It is a minor shame that the tremendous San Francisco staging of Richard Wagner's Parsifal, currently running at the War Memorial Opera House, had but one Sunday matinee performance. I can't answer the long-running question about Parsifal being a Christian opera or not, but seeing it this past Sunday returned me to those long hours of my religious upbringing, spent in pews and listening to sermons on compassion, suffering and redemption.
The Giuseppe Verdi of 1855 was not unlike the Bob Dylan of 1965. Both had just produced, in rapid succession, three defining masterpieces which would ensure their immortality in Verdi's case Rigoletto, Il Trovatore and La Traviata, in Dylan's the trilogy of albums starting with Bringing It All Back Home. The question that now loomed was where to go from here? For Verdi, as for Rossini and Donizetti before him, the answer was Paris, and the conquest (and financial rewards) of French opera.