Parsifal

Wagner called Parsifal a Bühnenweihfestspiel — a festival play to consecrate a stage — and intended it never to leave Bayreuth, a restriction that held until 1913. A grail brotherhood is failing, its king cannot die of a wound that will not close, and rescue arrives in the form of someone who understands nothing and is therefore capable of pity. Slow, strange, and unlike anything else in the repertoire.