Parsifal – Stanislas de Barbeyrac
Kundry – Ekaterina Gubanova
Gurnemanz – Brindley Sherratt
Amfortas – Christian Gerhaher
Klingsor – Mark Stone
Titurel – James Platt
First Knight of the Grail – Ryan Vaughan Davies
Second Knight of the Grail – Jack Sandison
Squires – Elizabeth Karani, Lily Mo Browne, Giorgi Guilashvili, Emyr Lloyd Jones,
Flowermaidens – Chelsea Zurflüh, Rhian Lois, Sarah Richmond, Sarah Brady, Marianna Hovanisyan, Ellen Pearson
Voice from Above – Nikola Printz
Director – Evgeny Titov
Set designs – Etienne Pluss
Costumes – Esther Bialas
Lighting – D.M. Wood
Movement – Otto Pichler
Video – Christopher Ash
Dramaturgy – Janine Ortiz
Royal Opera Chorus (director: William Spaulding)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Jakub Hrůsá (conductor)
I had not intended to write about the Royal Opera’s new Parsifal. I was present as a mere civilian, and do not delude myself that the world has any pressing need to hear my thoughts. Yet, when I saw the second night of Evgeny Titov’s staging, heard the musical performances, and also read something of hostile audience reactions, I felt I might have something to say and thought it might be helpful to have something for my own records. Here goes then.
First, in the past decade or so of my Parsifal experience, Russian directors have scored a resounding victory. Not necessarily in Russia: about that, for better or worse, I have no idea, though I doubt whatever Valery Gergiev – remember him? – is currently serving up would detain many of us long. Yet, in the production history of a work that has distinctly fallen into historical phases – Bayreuth only; beyond the Festival-embargo; Wieland Wagner and beyond; now, Stefan Herheim and beyond – that final ‘beyond’ has for me been most fruitfully represented by the work of three Russian directors who, at some level, seem to have drawn on a distinctly Dostoevskian line of interpretation. That was perhaps clearest in Dmitri Tcherniakov (Berlin), for me very much the Parsifal that marked a new line of departure after Herheim, and in Kirill Serebrennikov (Vienna), but I think it is also present, albeit in more horrified, cynical form in Titov too. I am, of course, restricted by what I have seen, and make no comment on productions I have not, for instance that of Calixto Bieito, but mention this as much to frame what may have formed my thoughts as anything else. I also could not help but wonder whether some details and even themes might have been suggested to Titov by those two stagings, but have no idea whether that was actually the case. Sometimes, affinity is only that, and in any case broad lines of interest have a tendency to form in the wake of notable stagings as in any other interpretative work.
More important, what do we see, feel, and think here? It is as dark a Parsifal, reading both with and against the grain and offering a welcome degree of critique. Perhaps the post-apocalyptic setting is a little predictable by now, but if so, it is because it fits. This is a religious community lying beyond whatever may or may not remain of civilisation: a community that has long since lost its way, assuming it had one in the first place. That, surely, is straight Wagner—and since we have no idea what Monsalvat ever looked like, since it is not a ‘real place’, this being a mythological rather than realist work, it seems bizarre and certainly un-Wagnerian to come to it with expectations. The idea, rather than its external manifestation, is what matters; or rather, the latter is part of how we might progress to the former. Yet this Monsalvat has not merely lost its way; it has degenerated, assuming it was at some point something else, into something horrifying, a place of violence and outright cruelty, in which its rite, as tends to happen under mere ritualism, constantly reopens Amfortas’s wound to replenish its lost souls with his own blood. Is that a perversion of Christianity? Yes. Is Wagner’s text? Yes. Is this dark extension beyond what remains a potentially optimistic Feuerbachian psychology of religion in Wagner’s text unreasonable? Why should it be? This is contemporary theatre, not Titurel’s rite (which no one actually paying the slightest attention to Wagner could surely see as good in itself).
The cruelty visited on Amfortas may be graphic in a way we are not used to, but sometimes we need to be reminded of quite what might be at stake here, just as we do when contemplating Christ on the Cross, be it via the Isenheim Altarpiece or the St Matthew Passion. It is difficult to watch, as is Amfortas’s tortured state in what remains of his existence, wheeled into service by an unabashedly evil Titurel. But does anyone think Titurel here an admirable figure; and if so, why? (Feel free to do so, but that seems a directorial leap as great as any other.) The swan’s dying agonies, inflicted by Parsifal and pornographically prolonged by a Gurnemanz declining, for whatever reason, to put the poor creature out of its misery, are repeated and intensified in those of Amfortas as curdled Christ. There is thus a frightening sense of technological manipulation to this totalitarian world, whether ongoing screen surveillance, the cyber-creation of fembot Flowermaidens, or the literal power behind the visible throne, sonorously and with unusual immediacy intoned by James Platt as Titurel-Davros. Who is really in charge here? Perhaps him, or perhaps someone or something beyond. More likely the latter, since this hellish world continues without him, even as the Johnsonian bodybags pile high behind in preparation for his funeral. And the laughing, sinister, female progenitor of Flowermaidens and Kundry of second-act incarnation: does she exist at all? Or is she herself a cyber-phantom? Does it matter? This is surely our world too, or threatens to be.
The coup sans grâce falls, as it must, at the close. I found it shocking, as I am sure did many others. How one reacts to that shock is a personal matter, but for me it was intellectually and dramatically productive to an extent that I am still reeling when I consider it, especially in combination with the score and Jakub Hrůsá’s conducting, on which more below. When dark knights come to arm Parsifal with the cybernetic force he requires – or better, that they require of him – there is already a sense that something will go horribly wrong. A strength of Titov’s production hereafter is that he intensifies the dramatic tension, making it far from clear whether it will. Perhaps Parsifal and Parsifal will do as they should—though we bear in mind the nested meanings acquired of Gurnemanz’s Act I ‘Weisst du, was du sahst?’ The problem may now be that Parsifal does know, that he knows only too well. If so, he ultimately cannot overcome the evil forces surrounding him—and us. He seems to give Amfortas rest, but what can that actually be in this context? Whatever it is, it is not enough, Amfortas requires more and more from the spear, until Parsifal is himself driven to brutality with the spear, taking what he did to the swan, its death-throes again visibly re-enacted, and making it worse. He could not win, if winning were there to be had, and collapses beneath Amfortas’s trolley, broken, returned to the foetal position and role from which Kundry had apparently rescued him. ‘Durch Mitleid wissend…’? Not on your life—or anyone else’s. Therein lies the tragedy, its counterpoint with Wagner’s score itself the stuff of drama both immediate and reflective upon the Bühnenweihfestspiel: a utopian vision or was it always something darker? Here, tantalisingly, it is both realised and not, the work held to account in a fashion far more productive than detractors may have realised.
Hrůsá’s conducting was remarkably assured for one conducting the work for the first time; it would have placed him in the ranks of serious Wagner conductors, if this were his fiftieth. One should never, can never consider Wagner as ‘absolute music’, but on the more absolute side, all the components were there: blend, balance, harmonic rhythm, integration of the moment’s detail with the longer line, and so on. So too was another key to opera more generally as well as Wagner specifically, the ability to make the orchestra speak as Wagner’s Greek Chorus, roots extending back at least as far as Gluck and Mozart, but in truth as much to Bach, and ultimately to Aeschylus & Co. Even here, there were passages that were felt as recitativo accompagnato and arioso, yet at the highest level of symphonic integration. There was all the time in the world, but never too much. It was never either/or. The Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, clearly liberated by playing Wagner for its new Music Director, sounded for the most part the equal of any in the world, participants in the drama as much as their counterparts onstage. What fascinated and ultimately involved the most, though, was the dramatic counterpoint to stage action in Wagner’s ‘deeds of music made visible’. As the scene was initially set, then broadened, Hrůsá offered a more materialist Wagner, in whose sound the music found itself, as it found drama, participating as equal and ultimately leading protagonist, the thrilling urgency of second-act musical action an object lesson. So fine a musical account, conceived in tandem with, yet anything but subordinate to, the stage action, enabled the work in turn to question the questioning to which it had been subjected. If at Bayreuth, Stefan Herheim had presented the orchestra as the locus of redemption, here that hope persisted, but it was a hope rather than a certainty, a welcome questioning itself of Wagner’s reconciliation. That need not happen every time; but if one is truly drawn to, truly loves Parsifal, it becomes necessary to gain that critical distance. There is nothing to fear and much to gain
Babreyrac’s assumption of the title role was equally fascinating. In the first act, his musical approach was at times Lieder-like, springing from the poem, not to the exclusion of other aspects of the work, but with that accorded apparent priority. As the character developed and in tandem, so it seemed, with Hrůsá’s musical strategy, so his more overtly lyrical art bloomed, in turn presaging (or, in Wagner’s artistic life, recalling) the drama of his son Lohengrin. (Let us leave Nietzsche’s jibe on one side for now.) He seemed appalled and shaken – how could he not be? – by what he had witnessed in the Grail Hall. That, as well as his more distant past, was part of the trauma to be worked through in the second act, in which Barbeyrac’s boyish portrayal, vocal and acted, was just the thing, a doomed yet necessary attempt to bring the ‘pure fool’ into being rather than simply assume him. In that sense, it would be foolish, as it were, to deny that his physical appearance played no role, but it was a starting point, not an end point, as were the dramatic wiles of Ekaterina Gubanova’s Kundry. She slipped in and out of personas with ease, yet not without dramatic cost. For she was trapped too—and elicited the sympathy our souls required and this cruel world would not permit. Her treatment and that of the Flowermaidens was anything but sympathetic, but do we really think Klingsor, here played with villainous relish and determination by Mark Stone, is one who respects and loves women? Christian Gerhaher seemed far more at home, if one can call it that, with Amfortas than he had with the Rheingold Wotan this Easter in Salzburg. In a near-absolute sense, rather than that of sentimental psychobabble, we felt his agony, analysing rather than merely embodying Schopenhauerian Mitleid. His engagement with musical, verbal, and performance text alike combined to a degree equal with those of Barbeyrac and Gubanova. By the third act, before which an announcement was made, Brindley Sherratt was clearly ailing, but he soldiered on with unswerving dramatic commitment. His is clearly a Gurnemanz to reckon with. The chorus, often offstage, though at the beginning of the third act shockingly present, sang its several Passion-like roles, participatory and commentary, in various spatial guises, recalling and redramatising for us spaces in Wagner’s conception, from Bayreuth to Siena, to whatever or wherever Monsalvat may now be. If ensemble wavered at times, there was ample compensation at others.
This, then, was a dramatic engagement, not an exhausted rite. Only those who cling to the idea of Parsifal as the latter, frowning at anyone who even now dare applaud at the first act’s close, could possibly object in principle. But that in itself does not make any challenge worthwhile or successful. For me, Titov’s staging presents interesting and in the best sense provocative ideas, but falls down somewhat in failing to sustain them with equal strength across the drama. Much of the second act’s connection with the first and third too feels unduly tenuous; the first scene of the third comes across as needing further thought on how it might be conceptually integrated (or even aware). In the former case, the little girls who accompany Klingsor at the opening, presumably to be converted in more sense than one, seem surplus to requirements and uncomfortably close to Tcherniakov’s vision of a realm of paedophilia. Beyond that, the emphasis lies on Personenregie and the extraordinary acting capabilities of Barbeyrac and Gubanova. That is all well and good, but dramatically something is missing, and the final scene of the act seems almost banally conventional, disregard of the sign of the Cross included. (The truer transgression here would have been to have it made.) In the latter case, the impression, just or otherwise, is that greater planning by the production team may have been required—however impressive the performances, sung and acted. These are shortcomings reassessment for a serious revival may yet tackle. That may be frustrating, yet it is not so unusual; Bayreuth is not the only Werkstatt. And they are shortcomings: they take their place in any assessment, but should not be exaggerated.
Despite its flaws, this marked a step-change for a work that, over the time I have been attending performances, has not fared well dramatically in this theatre, notwithstanding the musical virtues of performances led by Bernard Haitink and Simon Rattle. Its most recent production was understandably never revived. I hope and trust Titov’s will be, above all for the critical engagement it enables with Wagner’s text as a whole and the ever-shifting relationship between its elements. That may be the only Erlösung dem Erlöser remaining: more partial, say, than with Herheim, but our modern(ist) lot is more often than not fragmentary. It is surely preferable to face existential truths head-on than to bury our heads in the false, enforced reconciliation of an unredeemed Monsalvat. Is that not what Parsifal is, or should be, about?
