Wagner's last opera, deliberately the slowest music in the repertoire, receives a new Royal Opera staging from Evgeny Titov this October.
Evgeny Titov makes his Royal Opera debut with a new staging of Parsifal at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden from Thursday 1 to Saturday 17 October 2026. Jakub Hrůša conducts.
Parsifal was Wagner’s last work, and he refused to call it an opera. He called it a Bühnenweihfestspiel, a festival play for the consecration of a stage, and wrote it for the acoustic of his own theatre at Bayreuth. He left instructions that it be performed nowhere else, a ban his widow enforced for thirty years.
It opened at Bayreuth on 26 July 1882. The plot comes from Wolfram von Eschenbach: a grail keeps a wounded king alive, and only a young man who understands nothing can help him.
Parsifal is deliberately the slowest music in the repertoire. Its first act takes the best part of an hour to move a short distance, so the audience feels time pass rather than watching a summary of it.
People either find it the greatest thing Wagner did or cannot sit through it, and both reactions answer the same quality.
Stanislas de Barbeyrac, Ekaterina Gubanova, Christian Gerhaher and Brindley Sherratt sing the four principal roles.