Faith and Fable: Simon Williams enjoys a thought-provoking production of Wagner’s final opera

Review of Parsifal, directed Ozawa, conducted Eun Sun Kim, San Francisco, 2025.

March 2026, Volume 20, Number 1, 64–5.

Of all Wagner’s music dramas, Parsifal is the closest to fable. From the start, the action is clearly foretold, the characters are more symbolic than realistic, and the ending demonstrates a truth fundamental to the moral or divine order that predetermined the events on stage. The salient distinction of the new production at the San Francisco Opera is to highlight these features in a painstakingly precise reading. The result is a refreshingly clear performance in which the contention between salvation and damnation is distinctly limned, but what lies beyond it is left to our imagination.