Evgeny Titov's new staging of Wagner's last opera opens at Covent Garden on 1 October 2026, Jakub Hrůša conducting. Five and a half hours, and every seat already gone.
Parsifal is the last thing Wagner wrote and he refused to call it an opera. He called it a Bühnenweihfestspiel — a festival play for the consecration of a stage — wrote it for the acoustic of his own theatre at Bayreuth, and left instructions that it should be performed nowhere else, a ban his widow enforced for thirty years. It opened there on 26 July 1882, after a plot drawn from Wolfram von Eschenbach: a wounded king, a grail that keeps him alive, and a young man who understands nothing and is therefore the only one who can help.
It runs five and a half hours and it is the slowest music in the repertoire, deliberately. The first act takes an hour to move a short distance, and the point is that the audience should feel the time pass. People either find it the greatest thing Wagner did or cannot sit through it, and both reactions are to the same quality.
Evgeny Titov makes his Royal Opera debut with a new staging, on the Main Stage at Covent Garden from Thursday 1 to Saturday 17 October 2026. Jakub Hrůša conducts, with Stanislas de Barbeyrac, Ekaterina Gubanova, Christian Gerhaher and Brindley Sherratt. Every date has gone. The first curtain is at half past four in the afternoon. Bring something to eat.