STAGE TUBE: Interview and Behind-the-Scenes With Director François Girard of Wagner's PARSIFAL at the Met

The new production of Wagner's transcendent masterpiece will open February 15 with an extraordinary cast of Wagnerian stars, including Katarina Dalayman as the mysterious Kundry; Peter Mattei in his role debut as Amfortas, the wounded King of the Knights of the Holy Grail; René Pape as the wise knight Gurnemanz; Evgeny Nikitin as the evil Klingsor; and Rúni Brattaberg in his Met debut as Titurel, Amfortas's father. The production team for Girard's staging includes set designer Michael Levine, costume designer Thibault Vancraenenbroeck, lighting designer David Finn, video designer Peter Flaherty, choreographer Carolyn Choa, and dramaturg Serge Lamothe. The Saturday, March 2 matinee performance of Parsifal will be transmitted worldwide as part of the Met's Live in HD series, which is now seen in more than 1,900 movie theaters in 64 countries around the world.

French Canadian director François Girard makes his Met debut with this staging of Parsifal, a co-production of the Met, the Canadian Opera Company, and the Opéra National de Lyon, where it premiered in early 2012. Girard's other opera productions include Kaija Saariaho's Emilie at Lyon and the Netherlands Opera; a double bill of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex and Symphony of Psalms at the Edinburgh Festival and Canadian Opera Company; a double bill of Brecht and Weill's The Lindbergh Flight and The Seven Deadly Sins in Lyon and Edinburgh; and Wagner's Siegfried as part of a multi-director staging of Der Ring des Nibelungen at Canadian Opera Company. He has also written and directed four feature films: Cargo, Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, Silk, and the Academy Award-winning historical drama The Red Violin.