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Examiner, February 20, 2013 |
By: Richard Carter |
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Wagner: Parsifal, Metropolitan Opera, 18. Februar 2013 |
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‘Parsifal’: lots of fans love it, so beware what you say
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Monday, Feb. 18, the Metropolitan Opera presented its 290th performance of
Richard Wagner’s final opera, Parsifal (Percival)—a work first seen there
Christmas Eve, 1903—based on 13th-century Knights-of-the-Holy-Grail legends.
A stellar cast led by German tenor Jonas Kaufmann in the title role under
the baton of Italian conductor Daniele Gatti wowed the sold-out
dyed-in-the-wool Wagnerian audience during all 5 hours, 35 minutes.
This season’s new coproduction comes to the Met for seven performances (of
which five remain) after visiting France’s Ópera National de Lyon and
Canadian Opera Company.
The current production has garnered praise
from The Washington Post, whose title says it all: “Met premieres Francois
Girard’s striking new ‘Parsifal’ with glorious cast, superb conducting.”
Though Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times called the overall production
“a downer,” yet his column admitted that the opera itself contains “some of
the most sublime music ever written” and places the whole work “among the
most metaphysical, ambiguous and profound, if inexplicable, operas ever
written.” And Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim’s preview article for the same
newspaper ended with a glowing quote from the star, Jonas Kaufmann: “Every
time I’m overwhelmed by the beauty of this music. The music that describes
all these miracles and all this passion is just incredibly gorgeous and
tempting. It really pulls you into this world. Even people who are not
religious become religious while hearing this music.”
This column
will focus on Parsifal’s inscrutability from the perspective of a career
operagoer who comes to this impressive work with an open mind and four other
Wagner operas under his belt, namely: Tristan und Isolde, Die fliegende
Holländer (The Fleeing Dutchman), Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin.
Many
moments in Parsifal are indeed breathtaking. Oddly, none of these happen to
be when any of the soloists are singing. Rather, the stirring orchestral
prelude and interludes and the ethereal choral numbers comprise the musical
standouts, and the redoubtable forces of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra
and matchless skills of the spectacular Chorus rivalled the formidable
soloists as the evening’s true stars.
The vocal and acting
skills of Jonas Kaufmann were worth the ticket price and the risk of getting
saddle sore. He looked the part of the innocent simpleton in Act I, grew in
worldly-wise maturity by Act II, and became the personification of
compassion in Act III. His splendid tone and peerless baritonal tenor were
beautiful, even when the vocal lines he declaimed were not.
Swedish soprano Katarina Dalayman portrayed Kundry, the centuries-old
mysterious woman who’s not allowed to die—or even sleep much, based on the
amount of groaning and moaning she did throughout the opera in a crumbled
position on the ground. Her impressive vocalism was never more pronounced
than in Act II, when she shrieked a two-octave downward leap, explaining
that she was punished for having laughed at the impaled Christ in the first
century. Kundry and Parsifal are the only ones who come close to performing
a duet in the entire work, but it really takes the form of lengthy
alternating monologues, never of intoning simultaneously, as is done in
Tristan und Isolde.
German bass René Pape performed by far the
lengthiest role of the opera, the hermit and spiritual mentor Gurnemanz. He
projected mellifluously in soft and loud passages, conveying crystal-clear
diction to the last row of the highest balcony.
Russian baritone
Evgeny Nikitin played a succinctly snide Klingsor during Act II. Faroese
bass Rúni Brattaberg echoed with rich reverberant tones from offstage as
former King Titurel, Amfortas’ aged father, in an all-too-brief role.
The story’s focal point, King Amfortas, suffers an unhealing wound
inflicted by Klingsor with a spear believed to have been the one used to
pierce Christ’s side after his impalement. It seems the king had let down
his guard years earlier and fell to the wiles of the seductive Kundry—which
is usually when people get wounded with spears. Finnish baritone Peter
Mattei acquitted the tortured role with burnished tone; he truly sounded
painfully afflicted. A bit of creepy stage business at Titurel’s burial saw
Amfortas dragging himself along the ground and getting into the grave,
ripping the swaddling bands from the mummy-looking cadaver.
Canadian
Director François Girard’s staging adhered closely to the German libretto.
Two outstanding features were the ever-changing video projections by
video designer Peter Flaherty, creating cosmic landscapes and roiling storm
clouds in Acts I and III and in Act II, flowing figures of a corpuscular
sort, sometimes resembling flames and smoke, other times an immense lava
lamp, all in vibrant red and orange. The Act II staging of Klingsor’s
enchanted sanctuary confined all movement to a triangular pool of ankle-deep
crimson liquid that looked remarkably like strawberry Jello. Twenty-four
Flower maidens, seemingly transplanted from Stravinsky’s ballet Sacre du
printemps (The Rite of Spring), stood motionless fully twenty minutes until
Parsifal’s arrival, whereupon they sprang to life in seductive dance as a
warm-up act for Kundry’s all-out attempt to ensnare him with her, um,
charms. The 1,600 gallons (16,000 according to The Washington Post) of
crimson liquid reflected eerily on abruptly rising fjord-like abutments,
which formed the side walls of the triangle, gaping open at the back in a
narrow fissure through which the red video projections could be seen. The
visual and sonic aspects made this the highlight of the evening; other than
the chorus’ contributions elsewhere, the Flower maidens’ sequence provided
the only other melodious ensemble singing that truly sounded like singing.
American author Mark Twain—a self-professed “untutored,” “ignorant
person”—attended an 1891 Bayreuth performance of Parsifal, in the theatre
Wagner built specifically for his operas. The December 6, 1891, Chicago
Daily Tribune carried his piece “Mark Twain at Bayreuth” (often titled “At
the Shrine of St. Wagner”) in which he says as only he could:
I was
not able to detect in the vocal parts of Parsifal anything that might with
confidence be called rhythm or tune or melody … Singing! It does seem the
wrong name to apply to it … In ‘Parsifal’ there is a hermit named Gurnemanz
who stands on the stage in one spot and practices by the hour, while first
one and then another of the cast endures what he can of it and then retires
to die.
From the outset, he wrote:
The entire overture, long
as it was, was played to a dark house with the curtain down. It was
exquisite; it was delicious. But straightway thereafter, or course, came the
singing, and it does seem to me that nothing can make a Wagner opera
absolutely perfect and satisfactory to the untutored but to leave out the
vocal parts. I wish I could see a Wagner opera done in pantomime once. Then
one would have the lovely orchestration unvexed to listen to and bathe his
spirit in, and the bewildering beautiful scenery to intoxicate his eyes
with, and the [silent] acting couldn’t mar these pleasures, because there
isn’t often anything in the Wagner opera that one would call by such a
violent name as acting; as a rule all you would see would be a couple of
silent people, one of them standing still, the other catching flies. Of
course I do not really mean that he would be catching flies; I only mean
that the usual operatic gestures which consist in reaching first one hand
out into the air and then the other might suggest the sport I speak of if
the operator attended strictly to business and uttered no sound.
The
original quote in context comes next and follows here complete:
I
trust that I know as well as anybody that singing is one of the most
entrancing and bewitching and moving and eloquent of all the vehicles
invented by man for the conveying of feeling; but it seems to me that the
chief virtue in song is melody, air, tune, rhythm, or what you please to
call it, and that when this feature is absent what remains is a picture with
the color left out. I was not able to detect in the vocal parts of
‘Parsifal’ anything that might with confidence be called rhythm or tune or
melody; one person performed at a time—and a long time, too—often in a
noble, and always in a high-toned, voice; but he only pulled out long notes,
then some short ones, then another long one, then a sharp, quick, peremptory
bark or two—and so on and so on; and when he was done you saw that the
information which he had conveyed had not compensated for the disturbance.
Not always, but pretty often. If two of them would but put in a duet
occasionally and blend the voices; but no, they don’t do that. The great
master, who knew so well how to make a hundred instruments rejoice in unison
and pour out their souls in mingled and melodious tides of delicious sound,
deals only in barren solos when he puts in the vocal parts. It may be that
he was deep, and only added the singing to his operas for the sake of the
contrast it would make with the music. Singing! It does seem the wrong name
to apply to it. Strictly described, it is a practicing of difficult and
unpleasant intervals, mainly. An ignorant person gets tired of listening to
gymnastic intervals in the long run, no matter how pleasant they may be. In
‘Parsifal’ there is a hermit named Gurnemanz who stands on the stage in one
spot and practices by the hour, while first one and then another character
of the cast endures what he can of it and then retires to die.
Within
minutes of the Met’s new production premiere last Friday, Opera-L’s message
boards, populated by some of the most devoted opera fans, began glowing with
words like “epiphany” and such descriptives as “transporting,”
“transfixing,” and “transcendent.” At Monday’s performance I was hoping for
at least one of these life-changing experiences. Instead of feeling
transported, I was always all too aware of remaining right where I was; I am
apparently more ‘trans-breakable’ than trans-fixable; and instead of
transcending, an old Carpenters’ tune kept replaying in my head: “We’ve only
trans-begun.” Though I enjoyed the performance in some ways, I failed to be
‘epiphed.’
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