Caroline H. Hume Music Director Eun Sun Kim is currently conducting Richard Wagner’s Parsifal through November 13.
Wagner’s enigmatic final work returns to the War Memorial Opera House stage in a new production by director Matthew Ozawa.
Company Chorus Director John Keene prepares the San Francisco Opera Chorus for Parsifal’s choral scenes featuring knights of the Holy Grail, seductive flower maidens and celestial voices.
Occupying Wagner for the last 25 years of his life, Parsifal premiered at the composer’s theater in Bayreuth, Germany, in 1882, six months before his death.
The score marks the apex of the composer’s paradigm-shaping craft, with its variegated soundscape of textures, colors, melodic themes and suspended harmonies that intensify the emotional resonance of this story about finding enlightenment through compassion.