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The stage production of Parsifal by Ruth Berghaus at the Frankfurt Opera in December 1982 and the influence of her work on Peter Konwitschny whose production of Parsifal premiered in Munich in 1955 are discussed.

Wagner introduces to a variety ways of looking out at the world in his piece of work, which the perceptions are recognizably knotted, and the way the characters perceive the world and how the piece inflects their perception is reviewed. It shows that the characters absorption offers the way to escape from conventional small-town life within the terms of the drama, and in its allegorical register, an escape from the stage conventions of cosmopolitan opera.

Palestrina figures its concerns-transparently allegorical ones about the manifold threats of modernity-in terms of paternities from the beginning. Two sharply conflicting models of paternity that emerge in and around Palestrina are concerned with similar issues of generational change, cultural inheritance, and the situation of aesthetic production in a deeply compromised, quotidian world.