Participating in the Ritual of Parsifal

Mahler’s reaction to Parsifal in 1883 encapsulates the profundity of experience that I hope you might have here in 2025. Wagner spent his career exploring the transcendent possibilities of the stage and, by his final work Parsifal, he unlocked the metaphysical in a way unique in opera before or since.

In The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis outlines the different natures of love, from familial love, to friendship, to erotic love, to unconditional divine love. The first three loves are the lingua franca of the opera stage, but rarely does opera venture into divine love. Parsifal is one of the exceptions. Rather than taking an emotional journey, Parsifal invites us into a deeply spiritual meditation on enlightenment through compassion.   

One way Wagner accomplishes this is through an advanced use of “leitmotifs” – musical motifs that represent characters, emotions and ideas. In Wagner’s operas, you can follow the story just by listening to the progression of musical motifs. What is extraordinary in Parsifal is that Wagner expands this concept of leitmotif to create not just drama, but ritual: a sacred space into which we, the audience, become a part.

From the very first notes of the opera – a unison chant-like motif, taken up over a shimmering radiance of light – we are in a place of enlightened compassion, of something larger than humanity. Out of this root theme emerges much of the musical substance of Parsifal – the rising scale of the grail motif (the “Dresden Amen”), the counterbalancing, weighty falling scale of the faith motif, and the bell motif, woven into the ritual and rite of the Grail Temple.

These motifs are often heard in circular repetition: we are in constant motion but never really moving. It is as though walking slowly up an Escher staircase, always rising, but somehow coming back to where you started.

That is the sublime invitation of Parsifal. An invitation not into drama, but into a spiritual ritual in which time is suspended. We are not observing. We are participating. To some degree, we do this every time we gather in the sacred space of the theater: 3,000 people joining together with the possibility for collective catharsis. In Parsifal, this is the fundamental essence of the piece: an invitation to participate in a ritual deep in our collective unconscious in which the human voice is the connection to a spiritual plane.

It was imperative to us that, in staging Parsifal, we create a space conducive for that participatory ritual. We very naturally turned to director Matthew Ozawa. His transcendent production of Orpheus and Eurydice (2022) created the kind of holistic immersion so needed for Parsifal. I am in awe of the intersection of Eun Sun Kim’s music making and Matthew’s staging and how they are constantly inviting us, the audience, into the ritual.

Ritual exists in all the design elements, but a critical aspect is movement. Matthew and choreographer Rena Butler have created a leitmotif lexicon of movement that seamlessly interweaves into the leitmotifs of music. Slow-moving, purposeful, ritualistic, and shared across the community of the Grail; but also imperceptibly evolving, inflected, changing in the most subtle of ways. Rena has incorporated traditions including Japanese Butoh dance, as well as Noh theater’s Jo-ha-kyū (序破急) movements with slow, measured gesture increasing in intensity. Movement in this Parsifal is deeply intentional.

The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh encouraged us to think of every walking step as a moment to connect with the present. He invited us to make each step with intentionality and joyfulness. His walking meditation mantra is “I have arrived. I am home.” I had a chance to do a walking meditation at Thich Nhat Hanh’s root temple in Vietnam earlier this year. What Matthew Ozawa and his team have created in this Parsifal reminds me so much of that experience. A ritual of purpose, of intentionality, of a single footstep placed with reverence for something much bigger. 

Ritual is not, however, unchanging. Like the musical and movement motifs, ritual morphs imperceptibly in response to changing conditions. And, for me, that is the profundity of Parsifal. The Knights are custodians of compassionate enlightenment. But there is a fracture in the world; in the pain of Amfortas is a questioning of the ritual. The ritual must be reframed. While there is reverence for what has been before, there is a reawakening into a new ritual for a new generation. And so, the circle begins once again.