In medieval legend as filtered through Richard Wagner, Parsifal is the Holy Fool who retrieves the sacred spear that pierced the side of the Savior and restores it to the knights of the Holy Grail, from whom it was stolen. And Parsifal’s son Lohengrin is the White Knight the Grail dispatches to clear the name of Elsa of Brabant, who stands wrongly accused of the murder of her brother. Yet it’s all wrong to regard Parsifal, the last of Wagner’s operas, as a “prequel” to the much earlier Lohengrin. For one thing, Lohengrin is an honest-to-goodness opera of the grand, Romantic variety. The abstruse, mystical Parsifal, on the other hand, is classified as “A Festival Play for the Consecration of the Stage”—the stage in question being that of Wagner’s personal Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, the only venue in the world he authorized to perform it. Be all that as it may, the Canadian director François Girard, who made his Metropolitan Opera debut with a widely admired Parsifal a decade ago, is now back for Lohengrin. It will be his third outing with the company, and his third Wagner (five minutes before the pandemic lockdown, the Met unveiled his Flying Dutchman). Piotr Beczała stars as the answer to a maiden’s prayer, glamorously arriving across the waters by swan-drawn boat. Tamara Wilson is the praying maiden, Elsa, whose happiness is undone by doubt. Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts. —Matthew Gurewitsch