Cult Fiction: Michael Fuller finds much to ponder in Richard Jones’s new ‘Parsifal’ in Paris

Review of Parsifal, directed Jones, conducted Jordan, Opéra Bastille, Paris, 2018.

November 2018, Volume 12, Number 3, 84–5.

To the vexed question of whether Parsifal should be regarded as a Christian work, Richard Jones’s new Paris staging responds with a clear non. Jones also resists any temptation to secularise Wagner’s Bühnenweihfestpiel. Instead, he turns it into the story of a Titurel-cult which has affinities with, but is clearly distinct from, Christianity.