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Bachtrack, 18 February 2013 |
by David Allen |
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Wagner: Parsifal, Metropolitan Opera, 15. Februar 2013 |
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The music redeems unanswered questions in the Met's beautiful new Parsifal
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Before the music in the Metropolitan Opera’s new Parsifal starts, a black
but reflective curtain drapes the front of the stage. It is dim enough not
quite to show the audience, but it picks out the chandeliers. As Daniele
Gatti coaxes the orchestra through the opening lines of the score the
tableau becomes translucent, first seeming to mirror the front rows of the
stalls, but slowly revealing the chorus, sitting in rows. Parsifal stands,
in the centre, chosen. The men slowly remove their workaday suits, socks,
and shoes, while the women turn. Director François Girard’s central conceit
is clear: the Grail community is us.
What follows is another in a
long line of Wagner productions set in a post-apocalyptic world. Michael
Levine’s set is desolate, burned, and gravelly, with Peter Flaherty’s
mesmerising videos projecting clouds that glow red and roil black, that
darken, thunder, and eventually part. A stream cuts the ground, soon to be
realised as Amfortas’ wound: the water turns to blood as the knight-leader
is dragged on stage. Parsifal peers into the blood at the end of Act I,
leading to a second act which takes place at the ravine-wound’s base. Act
III returns to the Act I set, with the addition only of rough-dug graves.
In Girard’s telling, nature has been desecrated, just like Amfortas’
skin and the Grail’s community have been rent by lust and sin. With the male
chorus – separated until the final bars from the women by the stage’s cleft
– in shirts and suits throughout, one wonders if this is a post-climate
change horror show, with the knights as guilty, faceless bureaucrats seeking
a charismatic leader. Regardless, the theme of nature is picked up
throughout, especially in vivid, abstruse projections in the transformation
musics, with views of a planet, whole but dead, and shards of refracted sun
breaking through. The clouds that dominate the background break only with
Parsifal’s redemption.
The centrality of nature to this production is
set alongside a focus on blood, and, relatedly, sex. Thousands of gallons of
blood coat the floor of the frankly vaginal second-act set: Amfortas’ sin
and Parsifal’s mother issues come together here. Klingsor’s Flower Maidens
terrify in Carolyn Choa’s ritualised, deliberate choreography, mechanised
and objectified as in previous knights’ dreams. Parsifal’s compassion –
Mitleid – for Amfortas’ pain brings on yet more blood, now invested with
life-giving, sacral power, just as in the redemptive Grail itself.
The steady, minimal staging of this Parsifal grows with almost unbearably
powerful images. Take Parsifal climbing the back of the stage, silhouetted
against a pillar of light, slowing seeking Amfortas and Kundry in Act III’s
gloom. Or his pained walk across the stage divide to redeem Kundry, a simple
but shattering move. In this Parsifal ritual deliberateness compels the
audience’s collective sympathy with the stage action. From the start, we are
all guilty, and all to be redeemed.
But Girard never quite does
enough to elucidate what he really has in mind with this ritually sad,
beautiful production. The separation of male and female as the course of all
woe is a fascinating idea, but it is never clear what the women have done in
the past, nor what role they are to play in the future. Clearly Girard wants
to complicate Wagner’s gender roles, to the extent that Kundry carries the
Grail to the knights so that Parsifal can redeem them. But is she redeemed
only to serve? Does she redeem the women, or does Parsifal? And why, how? Or
is there a different kind of Mitleid at work, that of mutual, true love?
That seems to be the impression Girard aims for by the sensuous female flesh
projected to represent the Grail's temple: flesh tempts, but, through
Christ, it also sanctifies and regenerates.
In this production,
Girard, like Wagner himself, leaves questions unanswered – unlike the
composer, he leaves too many.
Redemption in Parsifal is seen on
stage, but it is felt and ultimately believed in the ears. Intriguing as
Girard’s production is, this Parsifal is most astonishing for Daniele
Gatti’s conducting. It is slow, but so filled with detailing and clarity
that it could easily last longer. Dramatic action took place first and
foremost in the orchestra, Gatti expertly controlling its sound, keeping an
impossible fragility in the outer acts and finding screwed-up modernist
horrors in the second. Such was Gatti’s control over colour that one thought
Wagner had beaten Schoenberg to his Klangfarbenmelodie punch. But it was his
delivery of architecture, with a liturgical power that built inexorably and
geometrically, that was most impressive, and most important. He did it from
memory, too.
Few better casts could be imagined than the one
the Met has assembled here. Jonas Kaufmann is the rare Wagnerian hero you
can believe in. He traced Parsifal’s progression from fool to Erlöser with
subtle movements and an aging, darkening tone. His two main monologues
ideally married words and line with scarcely conceivable power and dramatic
nuance, all the while deploying his formidable acting skills. His final
word, “Schrein”, sticks in the memory for its half-tone delivery, matched
seamlessly to the tenuous thread in Gatti’s strings. René Pape’s is
a Gurnemanz of tortured nobility and textual accuracy, with enough gravitas
to act as the production’s moral centre. Peter Mattei conjured a wretched
Amfortas, forcing our empathy, straining with physical difficulty but
delivering a long line to match that from the pit. Yevgeny Nikitin’s
venomous, predatory Klingsor was rather caricatured, but then Wagner’s
sorcerer is. Katarina Dalayman was perhaps the weakest link as Kundry, with
a particularly squally top to her voice, but she invested her role with
great emotional force. Minor characters were ably done, and the chorus was
particularly fine.
Kaufmann, more than most Parsifals, looks and
acts the part of a callow youth to perfection in the opening scene. Vocally,
he rises to the
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