From behind the Paywall: Episode 105 -- Richard Wagner's Parsifal
In Bed With The Right
Adrian Daub and Moira Donegan
4.8 • 662 Ratings
🗓️ 31 March 2026
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, Adrian and Moira are both traveling -- Adrian is finishing work on the newly titled Project 1933: Fascism Then and Now (available for preorder now). So, back by popular (?) demand (?), it's another Richard Wagner-focused episode of In Bed with the Right. Wagner's final opera, 1882's Parsifal, draws on the grail legends, various philosophers, Wagner's own aging process, and whatever the 19th century version of Buddhism for Dummies was. Come for the male suffering, stay for the syphilis-metaphors, the Best Little Whorehouse in Grailland, and the final split in the bromance known as Nietzgner (probably? We're talking about Nietzsche and Wagner).
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everyone. So this week's going to be a little bit different because unfortunately both |
| 0:04.9 | Moira and I are traveling and I am in fact recording this in a hotel room desperately trying |
| 0:10.0 | not to wake up my daughter. I've been in Europe doing some events around my new book in Switzerland |
| 0:15.7 | and Germany and of course also doing research for the 1933 book. Speaking of which, that book now has a subtitle and a cover, and, in fact, you can admire that |
| 0:25.7 | cover and deep reorder the book. |
| 0:28.4 | The full title is now Project 1933, Fascism Then and Now, short and sweet, and to the point. |
| 0:35.1 | But don't worry, after our travels are over, we're going to go back |
| 0:38.0 | to recording later this week. We're going to have an episode coming up on Lux Maxing, |
| 0:42.9 | one on anti-queer psychiatry, one on natural law, and one on the persistent fascination with |
| 0:48.6 | vibe shifts. A little bit about this episode, as you may know, the Met just put put on a very well-regarded production of Tristan and Zizolde by Richard Wagner, with Lee's Davidson and Michael Spires with Yuval Chiron directing. |
| 1:05.8 | Mora will watch that and I'll go back to my 15 recordings of that opera and we'll eventually do an episode |
| 1:11.7 | on Tristan and Dysolde, but we didn't get to it yet. And this week is also Good Friday, which |
| 1:18.0 | features very prominently in another opera of Richard Wagner's, namely his last one, Parcifal. |
| 1:23.0 | Well, it just so happens we had done a Patreon-only episode on Parseval late last year after |
| 1:30.4 | Moira was kind enough to get me tickets for it. It's an opera that's all about medieval |
| 1:35.1 | knights and holy grails, but in the hands of Richard Wagner, it's also all about compassion, |
| 1:41.5 | about community, about politics, and about gender and sexuality. And it's based on |
| 1:48.5 | the 13th century Middle High German chivalric romance parzifal, by Wolfram von Eschenbach, |
| 1:54.9 | with a little bit of Christian de Trois, thrown in there for good measure. But as always, |
| 2:00.5 | when Wagner bases things on other things, |
| 2:03.1 | it's pretty far from that. It ends up being all about Wagner and his world and about his |
| 2:07.4 | obsessions and about the 19th century and its preoccupations and obsessions. |
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