Photograph of Amalia Materna as Kundry and Ernest van Dyck as Parsifal in an 1889 performance of Parsifal (photographer unknown, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)
Back in my student days there was still a tradition among many of the well-to-do New Yorkers that Good Friday was better spent attending a performance of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal at the Metropolitan Opera, rather than going to church to sit through an account of the Passion. I was never part of that set; and, as a result, most of my Parsifal experiences came about through opera subscriptions. My “first contact” was Otto Schenk’s staging for the Metropolitan (Met) Opera; and that impression was vivid enough for me to purchase a DVD of a televised account made in 1992.
Today, as a contribution to shelter-in-place programming on Good Friday, Met Opera on Demand offered free access of one of its video documents of Parsifal. This one was made from a performance on March 2, 2013 with tenor Jonas Kaufmann in the title role, joined by René Pape as Gurnemanz and Katarina Dalayman as Kundry. At the time of the recording, this was a new production staged by François Girard; and the conductor was Daniele Gatti.
I should probably begin by making it clear that I tend to be a traditionalist where Wagner’s operas are concerned. He wrote his own libretti, making it clear that he wanted as much control over the narrative as he exercised over the music. In that framework Schenk’s staging was basically “by the book,” honoring both the letter and the spirit of Wagner’s text.
Nevertheless, there has been a long history of revisionist approaches to Wagner, many of which took place at the annual Bayreuth Festival performances. As a result, it is hard to attend consistently Wagner productions without encountering a fair share of that revisionism. At the San Francisco Opera that was certainly the case during the spring season of 2000 with a production of Parsifal conceived by Nikolaus Lehnhoff. In that case I was positively impressed, but I know that it still provoked a lot of grumbling. However, my own grumbling probably hit its maximum while viewing the film made by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg in 1982, which was so saturated by Nazi symbolism (along with a gratuitous reference to Hiroshima during the prelude to the first act) that any vestiges of Wagner’s narrative were purely accidental.
In that frame of reference Girard’s approach to staging prompted more yawning than grumbling. In each of the three acts his priority seemed to have more to do with projections and lighting than with the narrative; and, in the second act, he overloaded the number of Flowermaidens and then required them to master choreography while singing. As a result there were just too many distractions from the narrative itself; and, by undermining the narrative, Girard also undermined clear accounts of the individual roles that contribute to the narrative.
This was particularly the case with Kundry, whose personal journey through the three acts of the opera is more complex than that of any of the other characters, including Parsifal himself. Indeed, one could get into extended arguments over just what Kundry’s journey is. Schenk’s staging offers a clear account of how she is the agent responsible of Amfortas’ wound, then Kligsor’s agent for bringing down Parsifal, and finally (through the only word she utters in the third act) her commitment to act as Parsifal’s servant. Girard, on the other hand, treats these stages as secondary, which tended to undermine the sources of motivation for Parsifal’s own actions.
Thus, while the musical accounts delivered by Kaufmann, Pape, and Dalayman (not to mention the instrumental technique that emerged through Gatti’s conducting) did much to advance Wagner’s narrative, their performances seemed almost constantly to contend with Girard’s desires to pull them in less productive directions.
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