Parsifal

A short personal piece I wrote on Parsifal:

The first time I listened to Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal, it made me feel physically sick. The only other opera that reliably had this effect on me at the time was Debussy’s Pélleas et Mélisande (a work deeply influenced by Parsifal), but my first viewing of that had been on video when I was in bed with the flu, so I put it down to the power of association combined with prolonged exposure to the peculiarities of singing in French. But I was in perfectly good health when, as a twenty-two-year-old, I borrowed the CDs of Parsifal from the local library…

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