Two modern renaissance men pay homage to the medieval tale of Parsifal

From Wolfram von Eschenbach’s epic of chivalry to Richard Wagner’s opera, from the knight as fool to the fool as savior, the story of Parsifal has struck deep chords with artists over the centuries.

In this collaboration, Georg Baselitz’s studies for a 2018 production of Parsifal at the Munich State Opera (2018) are paired with Alexander Kluge’s responses to Baselitz’s drawings, through stories in which he filters out individual elements from Eschenbach’s epic, such as Parsifal’s native wit or the figure of the Knight of the Cheerful Countenance.

The result is an ongoing communication conducted over long periods of time: aspects of the Middle Ages can be found in the present. The volume concludes with Tristan Marquardt’s text Excerpts from a Parsifal Lexicon, which shows how far our contemporary language has diverged from Eschenbach’s in terms of meaning and sound.