Siena, Wagner & “Parsifal”

Part of TŌN’s Sight & Sound series

In the popular series Sight & Sound, The Orchestra Now explores the parallels between orchestral music and the visual arts. Each performance includes a discussion with conductor and music historian Leon Botstein accompanied by on-screen exhibition images and live musical excerpts, then a full performance of the works and an audience Q&A.

At the dawn of the Italian Renaissance, Siena was the site of phenomenal artistic innovation and activity. Sienese artists—including Duccio, Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and Simone Martini—played a pivotal role in defining Western painting. Over 500 years later, Richard Wagner revolutionized opera composition in much the same way. Twelve years after he read Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, a poem from just 100 years before Siena’s painting revolution, he began working on a libretto inspired by this tale of the quest for the Holy Grail. This eventually became his final composition, the opera Parsifal.

The exhibition Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350 will be on view at The Met Fifth Avenue October 13, 2024–January 26, 2025 in gallery 199.