for her charms. All her penitent endeavours eventually transform into a renewed life of sin and a continued unredeemed existence in bondage to Klingsor. When Parsifal still resists her, Kundry curses him through the power of her own accursed being to wander without ever finding the Kingdom of the Grail again, and finally calls on her master Klingsor to help her.

Klingsor appears on the castle rampart and hurls the Holy Spear at Parsifal to destroy him. He seizes the spear in his hand and makes with it the sign of the Cross, banishing Klingsor's dark sorcery. The whole castle with Klingsor himself suddenly sinks as if by terrible earthquake and the enchanted garden withers. As Parsifal leaves, he tells Kundry that she knows where she can find him.

Act 3
Prelude to act 3 – Parsifals Irrfahrt (Parsifal's Wandering)

Musical introduction of c. 4–6 minutes.

Scene 1

The scene takes place many years later. Gurnemanz is now aged and bent, living alone as a hermit. It is Good Friday. He hears moaning near his hut and finds Kundry lying unconscious in the brush, similarly as he had many years before ("Sie! Wieder da!"). He revives her using water from the Holy Spring, but she will only speak the word "serve" ("Dienen"). Looking into the forest, Gurnemanz sees a figure approaching, armed and in full armour. The stranger removes his helmet and Gurnemanz recognizes the lad who shot the swan; to his amazement the knight also bears the Holy Spear.

Kundry washes Parsifal's feet and Gurnemanz anoints him with water from the Holy Spring, recognizing him as the pure fool, now enlightened by compassion and freed from guilt through purifying suffering, and proclaims him the foretold new king of the knights of the Grail.

Parsifal looks about and comments on the beauty of the meadow. Gurnemanz explains that today is Good Friday, when all the world is purified and renewed.

A dark orchestral interlude leads into the solemn gathering of the knights.

Orchestral interlude – Verwandlungsmusik (Transformation music) – Titurels Totenfeier (Titurel's Funeral March)

Scene 2

Within the Castle of the Grail, Titurel's funeral is to take place. Mourning processions of knights bring the deceased Titurel in a coffin and the Grail in its shrine, as well as Amfortas on his litter, to the Grail hall ("Geleiten wir im bergenden Schrein"). The knights desperately urge Amfortas to keep his promise and at least once more, for the very last time uncover the Grail again, but Amfortas, in a frenzy, says he will never again show the Grail, as doing so would just prolong his unbearable torment. Instead, he commands the knights to kill him and end with his suffering also the shame he has brought on the brotherhood. At this moment, Parsifal appears and declares only one weapon can help here: only the same spear that inflicted the wound can now close it ("Nur eine Waffe taugt"). He touches Amfortas' side with the Holy Spear and both heals the wound and absolves him from sin. The spear, now reunited with the Holy Grail, starts to bleed with the same divine blood that is contained within the sacred chalice. Extolling the virtue of compassion and blessing Amfortas' suffering for making a pure fool knowing, Parsifal replaces Amfortas in his kingly office and orders to unveil the Grail, which is never to be hidden again. As the Grail glows ever brighter with light and a white dove descends from the top of the dome and hovers over Parsifal's head, a chorus mysticus of all the knights praises the miracle of salvation ("Höchsten Heiles Wunder!") and proclaims the redemption of the Redeemer ("Erlösung dem Erlöser!"). Kundry, also at the very last released from her curse and redeemed, slowly sinks lifeless to the ground with her gaze resting on Parsifal, who raises the Grail in blessing over the worshipping knighthood.

Reactions
Since Parsifal could initially only be seen at the Bayreuth Festival, the first presentation in 1882 was attended by many notable figures. Reaction was varied. Some thought that Parsifal marked a weakening of Wagner's abilities, many others saw the work as a crowning achievement. The famous critic and Wagner's theoretical opponent Eduard Hanslick gave his opinion that "The Third act may be counted the most unified and the most atmospheric. It is not the richest musically," going on to note "And Wagner's creative powers? For a man of his age and his method they are astounding ... [but] It would be foolishness to declare that Wagner's fantasy, and specifically his musical invention, has retained the freshness and facility of yore. One cannot help but discern sterility and prosaicism, together with increasing longwindedness."

On the other hand, the conductor Felix Weingartner found that: "The flowermaidens' costumes showed extraordinary lack of taste, but the singing was incomparable... When the curtain had been rung down on the final scene and we were walking down the hill, I seemed to hear the words of Goethe 'and you can say you were present'. The Parsifal performances of 1882 were artistic events of supreme interest and it is my pride and joy that I participated in them." Many contemporary composers shared Weingartner's opinion. Hugo Wolf was a student at the time of the 1882 Festival, yet still managed to find money for tickets to see Parsifal twice. He emerged overwhelmed: "Colossal – Wagner's most inspired, sublimest creation." He reiterated this view in a postcard from Bayreuth in 1883: "Parsifal is without doubt by far the most beautiful and sublime work in the whole field of Art." Gustav Mahler was also present in 1883 and he wrote to a friend; "I can hardly describe my present state to you. When I came out of the Festspielhaus, completely spellbound, I understood that the greatest and most painful revelation had just been made to me, and that I would carry it unspoiled for the rest of my life." Max Reger simply noted that "When I first heard Parsifal at Bayreuth I was fifteen. I cried for two weeks and then became a musician." Alban Berg described Parsifal in 1909 as "magnificent, overwhelming", and Jean Sibelius, visiting the Festival in 1894, said: "Nothing in the world has made so overwhelming an impression on me. All my innermost heart-strings throbbed... I cannot begin to tell you how Parsifal has transported me. Everything I do seems so cold and feeble by its side. is really something." Claude Debussy thought the characters and plot ludicrous, but nevertheless in 1903 wrote that musically it was: "Incomparable and bewildering, splendid and strong. Parsifal is one of the loveliest monuments of sound ever raised to the serene glory of music." He was later to write to Ernest Chausson that he had deleted a scene he had just written for his own opera Pelléas et Melisande because he had discovered in the music for it "the ghost of old Klingsor, alias R. Wagner".

However, some notable guests of the Festival took a more acerbic view of the experience. Mark Twain visited Bayreuth in 1891: "I was not able to detect in the vocal parts of Parsifal anything that might with confidence be called rhythm or tune or melody... Singing! It does seem the wrong name to apply to it... In Parsifal there is a hermit named Gurnemanz who stands on the stage in one spot and practices by the hour, while first one and then another of the cast endures what he can of it and then retires to die." Performance standards may have contributed to such reactions; George Bernard Shaw, a committed Wagnerite, commented in 1894 that: "The opening performance of Parsifal this season was, from the purely musical point of view, as far as the principal singers were concerned, simply an abomination. The bass howled, the tenor bawled, the baritone sang flat and the soprano, when she condescended to sing at all and did not merely shout her words, screamed..."

During a break from composing The Rite of Spring, Igor Stravinsky traveled to the Bayreuth Festival at the invitation of Sergei Diaghilev to see the work. Stravinsky was repulsed by the "quasi-religious atmosphere" of the festival. Stravinsky's repulsion is speculated to be due to his agnosticism, of which he recanted later in life.

Interpretation and influence

Wagner's last work, Parsifal has been both influential and controversial. The use of Christian symbols in Parsifal (the Grail, the spear, references to the Redeemer) together with its restriction to Bayreuth for almost 30 years sometimes led to performances being regarded almost as a religious rite. However, Wagner never actually refers to Jesus Christ by name in the opera, only to "The Redeemer". In his essay "Religion and Art", Wagner described the use of Christian imagery thus: "When religion becomes artificial, art has a duty to rescue it. Art can show that the symbols which religions would have us believe literally true are actually figurative. Art can idealize those symbols, and so reveal the profound truths they contain." The critic Eduard Hanslick objected to the religious air surrounding Parsifal even at the premiere: "The question of whether Parsifal should really be withheld from all theatres and limited to... Bayreuth was naturally on all tongues... I must state here that the church scenes in Parsifal did not make the offensive impression on me that others and I had been led to expect from reading the libretto. They are religious situations – but for all their earnest dignity they are not in the style of the church, but completely in the style of the opera. Parsifal is an opera, call it a 'stage festival' or 'consecrational stage festival' if you will."

Schopenhauer
Wagner had been greatly impressed with his reading of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer in 1854, and this deeply affected his thoughts and practice on music and art. Most writers (e.g. Bryan Magee) see Parsifal as Wagner's last great espousal of Schopenhauerian philosophy. Parsifal can heal Amfortas and redeem Kundry because he shows compassion, which Schopenhauer saw as the highest manifestation of human morality. Moreover, Parsifal displays compassion in the face of sexual temptation (act 2, scene 2); Schopenhauerian philosophy suggests that the only escape from the ever-present temptations of human life is through negation of the Will, and overcoming sexual temptation is in particular a strong form of negation of the Will. Schopenhauer also claims that compassion should be extended to non-human sentient beings as well, supporting this claim by the lives of Christian saints and mystics and the Indian religions of Hinduism and Buddhism. This worldview finds in Parsifal its expression in the holy status of animals within the Kingdom of the Grail, in the schocked response to Parsifal's "murder" of the swan (act 1, scene 1), which awakens in the youth the first unaware throb of compassion, or in Gurnemanz's "sermon" about the Good Friday Spell affecting nature and humanity's relation towards nature (act 3, scene 1). Wagner himself in his older age became an advocate of vegetarianism and an opponent of vivisection, participating in an anti-vivisectionist petition to the Reichstag in 1879; he also professed what might be called early environmentalist sentiments. As the exact opposite of compassion and therefore as the ultimate moral evil Schopenhauer sees the act of Schadenfreude, the enjoying of the suffering of another living being; it is precisely this sin of which Kundry is guilty when she maliciously laughs in mocking pride at the sufferings of the Redeemer and as a result of which she falls under Klingsor's curse (recounted in act 2, scene 2), broken only at the moment when she is again capable to weep and thus express compassion during the Good Friday Spell (act 3, scene 1). When viewed in this light, Parsifal, with its emphasis on Mitleid ("compassion") is a natural follow-on to Tristan und Isolde, where Schopenhauer's influence is perhaps more obvious, with its focus on Sehnen ("yearning"). Indeed, Wagner originally considered including Parsifal as a character in act 3 of Tristan, but later rejected the idea.

Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche, who was originally a champion of Wagner and Schopenhauer, chose later to use Parsifal as the ground for his breach with Wagner. Nietzsche took the work as an exemplar of the self-denying, life-denying, and otherworldly Christian slave morality motivated by the "will to nothingness," as opposed to the self-affirming and earthly master morality of pre-Christian ruling classes and the strong motivated by the "will to power." An extended critique of Parsifal opens the third essay ("What Is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals?") of On the Genealogy of Morality. In Nietzsche contra Wagner he wrote: "Parsifal is a work of perfidy, of vindictiveness, of a secret attempt to poison the presuppositions of life – a bad work. The preaching of chastity remains an incitement to anti-nature: I despise everyone who does not experience Parsifal as an attempted assassination of basic ethics." Despite this attack on the subject matter, he also admitted that the music was sublime: "Moreover, apart from all irrelevant questions (as to what the use of this music can or ought to be) and on purely aesthetic grounds; has Wagner ever done anything better?" (Letter to Peter Gast, 1887).

Racism debate
Some writers see in the opera a promotion of racism or antisemitism. One line of argument suggests that Parsifal was written in support of the ideas of the French diplomat and racial theorist Count Arthur de Gobineau, expressed most extensively in his Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. Parsifal is proposed as the "pure-blooded" (i.e. Aryan) hero who overcomes Klingsor, who is perceived as a Jewish stereotype, particularly since he opposes the quasi-Christian knights of the Grail. Such claims remain heavily debated, since there is nothing explicit in the libretto to support them. Wagner never mentions such ideas in his many writings, and Cosima Wagner's diaries, which relate in great detail Wagner's thoughts over the last 14 years of his life (including the period covering the composition and first performance of Parsifal) never mention any such intention. Having met Gobineau for the first time very briefly in 1876, it was nonetheless only in 1880 that Wagner read Gobineau's essay. However, the libretto for Parsifal had already been completed by 1877, and the original drafts of the story even date back to 1857. Besides the question of chronology, an eventual meeting in person between Wagner and Gobineau was also accompanied by mutual disagreements and quarrels; e.g. on 3 June 1881 Wagner is reported to have "exploded in favour of Christian theories in contrast to racial ones". Despite this, Gobineau is sometimes cited as an inspiration for Parsifal.

The related question of whether the opera contains a specifically antisemitic message is also debated. Some of Wagner's contemporaries and commentators (e.g. Hans von Wolzogen and Ernest Newman) who analysed Parsifal at length, make no mention of any antisemitic interpretations. However the critics Paul Lindau and Max Nordbeck, present at the world premiere, noted in their reviews how the work accorded with Wagner's anti-Jewish sentiments. Similar interpretive conflict continues even today; some of the more recent commentators continue to highlight the perceived antisemitic or anti-Judaic nature of the opera, and find correspondences with antisemitic passages found in Wagner's writings and articles of the period, while others deny such claims, seeing for example the opposition between the realm of the Grail and Klingsor's domain as portraying a conflict between the sphere embodying the world-view of Wagner's Schopenhauerian Christianity and a pagan sphere more generally.

The conductor of the premiere was Hermann Levi, the court conductor at the Munich Opera. Since King Ludwig was sponsoring the production, much of the orchestra was drawn from the ranks of the Munich Opera, including the conductor. Wagner objected to Parsifal being conducted by a Jew (Levi's father was in fact a rabbi). Wagner first suggested that Levi should convert to Christianity, which Levi declined to do. Wagner then wrote to King Ludwig that he had decided to accept Levi despite the fact that (he alleged) he had received complaints that "of all pieces, this most Christian of works" should be conducted by a Jew. When the King expressed his satisfaction at this, replying that "human beings are basically all brothers", Wagner wrote to the king angrily: "If I have friendly and sympathetic dealings with many of these people, it is only because I consider the Jewish race as the born enemy of pure humanity and all that is noble about it (sic)". Seventy-one years later, the Jewish bass-baritone George London performed in the role of Amfortas at Neu Bayreuth, causing some controversy.

It has been claimed that Parsifal was denounced as being "ideologically unacceptable" in Nazi Germany and that the Nazis placed a de facto ban on Parsifal because of what many scholars see as the presence of themes such as compassion, Schopenhauerian negation of the will, renunciation of desires, asceticism and even non-violence and anti-militarism in the work's libretto. Some of the Nazi officials and leaders may have had certain doubts about the work. In his 1930 book The Myth of the Twentieth Century the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg expressed the view that "Parsifal represents a church-influenced enfeeblement in favour of the value of renunciation". According to Joseph Goebbels' diaries, Adolf Hitler too had apparently some reservations about Parsifal, particularly about what he called its "Christian mystical style". Despite this, there were in fact 26 performances at the Bayreuth Festival between 1934 and 1939 and 23 performances at the Deutsche Oper Berlin between 1939 and 1942. However, Parsifal was not performed at Bayreuth during World War II, a significant omission in view of the fact that the work, with the exception of one year, had been an annual fixture of the Festival since 1882.

Leitmotifs
A leitmotif is a recurring musical theme within a particular piece of music, associated with a particular character, object, event or emotion. Wagner is the composer most often associated with leitmotifs, and Parsifal makes liberal use of them. Wagner did not specifically identify or name leitmotifs in the score of Parsifal (any more than he did in any other of his scores), although his wife Cosima mentions statements he made about some of them in her diary. However, Wagner's followers (notably Hans von Wolzogen whose guide to Parsifal was published in 1882) named, wrote about and made references to these motifs, and they were highlighted in piano arrangements of the score. Wagner's own reaction to such naming of motifs in the score was one of disgust: "In the end people believe that such nonsense happens by my suggestion."

The opening prelude introduces two important leitmotifs, generally referred to as the Communion theme and the theme of the Grail. These two, and Parsifal's own motif, are repeated during the course of the opera. Other characters, especially Klingsor, Amfortas, and "The Voice", which sings the so-called Tormotif ("Fool's motive"), have their own particular leitmotifs. Wagner uses the Dresden amen to represent the Grail, this motif being a sequence of notes he would have known since his childhood in Dresden.

Chromaticism
Many music theorists have used Parsifal to explore difficulties in analyzing the chromaticism of late 19th century music. Theorists such as David Lewin and Richard Cohn have explored the importance of certain pitches and harmonic progressions both in structuring and symbolizing the work. The unusual harmonic progressions in the leitmotifs which structure the piece, as well as the heavy chromaticism of act 2, make it a difficult work to parse musically.

Notable excerpts
As is common in mature Wagner operas, Parsifal was composed such that each act was a continuous flow of music; hence there are no free-standing arias in the work. However, a number of orchestral excerpts from the opera were arranged by Wagner himself, and remain in the concert repertory. The prelude to act 1 is frequently performed either alone or in conjunction with an arrangement of the "Good Friday" music which accompanies the second half of act 3, scene 1. Kundry's long solo in act 2 ("Ich sah das Kind") is occasionally performed in concert, as is Amfortas' lament from act 1 ("Wehvolles Erbe").

Instrumentation
The score for Parsifal calls for three flutes, three oboes, one English horn, three clarinets in B-flat and A, one bass clarinet in B-flat and A, three bassoons, one contrabassoon; four horns in F, three trumpets in F, three trombones, one tuba, 6 onstage trumpets in F, 6 onstage trombones; a percussion section that includes four timpani (requiring two players), tenor drums, 4 onstage church bells, one onstage thunder machine; two harps and strings. Parsifal is one of only two works by Wagner in which he used the contrabassoon. (The other is the Symphony in C.)

The bells that draw the knights to the Grail ceremony at Monsalvat in acts 1 and 3 have often proved problematic to stage. For the earlier performances of Parsifal in Bayreuth, Wagner had the Parsifal bell, a piano frame with four strings, constructed as a substitute for church bells. For the first performances, the bells were combined with tam-tam and gongs. However, the bell was used with the tuba, four tam-tams tuned to the pitch of the four chime notes and another tam-tam on which a roll is executed by using a drumstick. In modern-day performances, the Parsifal bell has been replaced with tubular bells or synthesizers to produce the desired notes. The thunder machine is used in the moment of the destruction of Klingsor's castle.

Recordings
Parsifal was expressly composed for the stage at Bayreuth and many of the most famous recordings of the opera come from live performances on that stage. In the pre-LP era, Karl Muck conducted excerpts from the opera at Bayreuth. These are still considered some of the best performances of the opera on disc. They also contain the only sound evidence of the bells constructed for the work's premiere, which were melted down for scrap during World War II.

Hans Knappertsbusch was the conductor most closely associated with Parsifal at Bayreuth in the post-war years, and the performances under his baton in 1951 marked the re-opening of the Bayreuth Festival after World War II. These historic performances were recorded and are available on the Teldec label in mono sound. Knappertsbusch recorded the opera again for Philips in 1962 in stereo, and this release is often considered to be the classic Parsifal recording. There are also many "unofficial" live recordings from Bayreuth, capturing virtually every Parsifal cast ever conducted by Knappertsbusch. Pierre Boulez (1971) and James Levine (1985) have also made recordings of the opera at Bayreuth that were released on Deutsche Grammophon and Philips. The Boulez recording is one of the fastest on record, and the Levine one of the slowest.

Amongst other recordings, those conducted by Georg Solti, James Levine (with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra), Herbert von Karajan, and Daniel Barenboim (the latter two both conducting the Berlin Philharmonic) have been widely praised. The Karajan recording was voted "Record of the Year" in the 1981 Gramophone Awards. Also highly regarded is a recording of Parsifal under the baton of Rafael Kubelík originally made for Deutsche Grammophon, now reissued on Arts & Archives.

On the 14 December 2013 broadcast of BBC Radio 3's CD Review – Building a Library, music critic David Nice surveyed recordings of Parsifal and recommended the recording by the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Rafael Kubelik (conductor), as the best available choice.

Filmed versions
In addition to a number of staged performances available on DVD, Parsifal was adapted for the screen by Daniel Mangrané in 1951 and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg in 1982. There is also a 1998 documentary directed by Tony Palmer titled: Parsifal – The Search for the Grail. It was recorded in various European theaters, including the Mariinsky Theatre, the Ravello Festival in Siena, and the Bayreuth Festival. It contains extracts from Palmer's stage production of Parsifal starring Plácido Domingo, Violeta Urmana, Matti Salminen, Nikolai Putilin, and Anna Netrebko. In also includes interviews with Domingo, Wolfgang Wagner, writers Robert Gutman and Karen Armstrong. The film exists in two versions: (1) a complete version running 116 minutes and officially approved by Domingo, and (2) an 88-minute version, with cuts of passages regarded by the German distributor as being too "political", "uncomfortable", and "irrelevant".

title: Parsifal


text:
Uniform

A uniform is a variety of costume worn by members of an organization while usually participating in that organization's activity. Modern uniforms are most often worn by armed forces and paramilitary organizations such as police, emergency services, security guards, in some workplaces and schools, and by inmates in prisons. In some countries, some other officials also wear uniforms in their duties; such is the case of the Commissioned Corps of the United States Public Health Service or the French prefects. For some organizations, such as police, it may be illegal for non-members to wear the uniform.

Etymology
From the Latin unus (meaning one), and forma (meaning form).

Corporate and work uniforms
Workers sometimes wear uniforms or corporate clothing of one nature or another. Workers required to wear a uniform may include retail workers, bank and post-office workers, public-security and health-care workers, blue-collar employees, personal trainers in health clubs, instructors in summer camps, lifeguards, janitors, public-transit employees, towing- and truck-drivers, airline employees and holiday operators, and bar, restaurant and hotel employees. The use of uniforms in commercial or public-service organizations often reflects an effort in branding and in developing a standard corporate image; it also has important effects on the employees required to wear uniforms. The term uniform may be misleading because employees are not always fully uniform in appearance and may not always wear attire provided by the organization, while still representing the organization in their attire. Academic work on organizational dress by Rafaeli & Pratt (1993) referred to uniformity (homogeneity) of dress as one dimension, and conspicuousness as a second. Employees all wearing black, for example, may appear conspicuous and thus represent the organization even though their attire is uniform only in the color of their clothing, not in its features. Pratt & Rafaeli, (1997) described struggles between employees and management about organizational dress as struggles about deeper meanings and identities that dress represents. And Pratt & Rafaeli (2001) described dress as one of the larger set of symbols and artifacts in organizations, which coalesce into a communication grammar.

Armed forces and security
Military uniform is the standardised costume worn by members of the armed forces and paramilitaries of various nations. Military dress and military styles have gone through great changes over the centuries from colourful and elaborate to extremely utilitarian. Military uniforms in the form of standardised and distinctive dress, intended for identification and display, are typically a sign of organised military forces equipped by a central authority. The utilitarian necessities of war and economic frugality are now the dominant factors in uniform design. Most military forces, however, have developed several different uniform types.

Military personnel in most armed forces and some civilian officials may wear some or all of the following: combat uniform, service dress, dress uniform, full dress uniform, mess dress.

Medical workers
Uniforms can distinguish various categories of staff in medical institutions: doctors, surgeons, nurses, ancillary staff and volunteers.

Traditional female nurses' uniforms resemble uniforms (habits) worn by religious orders.

Equipment - notably stethoscopes - worn like a badge of office, may accompany or replace medical uniforms.

Educational
Uniforms are required for students in many schools in different countries. School uniforms vary from a standard issue T-shirt to rigorous requirements for many items of formal wear at private schools. School uniforms are in place in many public schools as well.

Countries where mandatory school uniforms are common include Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Thailand, India, Australia, UAE, Singapore, Albania, Philippines, some schools in Taiwan, New Zealand, South Africa, Indonesia and the United Kingdom, among many other places. In some countries, uniform types vary from school to school, in the United Kingdom, many pupils between 11 and 16 of age wear a blazer, tie and trousers for boys and blouse, tie and trousers, skirt, or culottes for girls. The ties tend to have a set pattern or a logo embroidered representing the school, and jackets will usually carry a badge on the breast pocket with the school's name, coat of arms, and motto or emblem. Children in many British state primary schools will have a uniform jumper and/or polo shirt with the school name and logo.

Some universities in the DPRK require students to wear uniforms.

Diplomats
From about 1800 to after the Second World War, diplomats from most countries (and often senior non-military officials generally) wore official uniforms at public occasions. Such uniforms are now retained by only a few diplomatic services, and are seldom worn.

Police

Members of the police in every country have a uniform for identification as law-enforcement personnel or agents. They are distinguished from the public by the uniform the police wear during overt policing activity. Usually each country has its own different police uniform.

Contrast plainclothes law enforcement and undercover operations.

Sports
Most, if not all, sports teams also wear uniforms, made in the team's distinctive colors. In individual sports like tennis and golf, players may choose any clothing design allowed by the competition rules.

To prevent the confusion (for officials, players, and fans) that might result from two opposing teams wearing uniforms (kits) with similar colors, teams have different variations for "home" and "away" games, where typically one is dark and the other is light. In the four major North American sports leagues, one of the two uniforms is almost always predominantly white, and each league except for the National Basketball Association (NBA) has a rule to determine which team should normally wear its white uniform. Customarily, National Football League (NFL) and National Hockey League (NHL) teams wear their color uniforms for home games. By contrast, Major League Baseball (MLB) teams wear their white uniforms for home games. The NBA traditionally required home teams to wear white, or at least a light color, but as of the allows home teams to wear any uniform color, mandating only that away teams wear a color that sufficiently contrasts with the home team's choice. These rules are not strictly enforced, however, for any of the four major professional sports leagues in North America. Some NFL teams, most notably the Dallas Cowboys, prefer to wear their white jerseys for home games. When Joe Gibbs was the head coach of the Washington Redskins — first from 1981 to 1992, and again from 2004 to 2007 — the Redskins exclusively wore white jerseys at home games. In the United Kingdom, especially in football, the terms "kit" or "strip" (as in 'football kit') are more common (instead of uniform).

Domestic workers
Domestic workers are often required by their employers-managers to wear a uniform.

Prison

A prison uniform is any uniform worn by individuals incarcerated in a prison, jail or similar facility of detention.

Beautician
The beauticians use uniforms to protect their skin from harmful chemicals and acid. These chemical resistant and water proof uniforms are not only safe to work in but also provide a professional, polished appearance throughout the day.

Scouting

The Scout uniform is a specific characteristic of the Scouting movement, in the words of Baden-Powell at the 1937 World Jamboree, "it covers the differences of country and race and make all feel that they are members one with another of one World Brotherhood". The original uniform, which has created a familiar image in the public eye, consisted of a khaki button-up shirt, shorts and a broad-brimmed campaign hat. Baden-Powell himself wore shorts since being dressed like the youth contributed to reducing perceived "distance" between the adult and the young person. Nowadays, uniforms are frequently blue, orange, red, or green, and shorts are replaced by long pants in areas where the culture calls for modesty, and in winter weather. The campaign hats have also been dropped in some Scouting organisations.

Buttons
Some uniforms have specially-manufactured buttons, which, in the case of antiques, often outlast the fabric components of the uniform, and become highly collectable items. Nowadays, buttons come in different materials, shapes sizes and colors.

Hygiene
In some countries or regions such as the UK, Australia or Hong Kong, the cost of cleaning one's uniform or work clothing can be partially deducted or rebated from the personal income tax, if the organization for which the person works does not have a laundry department or an outsourced commercial laundry.

title: Uniform