New essays demonstrating and exploring the abiding fascination of Wagner's controversial work. Richard Wagner's Parsifal remains an inexhaustible yet highly controversial work. This "stage consecration festival play," as the composer described it, represents the culmination of his efforts to bring medieval myth and modern music together in a dynamic relationship. Wagner's engagement with religion--Buddhist as well as Christian--reaches a climax here, as he seeks through artistic means "to rescue the essence of religion by perceiving its mythical symbols . . . according to their figurative value, enabling us to see their profound, hidden truth through idealized representation." The contributors to this collection break fresh ground in exploring the text, the music, andthe reception history of Parsifal. Wagner's borrowings-and departures-from the medieval sources of the Grail legend, Wolfram's Parzival and Chretien's Perceval, are considered in detail, and the tensional relation of the work to Christianity is probed. New perspectives emerge that bear on the long genesis of the text and music, its affinities to Wagner's earlier works, particularly Tristan und Isolde, and the precise way in which the music was composed. Essays address the work's bold, modernistic musical language and its unprecedented soundscape involving hidden choruses and other unseen sources of sound. The turbulent, astonishing, and sometimes disturbing history of Parsifal performances from 1882 until 2004 is traced in vivid detail for the first time, demonstrating the abiding fascination exerted by this uniquely challenging work of art. Contributors: MaryA. Cicora, James M. McGlathery, Ulrike Kienzle, Warren Darcy, Roger Allen. William Kinderman and Katherine Syer teach at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and often lead study seminars during the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, Germany.

The psychological dimension of Richard Wagner's operas has long been associated with the ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer, yet Wagner had begun absorbing elements of contemporary psychological thought into his stage works as early as the 1830s, twenty years before he engaged with the philosopher's writings. As Katherine Syer demonstrates, the composer incorporated imagery and metaphors with the potential to infuse his psychologically charged dramas with latent political meaning. His operatic visions convey a sense of urgency intimately bound up with the era's crises and instabilities. In Wagner's Visions, Syer offers a detailed examination of Die Feen, Wagner's least known complete opera, as well as new analytical insights into Der fliegende Hollander, Tannhauser/, Lohengrin, and the four Ring dramas. Her study of the ways Wagner probed the inner experiences of his protagonists explores the impact of neglected yet crucial artistic influences. These include the fables of the eighteenth-century Venetian playwright Carlo Gozzi, the Iphigenia operas of Christoph Willibald Gluck, and the legacy of the martyr Theodor Korner. During the Napoleonic Wars, which raged as Wagner was born, Korner's poetry became the lingua franca of the revolutionary movement to liberate and unify Germany. A Humboldt Fellowship recipient, Syer is Assistant Professor of Musicology and Theatre Department Faculty Affiliate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.