BAYREUTH, Germany — The word we still use is “pilgrimage,” for, as Mark Twain put it back in 1891, “a pilgrimage is what it is.” Each summer, tens of thousands of true believers shuffle their way up a ...

MUNICH — "Spring is here,” an old knight declares in the final act of Wagner’s “Parsifal.” Yet wintry night never ends in the grim, ashen new production of the work, which opened the Munich Opera ...