Patrons listen as a brass fanfare from the balcony
heralds the imminent start of Parsifal. Note: Due to the strict
prohibition against photography in the Festspielhaus, no personal
pictures from inside can be shown. Photo by Leonard Turnevicius.
(Bayreuth, Germany – August 6, 2008) Wagner’s Parsifal has had a colourful history on stage. The “Bühnenweihfestspiel” (stage dedication festival play), as Wagner called it, it received its première in 1882 at the second Bayreuth Festival. During that summer, it ran sixteen times at the Festspielhaus. At the final performance which took place on August 29, Wagner took over the baton from Hermann Levi at the 23rd bar of the Transformation Music in Act III and conducted the remainder of the work. It would by the only time he would conduct in his theatre. Some six months later, Wagner was dead.
Before he died, Wagner’s decree was that Parsifal should be performed only in Bayreuth for the next thirty years. That was not to be. There were concert performances of the work in London and Munich in 1884, New York in 1886, and Amsterdam a decade later. The Met staged it in 1903, while Toscanini led a La Scala performance.
Prior to that thirty year period coming to an end, Wagner’s widow, Cosima, née Liszt, sought a “Lex Parsifal” from the German government, whereby Parsifal would be by law performed only in Bayreuth. Her bid was unsuccessful. Parsifal could now be staged anywhere.
Parsifal continued to be performed in Bayreuth with Wagner’s stage directions until 1933. The following year, a new production of Parsifal was conducted by Richard Strauss and directed by Heinz Tietjen.
The first Bayreuth Festival after the war took place in 1951, and featured a new production by Wieland Wagner, the composer’s grandson. That production played Bayreuth for many seasons, and was continually worked on by Wieland, so that by 1964 he would declare, “What is left of the 1951 production now? The disc, the temple of the Grail, the holy lake. Otherwise everything is different.”
Since 1882, there have been only nine productions of Parsifal. The current one is by Norwegian director Stefan Herheim. It supersedes the Christoph Schlingensief directed Parsifal first seen in 2004 and revived thereafter, a production hailed by some, and decried as an artistic disaster by others.
Herheim has taken over some of Schlingensief’s ideas, particularly that of the idolatry involved in the Wagner-Parsifal axis, though he’s done so without the hodge-podge on stage, and in a less controversial manner.
The stage curtain opened during the overture to reveal a pantomime of some of the Parsifal’s back story. A woman lies on a bed in an opulent chamber. She embraces a young boy before he runs out to play. Stage right, a huge portrait of Ludwig II hangs on a wall. A toy horse is seen stage left. (Is it a nod to the toy Valkyrie horse used by Wagner in the 1876 Ring production?)
The main curtain opens to reveal the rear of Wahnfried (Wagner’s residence) with its fountain (stage centre) and Wagner’s grave (at the lip of stage).
Gurnemanz and the townsfolk are in late nineteenth dress, each sporting a pair of angel’s wings, in black. (Surely to symbolize Amfortas’s double pain from the wound inflicted by Klingsor, and by the ignominy of having succumbed to the temptation of Kundry, as well as the suffering of the entire Grail community.) Parsifal enters dressed in a white sailor’s outfit with knee-length shorts.
During the singing of Zum letzten Liebesmahle, in which the knights and squires are to give thanks for the bread and wine of which they’ll soon partake, curiously, a baby born from the woman who was lying on a bed is instead displayed to the people who raise their left arms in an outstretched salute.
Later on, the woman on the bed writhes sensually. Parsifal kneels with her on her bed and they both sink down (and disappear thanks to a trap door on the bed). Has Parsifal succumbed to temptation, as Amfortas once did with Kundry?
Herheim’s production used much videography which was projected onto a scrim placed at the rear of the set. In Act I, there was documentary footage of WWI German troops.
There is a Bayreuth tradition of no applause after the first act of Parsifal. As soon as the music had ended, there were those in the audience who made a “shh” sound to try and ward off those who wished to applaud, but to no avail.
In Act II, Kundry no longer appeared in her black outfit, but in a long red robe, subservient now to Klingsor who was dressed in a black tux jacket, white shirt, short black trunks, and a garter belt that held up fish net stockings.
Back in 1882, composer Léo Délibes shocked Vincent D’Indy by saying he liked Act II only because of the pretty girls (the flower maidens). In Herheim's production there was a gaggle of showgirls, some with tall spangled headdresses (the kind you might see in Las Vegas or in the 1920s), some in brightly coloured chiffon bikini tops and shorts. Ringing the set's walls were military hospital beds on which lay men. Some of the flower maidens mounted the beds and positioned themselves à la cowgirl (the favoured position of opera directors this summer) on top of the men, and began to, well, you get the idea.
Parsifal, now in a blue sailor’s suit, made his entrance by jumping off Wahnfried’s balcony onto a bouncy high jump mat below.
And then, minutes before the act was to end, Klingsor appeared on the balcony. Nazi banners, a black swastika contained within a white circle on a blood red background, were unfurled from the flies, stretching to the stage floor. A large “concrete” shield bearing the Nazi emblems of the eagle and swastika was lowered from the rafters and hung overhead the stage. Two lines of Wehrmacht soldiers bearing arms and dressed in shin length black overcoats marched onto the stage in perfect synchronization.
A young boy dressed in a Hitler Jugend outfit with a spear appeared on a ledge below Klingsor. The lad cocked his arm, ready to throw the spear at Parsifal in hopes of killing him. (In Wagner’s version, it’s Klingsor who’s to do this.) What transpired thereafter was not well executed. Parsifal is supposed to catch in mid-air the spear “thrown” at him. Due to the poor coordination between lighting and acting, the audience saw the secret of how the spear “throwing” was done. The lad didn’t throw the spear. He let it drop behind him, though followed through with the throw with an empty hand, whereupon Parsifal grabbed a (second) spear beside him making it look as though he’d “caught” that (original) spear. The manner in which the scene was lit needed to be timed so that the audience wouldn't see the two spears.
Parsifal touched the grave with the tip of the spear, an action which set all pandemonium loose. The Nazi shield fell onto the stage below breaking into smithereens. The Wehrmacht soldiers “opened fire”, but Parisfal making a sign of the cross with his spear, took care of them all. In moments, they all lay “dead” on the stage. (Would that war would be so easy.)
Certainly, Wagner chose symbols and rites for use in Parsifal that his audience would already understand: the Holy Grail, Holy Communion, the foot-washing, and so on. Herheim, too, has chosen symbols that in today’s culture are readily understandable. In this way, the Nazis are chosen and used as the personification as evil (another favourite of European directors—see Bregenz’s Karl V).
In the third act, the Good Friday meadow was in Herheim’s production the bombed out remains of Wahnfried (the house suffered damage from Allied bombing during the war).
In scene two, the knights of the Holy Grail are depicted as politicians in the German Bundestag (Parliament). They gesticulate, as blowhard politicians are wont to do, as they sing. Parsifal rises through a hole, stage centre. He is now dressed similar to Kundry, his long, pure white robe with chest length auburn hair cutting a Christ-like figure. But certainly a figure that is out of place in the Bundestag.
A video of a rotating globe is projected on the rear scrim. The mirror-like scrim also reflects the audience seated in the auditorium, populating the globe. Has Parsifal “redeemed” the world, or only those in the audience?
At the lip of the stage, Gurnemanz, Kundry, and the young boy from the opening scene stand as a nuclear family (in Wagner’s original, Kundry is to sink lifeless onto the stage.)
Moments before the end, someone began to whistle (a sign of displeasure in European theatres). Several in the house tried to “shh” him, but to no avail. There was more brief, whistling, followed by more “shhs”. When the music had died away, the boo-birds came out in force. No wall flowers, these Europeans, but then again, booing is just as acceptable as applause in Europe. They were however, drowned out by people applauding and shouting bravos. The applause went on for nine minutes, over eight and a half minutes longer than the boos.
South Korean bass Kwangchul Youn impressed as Gurnemanz. His is a Wagernian voice of import.
Japanese born Mihoko Fujimara was an unsensual Kundry whose top notes approached shrillness.
London born tenor Christopher Ventris captured the divisions of Parsifal from boyish kid, to maturing man, to supposed "redeemer". Vocally, he left mixed impressions: strong in Act II, though with biting timbre.
Baritone Detlef Roth, from the Schwarzwald city of Freudenstadt, and like Ventris making his Bayreuth début, carried himself well as Amfortas, though his voice was a touch narrow for the part.
Thomas Jesatko, born in Nürnberg, wasn’t quite the meistersinger as Klingsor. His blustery delivery gradually wore on the ears.
Diógenes Randes, a Brazilian bass returning to Bayreuth for the second time, was the booming voice of Titurel.
For whatever reason, the usually superb chorus was not in tip-top form this night.
In the pit, Daniele Gatti’s reading was broad, its single aim to make the music sound as beautiful as possible. Parsifal is a long play. The duration of this performance was four hours and fifteen minutes, excluding two generous intermissions during which patrons could eat dinner if they so wished. (The evening ran from 4:01 to 10:44 p.m.) Gatti drew some rich, long-breathed playing from the orchestra. The sound was full, never burdensome, though things sounded tired in spots just before the end.
As for Heike Scheele’s set, its columns could expand or detract, its walls could rotate in and out providing for an easy transformation for the Verwandlungsmusik. The colours used throughout were nothing but eye-catching.
As a matter of interest, the month long Bayreuth Festival received a total of 447,240 requests from about 80 countries for the 53,900 available tickets. Of the total number of requesters, only 12.05% of them were accorded tickets.
Next season, the Bayreuth Festival will present a new production of Lohengrin by director Hans Neuenfels.
