August: Parsifal
The 2023 Bayreuth Festival production of Parsifal, featuring Andreas Schager as Parsifal and Elīna Garanča as Kundry.
Themen: Mitgefühl, Heilung, Heiligkeit
Element: Klöster und Spätsommerliche Stille
Why Parsifal and why here?
Opera: Parsifal (1882), Wagner’s last work, a Bühnenweihfestspiel about the Grail knights and a wounded king.
Core themes we’re going to walk through:
Compassion (Mitleid): Parsifal’s whole arc is the pure fool made wise through pity.
Woundedness and healing: Amfortas’s unhealed spear wound, the land’s blight.
Sacred space & ritual time: The Grail Temple where here time becomes space during the Act I transformation.
Nature as liturgy: The Good Friday Music. The world waking up as a kind of sacrament of renewal.
Sound as architecture: The four-note Grail bell figure, written explicitly for bells.
New York Analogues:
Riverside Church: Rockefeller’s tower with the 74-bell Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Carillon. For decades its quarter-hour pattern was built on the Parsifal Grail bell motif, designed by Frederick C. Mayer as the Parsifal Quarters.
Grant’s Tomb: North America’s largest mausoleum, sitting directly across from Riverside, visible from the tower; Ross literally looks down at it while the Parsifal bells boom.
Bronx Wagner streets: Lohengrin Place, Siegfried Place, Valhalla Drive, and Parsifal Place; Ross flags this tiny Wagnerian enclave as his last New York node.
August is therefore our Grail axis month. From the unfinished cathedral, to mystical paintings, to a literal Parsifal bell tower, to a tomb, to a street grid where the Grail has street signage.
Parsifal across Morningside Heights
Walk through Riverside Park: Good Friday Music with river, trees, and paths.
Riverside Church: Parsifal Quarters, bells, and the vertical Grail tower.
Grant’s Tomb: Wounded king / Amfortas parallel.
Optional Bronx Parsifal Place add-on.
Riverside Park Walk (107th to 120th)
Good Friday in Manhattan: The land heals
Walk north on Riverside Drive or through Riverside Park itself from roughly W 107th to W 120th. The park terraces and tree alleys run alongside the Hudson, gradually rising toward the high bluff where Riverside Church and Grant’s Tomb sit.
Opera Focus:
Continue the Good Friday Music. This is its natural setting.
Walking Script:
Start at one of the park entrances near 107th, hit play as you step under the first major canopy of trees.
As the strings begin their slow, luminous progressions, notice:
Leaves moving in layered planes.
Glimpses of the Hudson River through tree trunks.
Let Gurnemanz’s idea (that Good Friday is about the world appearing transfigured) overlay on mundane park scenes. Joggers, kids, dogs.
Time your walk so that a big, glowing orchestral phrase coincides with your first full view of Riverside Church’s tower appearing above the treeline.
You’re literally walking the Good Friday Spell in an urban landscape.
Riverside Church
The Parsifal Quarters: A Grail tower of bells
By the time you reach about 120th & Riverside Drive, you’re at The Riverside Church.
Subway (if jumping here directly):
1 train to 116 St–Columbia University, then walk north on Broadway to 120th and west toward Riverside Drive; the church dominates the skyline.
Why this is the August Anchor:
Riverside is a 1930 neo-Gothic tower church, modeled in part on Chartres, overlooking the Hudson.
Its tower houses the 74-bell Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Carillon, one of the world’s largest, with a 20-ton bourdon bell sounding a low C.
For decades, the quarter-hours were marked by a pattern based on the four-note bell motif from Parsifal. The figure you hear as the knights approach the Grail shrine. Frederick C. Mayer, Rockefeller’s bell adviser, designed this sequence specifically for Rockefeller’s carillons and named it the Parsifal Quarters.
So the sound of Parsifal was literally built into this tower’s daily timekeeping.
Opera Focus:
Grail bell motif & Knights’ Procession (Act I).
What to Listen to:
Parsifal: Grail Bells / Knights of the Holy Grail Procession
Parsifal: Grail bell motif experiments (for the literal bell sound)
Walking & Listening:
Stand across Riverside Drive, just inside the park, so you can see the entire tower.
Start the Knights’ Procession track as you look up at the belfry openings.
As the music moves forward, cross the street and walk toward the main entrance, imagining:
The knights climbing interior staircases.
The Grail ceremony assembling somewhere above you.
If the tower tours are running and you choose to go up, time it so you’re still hearing the bell motif or the slower part of the Procession as you step out into the tower viewing room. Ross describes looking down on Grant’s Tomb while the carillon’s low C booms.
This is Parsifal as city infrastructure. The Grail motif turned into a municipal clock.
Grant’s Tomb
The wounded king and the politics of remembrance
From Riverside Church:
Walk north along Riverside Drive (or through the park) a few blocks to 122nd Street.
You’ll see General Grant National Memorial on the Riverside median, the massive domed mausoleum.
Subway if you start here:
1 train to 116 St–Columbia University, then as the NPS directions say: walk six blocks north to 122nd, then two blocks west to Riverside Drive.
Why this is on the Parsifal Map:
It’s the largest mausoleum in North America, dedicated to a leader whose body lies in an above-ground sarcophagus.
Ross notes that Grant attended the premiere of Wagner’s American Centennial March in Philadelphia in 1876. He considers visiting the tomb from the Riverside tower specifically because of that Wagner link.
It sits in direct visual alignment with Riverside Church. A Grail tower and a political tomb facing each other over the Hudson.
Opera Focus:
Amfortas’s agony and healing / final Grail scene, and/or a reprise of Good Friday Music.
What to Listen to:
Parsifal: Nur eine Waffe taugt → Final Grail unveiling (End of Act III; any complete recording)
Or simply keep Good Friday Music going.
Walking / Contemplation:
Start the music as you approach the broad staircase.
Climb slowly, aligning your pace with the rising orchestration.
Once inside the rotunda, stand under the dome and look down at the sarcophagi.
Think of Amfortas. A leader whose wound is also the community’s wound.
Grant’s role in ending the Civil War and trying to heal the country is not a stretch as a secular Grail-king analogue.
Let the final, luminous chords of the Act III music land as you step back outside into the park air.
You’ve moved from ritual space (Cathedral) to mystic imagery (Roerich) to bell tower (Riverside) to tomb (Grant). A full Parsifal arc.
Optional: Bronx, Parsifal Place & Valhalla Drive
The Grail on the street grid
If you want to finish August with something deliciously literal:
In the Bronx there’s a tiny patch of streets named Lohengrin Place, Siegfried Place, Parsifal Place, and Valhalla Drive. Ross throws this detail in as his final New York Wagner flourish.
Getting There (Simple Version):
Take the 6 train to Buhre Ave in the East Bronx.
Walk or take the Bx24 bus toward Country Club Road / Kearney Ave. Valhalla Drive and Parsifal Place are a short walk from those stops.
Listening Idea:
Put on a chunk of Act III (Good Friday, final scene) and just wander the streets named after Wagner characters.
It’s low-stakes, wonderfully weird. Suburban houses on Valhalla Drive, lawns on Parsifal Place.
Think of it as the Grail myth fully absorbed into ordinary life.
August / Parsifal Themes
Opera: Parsifal (WWV 111): Wagner’s final work, about compassion, healing, and the Grail.
NYC Axis:
St John the Divine: Grail Temple in stone (Prelude & Transformation).
Nicholas Roerich Museum: Mystical Montsalvat imagery (Good Friday).
Riverside Park & Church: Good Friday landscape and Parsifal Quarters carillon.
Grant’s Tomb: Wounded-king mausoleum and American Wagner connection.
Bronx Parsifal Place: The Grail myth as literal address.
Element: Compassion that turns wounds into wisdom, bells that turn time into space.
Mood: A slow, late-summer pilgrimage where you’re listening for healing in the city’s stone, water, and bells.
Listening Archive
Parsifal, Grail Bell Motif (for the Riverside carillon tie-in)
Optional: Full Act III (for Bronx wander)
Toward September: Siegfried
Parsifal teaches the discipline of waiting. August slows the year to a near standstill, insisting that healing cannot be forced, that wounds must be seen before they can be touched, and that innocence is not something to be performed but something to be protected. Action, in this world, is dangerous unless it is earned.
September breaks that suspension. Cautiously.
Siegfried is Wagner’s opera of becoming, not yet burdened by guilt, contracts, or the full weight of consequence. Unlike Parsifal’s listening innocence, Siegfried’s innocence is kinetic. He acts before he understands. He forges, breaks, laughs, and moves forward without knowing what the world will eventually demand of him. This is not wisdom. It is vitality. Raw, unshaped, and therefore vulnerable.
September carries this energy naturally. The city reanimates. Work resumes. Bodies return to motion. After August’s inwardness, momentum feels irresistible again. But the year has taught you something by now: action without memory is not freedom. Siegfried’s strength is real, but it is also precisely what will later be manipulated, narrated, and destroyed.
The question shifts once more: Not What must I refrain from doing? but What kind of self am I becoming through action? September begins with movement. Bright, unencumbered, already shadowed by what is still to come.
