Parsifal: The Problem Restated

By the time Richard Wagner got to work on Parsifal, his last opera, the conditions of his life had changed utterly from what they had been when he’d started work on The Nibelung’s Ring. A composer of romantic operas who’d set out to make some point in his libretto as inescapable as possible couldn’t have come up with a more drastic set of differences. He began composing The Ring as a political exile living in poverty in Switzerland, over his head in debt, married to a high-strung soprano who was...