RT Article
T1 Spiritual Succor or Sacrilege? British Catholic Responses to and Interpretations of Wagner's Parsifal
JF The catholic historical review
VO 110
IS 1
SP 21
OP 46
A1 Hale, Frederick
LA English
PB The Catholic University of America Press
YR 2024
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1882582608
AB Scholarly knowledge about the interplay of Wagnerian opera and British church history has advanced on an uneven front and has yet to reach lofty heights. Relatively little has been published about how Parsifal, Richard Wagner’s final and arguably most religious opera, was perceived in the United Kingdom. The present study begins to fill that gap by investigating how a spectrum of British Catholics diversely debated such crucial themes as the extent to which Parsifal was a Christian work, the possible mimesis of the Mass in the Holy Grail scenes, the construction of the title character as a symbolic Christ figure, and whether the staging of this work, whose spiritual content was widely acknowledged, could appropriately be performed in a secular setting like the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden.
K1 British Catholicism
K1 Covent Garden
K1 Parsifal
K1 Opera
K1 Richard Wagner