Existentialism is not Mumbo Jumbo!

The Temple of the Grail in the first act of the current San Francisco Opera production of Parsifal (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of SFO)

I was glad to have a schedule that allowed me to attend the first of five San Francisco Opera performances of Richard Wagner’s final opera, Parsifal, and then have all my thoughts in a row and documented prior to 8 AM the following morning. Sadly, I was not able to see what the San Francisco Chronicle had to say about it until relatively late this morning. The account was written by Joshua Kosman, identified as the Chronicle’s “former classical music critic.” This was not the first time that the two of us had significantly different opinions, but I was more perplexed than usual by what I read in this morning’s paper.

More specifically, this is the account that set my juices flowing:

In tackling Wagner’s final and most enigmatic operatic creation, the company has deftly bypassed all the piece’s most intractable challenges – its static dramaturgy, its talkiness, its indecipherable religious framework – and opted instead to dazzle the eyes and ears.

This, I think, is the correct “Parsifal” strategy. There’s no obligation to take seriously the opera’s air of sacramental mumbo jumbo, with its babble about sin and redemption and purity, just because Wagner and his followers have done so. While there is always room for a diversity of opinions, those two paragraphs struck me as a need for a response to a call, or, at least, a need to take on existential adjectives such as “enigmatic” and “correct.”

Where the latter case is concerned, I always remember a Second City routine that was set in the Art Institute of Chicago. Two people are looking at the same painting. One says, “I don’t like it.” The other snaps back, “Well, you’re wrong!” When it comes to interpreting narrative, there will always be situations in which there is no “correct strategy.”

One does one’s best to identify events and how they impact each other, but sometimes coming to a conclusion can be elusive. In reflecting on my own experience of Parsifal, I would say that the opera involves the human condition as it applies to the qualities of loss (Amfortas’ wound) and enlightenment (Parsifal’s influence on Kundry). One may be perplexed by how these characters come to be influenced; but they are flesh and blood, rather than puppets of “sacramental mumbo jumbo.”

I suppose what matters most is that the Parsifal narrative is far from “a walk in the park.” That is why I invoked the phrase “journey of enlightenment” in the conclusion of my “morning after” writing. Perhaps, in the context of my metaphors, I should simply accept the fact that, in our respective visits to San Francisco Opera this past Saturday afternoon, Kosman and I found ourselves walking down entirely different paths that may never meet!

Having now put two stakes in the ground (one for each article), I can confess that I am looking forward to seeing this production a second time this coming Sunday!