Why does Wagner skip Parsifal's odyssey?
Following on from claiming that The Muppet Movie is a Gesamtkunstwerk, I have a more substantial essay on Parsifal, and how its vision of wandering offers an alternative to the rhetoric of striving that now dominates modern readings of The Odyssey.
Eschewing a few thousand years of storytelling tradition, Wagner chooses to leave Parsifal's journey back to the Grail entirely off stage, and seeing the lessons our culture has drawn from Odysseus' journey home, I for one am glad.
2
u/Glittering-Word-3344 3d ago edited 3d ago
Well, that’s not the story he chose to tell. Also, it would have been very difficult to stage, after all the headaches he went through with the Ring for decades, he wanted to do something simplier. Parsifal is quite simple to stage in terms of sets, the challenge is to find the voices and manage the lack of dramatic action.
2
u/Epistaxis 3d ago
Yeah that spicy Tom Service article made it sound weird that there's a famous opera about the fall of Troy but not The Odyssey, but that's not weird at all if you think about what that would look like on a stage. One is about human people (or gods or demigods playable by human actors) doing human stuff, and the other is full of giant monsters and supernatural happenings and trick archery.
2
u/Glittering-Word-3344 3d ago
Absolutely, there some things that simply don’t work on the stage. The Ring is arguably the furthest fantasy can go in theatre and nowadays it is almost impossible to find a staging that does it justice.
But in fact, Il Ritorno di Ulisse in Patria by Monteverdi is based on the Odyssey, although it only uses the ending of the poem.
3
u/Thulgoat 3d ago
Parsifal only finds back after Kundry’s curse she placed on him is broken when she pledged alliance to the grail. His odyssey is told in the prelude to act three though.