In one of the benchmark events of San Francisco Opera’s 103rd season, Caroline H. Hume Music Director Eun Sun Kim conducts Richard Wagner’s Parsifal from October 25–November 13.
Wagner’s enigmatic final work returns to the War Memorial 2 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.
Parsifal marks the continuation of Eun Sun Kim’s exploration of Wagner’s works each season in San Francisco. Her Wagner journey began in 2023 with Lohengrin, the preparation for which was captured in the NorCal Emmy-nominated documentary Eun Sun Kim: A Journey Into Lohengrin.
Last season, she conducted her first performances of Tristan und Isolde of which the San Francisco Chronicle said, “Kim commands every page of this daunting and harmonically unsettled score, from the hushed opening of the prelude through to Isolde’s concluding aria nearly five hours later.”