Samuel L. Leiter, Brooklyn and the ‘Parsifal’ Craze of 1904: Or, How a 50-Cent Stock Company turned Wagner’s Music Drama into a Drama with Music

March 2026, Volume 20, Number 1, 4–20.

While examining the theatrical output of 1904, I could not help noticing how prominent were references to Wagner’s opera (or ‘music drama’), Parsifal, first staged in 1882, which had opened on Christmas Eve 1903 at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Opera House in a highly controversial production by the Met impresario, Heinrich Conried, scheduled for ten performances. My focus was on theatre, not opera, so I generally ignored such enterprises. That changed when I learned that Corse Payton (1866–1934), actor-manager of a successful, ‘popular-price’ stock company (known as a repertory company in the UK) at Brooklyn’s Lee Avenue Theatre, was in 1904 preparing an English-language, dramatic version of Wagner’s ‘sacred opera’, with the music used mainly for incidental purposes. It was not long before I realised I had opened a larger can of worms than was originally intended. Brooklyn, it turned out, had a close connection to Parsifal going back to the year of its creation.