Premiere tonight May 24 for our Tobias Westman as one of the 4 Knappen in Parsifal at Opera National in Paris.

As of the prelude of Parsifal something magical takes place: a musical score with a sacred dimension, infused with esotericism and Buddhist and Christian references to convey a universal message, albeit a cryptic one. How are we to understand a work that we cross like a “forest of symbols”? Drawing on the legend of Percival and the Holy Grail as inspiration for his final opera, Wagner completes his reflexion on the struggle between good and evil and sows the seeds of the virtues of compassion and renunciation. Values which Richard Jones explores by confronting the moral rigour of a dogmatic community with the obscurantism of a deviant scientific ideology. Two worlds opposed to each other in every way other than an irrepressible attraction for illusions.