Parsifal in Full Score

Rating:
Summary: Wagner's Miracle Play
Review: Parsifal, Wagner's last opera, and the only one written for a Bayreuth premiere, tells the story of Percival's recovery of the Holy Grail. It was written with the same passion for Christian mythology with which the anonymous medieval English mystery writers wrote their plays. Unfortunately, this powerfully spiritual music drama provides the setting for one of Wagner's most disgraceful bits of anti-semitic insensitivity. Hermann Levi, the premiere's conductor, waited backstage to enter the pit and begin the performance. Seconds before he entered, Wagner grabbed the score from Levi's hands, stating coldly, "give it back, I can't have a Jew like you conduct this." Then, after a tense pause, he smiled and said, "I was just joking. Here." Unquestionably, Wagner was two things: an insensitive brut whose anti-semitism later inspired the sociopathy of Adolf Hitler, and a musicodramatic genius. Dover reprinted an early twentieth century Peters edition of Parsifal. From a scholarly viewpoint, Peters is a most reliable German publisher. Dover provides a translation of the cast list and the table of contents. Unfortunately, there is no English translation of the text, and no glossary of German musical terms. Nonetheless, any good recording will provide a reliable libretto, and the musical terms can be looked up in any good German or musical dictionary. As always with Dover, the book is easily read and built to last. It may be a little small for podium use, but it is perfect at home in front of the stereo. There is, unfortunately, no reprint of the original title page, as the Tristan and Walkure scores have. The original title page serves no purpose really, but sometimes it's fun to open to that title page...and dream.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent score for listening to Wagner's masterpiece
Review: Wagner's Parsifal, his "last" opera, is also in many ways his most moving on an intellectual and spiritual level. Full of Schopenhauerian resignation which rises beyond the pessimism of The World as Will and Idea into the world of Buddhist renunciation, Parsifal uses Christian metaphor to show the futility of striving and the peace to be gained from release.

However, this review will obviously be of the Dover edition of the full score, not the opera itself. Also, I won't comment on the previous review, except to add that the reviewer should do Wagner and the world a favor and read Macgee's Tristan Chord, and give the slanderous and bizarre Wagner-Hitler link a well-deserved rest. Wagner was an anti-semite, but to somehow link this to Hitler is a classic example of the genetic fallacy (where did this idea ever come from, anyway? The Nazis loved Beethoven far more than Wagner's left-wing revolutionary aural madness,it never really fit with their style...).

The Dover editions of Wagner's full scores are the most useful editions available for actually listening to and studying Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerken, and are a bargain at twice the price. Professional musicians will of course recognize that the G. Schirmer editions are the ones most often used for actual performances and rehearsals, particularly the Schirmer piano reductions (either the good old green hardbacks or the orange paperbacks). But even professionals make good use of the Dover editions, since they are ideal for sitting down with a good set of headphones and a cup of coffee to take in the brilliance that was Wagner.