50 Years Ago Today: My First PARSIFAL

Fifty years ago today, on April 20th, 1974, I saw my first performance of Wagner’s PARSIFAL  I was in my twelfth year of being an opera-lover, and I understood the importance of seeing this opera for the first time. I’d heard it twice already on Met Texaco Saturday broadcasts: the first in 1966 with Régine Crespin, Sándor Kónya, Walter Cassel, and Jerome Hines, conducted by Georges Prêtre, and the second in 1971, with Irene Dalis, Mr. Kónya, Thomas Stewart, and Cesare Siepi, conducted by Leopold Ludwig. The music seemed way beyond me at the first hearing, though – having been raised in a devout Christian household – I found a lot of it very moving; in fact, I was sometimes moved to tears, though I was not sure why. By 1971, the music seemed much more immediate and the characters – and their stories – began to seem more meaningful. 

A lot had happened to me between that 1971 broadcast and the afternoon in 1974 that I walked into The Met for my first live performance of this mythic opera. I was, in fact, pretty down at the time. I’d had my first gay sexual experience in October 1973, only to be dumped by the object of my affection soon after. We’d been friends up until our night together, and it wasn’t until a few weeks after that I found out he already had a serious relationship going.

Uncharacteristically, I stayed away from Gotham for a while, but I kept in touch with another boy in our group, TJ. I had turned to him for solace, and we grew very close, though our ‘first night’ was a disaster. But we really liked each other, so we eventually got on the same groove. As I recall, it was the day after the PARSIFAL that we went to The Frick and it was there, in the Atrium, that we revealed our feelings and decided to make a go of it. A few weeks later, I went up to The Cape to spend the Summer with him. At the end of the Summer, we tried to resume our lives apart, but we missed each other so much that I moved down to live with him in his dorm room at Sarah Lawrence College.

Anyway, my diary entry about my first PARSIFAL is much briefer than my usual performance notes. As a rule, my diary was hand-written; I am not sure why I typed this entry:

I should perhaps clarify that Ms. Martin soon found the ‘staircase’ to her upper register and went on to be a very fine Sieglinde, Ortrud, Dyer’s Wife, and Tosca. Mr. Thomas, who had been my first Calaf and Tristan, went on singing for another eight seasons, with mixed results. Mr. Macurdy continued to develop and refine his Gurnemanz, and it became one of his greatest roles. 

The next opera I saw came five months later; by then, I was happily living on campus at Sarah Lawrence with my bookish boyfriend, and posing as a student. Photo by TJ.

~ Oberon