Parsifal, Vienna State Opera, 8 April 2026

Images: © Wiener Staatsoper / Michael Pöhn

 

Amfortas – Gerald Finley
Gurnemanz – Franz-Josef Selig
Parsifal – Klaus Florian Vogt
Klingsor – Werner van Mechelen
Kundry – Jennifer Holloway
Titurel – Matheus França
Younger Parsifal – Nikolay Sidorenko
Squires – Florentina Serles, Daria Sushkova, Andrew Turner, Adrian Autard
First Knight of the Grail – Carlo Osuna
Second Knight of the Grail – Alex Ilvakhin
Flowermaidens – Ileana Tonca, Mariia Zherebiateva, Anna Bondarenko, Ilia Staple, Jenni Hietala, Isabel Signoret

Director, designs, costumes – Kirill Serebrennikov
Lighting – Franck Evin
Assistant director – Evgeny Kulagin
Assistant designer – Olga Pavliuk
Assistant costume designer – Tatina Dolmatovskaya
Video and photography – Aleksey Fokin, Yurii Karih
Fight coordinator – Ran Arthur Braun
Dramaturgy – Sergio Morabito
Actors

Vienna State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Thomas Lang)
Vienna State Opera Orchestra
Axel Kober (conductor)

More by happy accident than design, my Easter Monday Rheingold in Salzburg was followed only two evenings later in Vienna by Parsifal from the same director, Kirill Serebrennikov. Whilst the former marked the first instalment, if the third performance, of a new Ring, the latter was the final performance in a revival of a production first seen in 2021 and reviewed here at its first revival last year. My thoughts on the production largely remain similar to 2025, though there will doubtless have been small changes, given a largely new cast, Klaus Florian Vogt the only singer to reprise a principal role. I shall doubtless also have seen different things and reacted differently to what I saw, so I shall recapitulate, without reading my former review, before proceeding to those performances. Conductor Axel Kober remained in the pit, as of course did the Vienna State Opera Orchestra, although how many players will have been the same I do not know. 

Serebrennikov’s role as a film as well as stage director is, as in Das Rheingold, apparent throughout. In this vision of Monsalvat correctional facility (the ‘l’ given by a cross) we are made to think and feel, if not quite as Wagner would have had us do – how can we ever know? – then in a way certainly preferable to any moribund attempt to imitate, the threadbare letter mistaken for the spirit, just as the ‘l’ Cross has almost vanished when we (and the characters) return for the third act to a building and institution that remains even after its initial purpose has died. So far, so Wagnerian one, might say, penetrating in historical decay at least to the essence of this Grail community tale. In some ways, this is Kundry’s tale: she as photojournalist documents the regime and its hardships, writing a lengthy investigative (exploitative?) story for the glossy magazine ‘Schloss’ managed by Klingsor, which may or may not contribute to institutional demise. 

The question of gaze is interesting: there is clearly something strongly homoerotic to the film visions not only of the young Parsifal (Nikolay Sidorenko) revisited or remembered by his later self (Vogt also on stage, a ghost who sings). ‘Er ist schön, der Knabe!’ as Klingsor cannot help but admit. Whether the prison activities, physical training, ‘play’ wrestling and all, themselves partake in such homoeroticism will partly be a matter for the beholder. There is, however, no question in the case of the swan, another young inmate who approaches the inexperienced Parsifal on film, only swiftly to be felled, his body taken away by guards whose relationship to the prisoners, not least old lag and tattoist Gurnemanz, is anthropologically fascinating if occasionally narratively tricky. Lingering shower shots as the pure fool cleanses himself tell one tale, which may or may not be concluded by filmic resurrection for the swan (a prison nickname perhaps?) at the close. 

But we should not forget that, if Gurnemanz is Wagner’s narrator, Kundry is in many ways Serebrennikov’s. Not only do prisoners act up for her, young Parsifal learning to flex his biceps in imitation of others by the time of his release from what seems to have been a week-long sentence, days recorded on the film, at the close of the first act. But she is photographer and writer, clearly a more serious as well as successful figure than fashionista Flowermaidens who get nowhere with their lust, when young Parsifal comes to the office, ritually stripped and bashful, to be reclothed in tighty whitie Calvin Kleins and still tighter black leather trousers. Kundry has her way beyond Wagner’s kiss, if not the whole way, whilst the older Parsifal, powerless to intervene in a past that is past, attempts to save his younger self. So the gaze represented, arguably embodied too, extends beyond the homoerotic, even beyond the queer, to the female too. Whatever names we may wish to accord this or these, such orientations and identities stand(s) in opposition to singular, heteronormative patriarchy, here a quasi-monastic prison in itself. Notably, there is no Voice from Above at the end: it is Kundry herself, less released by death than released by life. 

Kober’s conducting was largely brisk and no-nonsense. It was less overtly an ‘interpretation’ than many might conductors might give, though in so complex a score there is unquestionable art in giving the impression of letting it and the wonderful Vienna orchestra speak for themselves. If there were times when greater variation in tempo on both micro- and macro-levels might have been desirable or at least interesting, there were great dynamic range and considerable timbral variety – if not that of, say, a Barenboim – to the orchestra doing what it does best. The chorus was outstanding – surely outstandingly trained too – throughout; it would be tempting to take that for granted, but its marriage of precision and heft was not the least of the evening’s achievements. 

Vogt and Sidorenko gave tireless, complementary performances as Parsifal, their interaction and non-interaction moving as well as suggestive. Hearing Vogt in this role almost inevitably summons memories – for those who have heard it anyway – of his Lohengrin, an historico-genealogical layering that is fruitful if not necessary. This Parsifal must play the game we play yet retain freshness on the way to experience, far from the only instance of work and production gaining in turn from their interaction. Some dislike Vogt’s voice – excessively, I cannot help but think – but that is surely neither here nor there. He reminds us that he is justly a major artist in this repertoire, has been for many years, and shows no sign of going anywhere yet. Jennifer Holloway will sing Adriano in the Bayreuth Festspielhaus’s first ever Rienzi this summer. Her Kundry was well acted, well sung, increasing in overt confidence in fine parallel with Serebrennikov’s concept. Franz-Josef Selig could not reasonably be faulted as Gurnemanz, marriage of words and music an object lesson. The greater ambiguity, even occasional malevolence, of the character in this production was subtly suggested without caricature. Gerald Finley’s Amfortas made a similarly intelligent impression, unquestionably founded in and at ease with Wagner’s words and their changing meaning. Werner van Mechelen made his mark not only as Klingsor but as this Klingsor, Smaller roles were all well taken, often illuminatingly so. Like Kundry, probably Parsifal too, Wagner’s Bühnenweihfestspiel again found itself released by the new life staging and performances can and did impart.

Parsifal, Vienna State Opera, 23 April 2025

Images:© Wiener Staatsoper / Michael Pöhn
Parsifal (Nikolay Sidorenko and Klaus Florian Vogt)

Amfortas – Jordan Shanahan
Gurnemanz – Günther Groissböck

Parsifal – Klaus Florian Vogt
Klingsor – Jochen Schmeckenbecher
Kundry – Anja Kampe
Titurel – Ivo Stanchev
Younger Parsifal – Nikolay Sidorenko
Squires – Anita Monserrat, Juliette Mars, Andrew Turner, Nathan Bryon
First Knight of the Grail – Devin Eatmon
Second Knight of the Grail – Alex Ilvakhin
Flowermaidens – Ileana Tonca, Mariia Zherebiateva, Anna Bondarenko, Celine Mun, Jenni Hietala, Isabel Signoret

Director, designs, costumes – Kirill Serebrennikov
Lighting – Franck Evin
Assistant director – Evgeny Kulagin
Assistant designer – Olga Pavluk
Assistant costume designer – Tatina Dolmatovskaya
Video and photography – Aleksey Fokin, Yurii Karih
Fight coordinator – Ran Arthur Braun
Dramaturgy – Sergio Morabito

Vienna State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Thomas Lang)

Vienna State Opera Orchestra

Axel Kober (conductor)

 

Kirill Serebrennikov’s Vienna Parsifal, seen first in April 2021, receives a revival fully justifying the praise it garnered four years ago. Like Dmitri Tcherniakov’s Unter den Linden staging, it has a Russian quality to it, once again bringing to mind Dostoevsky (and Nietzsche’s confrontations with him and with Wagner), albeit in quite a different way. Here is not the world of the Old Believers but The House of the Dead: recalling, if only coincidentally, Frank Castorf’s move from the Ring not to Parsifal but to Janáček’s opera as a surprising, yet illuminating pendant. Well conducted by Axel Kober, in the best performance I have heard from him, with the Vienna State Opera Orchestra and Chorus, and a fine cast, this knocked spots of Bayreuth’s two recent, sorry encounters with the work written for its theatre. On a first acquaintance at least, Serebrennikov’s production marks an important contribution to Parsifal’s production history post-Stefan Herheim, whose Bayreuth staging continues, like Patrice Chéreau’s Ring, to divide others into worlds of ‘before’ and ‘after’. 

Video homes in on a remote, forest monastery, or I thought so initially. It is actually a prison. If it would be silly to say they are the same thing, the two certainly have something in common, as prison does with all manner of institutions and greater societies, all the more so when we deny that it does. As an Anglican cleric might have it, ‘we are all, in a very real sense, prisoners,’ and of course we are. Serebrennikov, notoriously, was himself when his art contravened the diktats of Putin and Russian Orthodoxy’s fascism. The way such societies constitute themselves internally and in relation to their governors is anthropologically revealing; all manner of rules, customs, comradeship, and expectations build up in complex interaction, masking, abetting, and inciting violence, increasingly so when, like all institutions, they stray from their founding purpose. Prisoners are thrown out by guards for a beating from prisoners. Gurnemanz is an intermediary, a political even, certainly at times a financier, paying a guard to look the other way. His leadership capacity involves tattooing fellow prisoners: a rite of initiation and doubtless of hierarchy too. Ritual become ritualism, as in the writing on the wall, sometimes in blood: ‘Durch Mitleid wissend, der reine Tor, harre sein’. Sometimes it takes an external intervention, a novice who does not know where he is, even who he is, to accomplish what is required—though that will be easier said than done. 

Gurnemanz (Günther Groissböck)

But that is to get slightly ahead of ourselves—not unreasonably, given the production does, presenting the first and second acts from the standpoint of an elder Parsifal, embodied in the singer (in this case, Klaus Florian Vogt), those acts’ stagework mostly – save for illuminating moments of interaction through memory – by the outstanding, highly physical acting of Nikolay Sidorenko. Violence is rife, and video enables us to home in further, observing and feeling the wounds, of which Amfortas’s is but the most egregious example, for ourselves. Like St Thomas, one might say—or like all manner of other instances, if one prefers. Kundry visits as a photographer, though one who seems also to know the rules, perhaps closer to guiding principles than others, though her photography, as becomes increasingly clear, is not only a matter of record but also of exploitation, glamourising what – and whom – should not be glamourised; such, however, is our society, and such is unquestionably the world of most of its journalism. Surveillance is part and parcel of that—and is of course an unmistakeable component of life in prison. The troubling death of another prisoner, relayed on video – though should we trust its (edited?) testimony? – equates, we think, to that of the swan. There is certainly a terrible beauty to the close-ups and a frank, border-line repellent insistence on our (homoerotic) gaze. There is ultimately no objectivity at the human level, least of all when we claim there is.

More broadly, narration may be necessary, whether via Kundry, Gurnemanz, or the elder Parsifal; yet it can, as we all know, be highly unreliable. That, as Herheim acknowledged, this has aesthetic and specifically musical implications, is clear both in Serebrennikov’s theory and practice. ‘It is Wagner's compositional and dramaturgical perspective of memory in Parsifal,’ he acknowledges, 

… from which I developed my scenic concept: An adult man of my age remembers the young man, almost still the lad he once was. For us, Wagner's music emerges from the inner movement of the protagonist and is set in the context of a scenic experimental arrangement. Parsifal is overtaken or overwhelmed by his memories, sometimes he gets lost in them. He discovers the repressed. The break in time between the first two acts and the third led me to tell the story of the mature Parsifal in a flashback, as it were, which takes us through the events of the first two acts until we arrive in the narrator's present in Act 3. In all three acts, there is what I understand to be a sacred or mystical encounter between Parsifal then and Parsifal now. It is important for me to emphasise that I have created a poetic space of memory in which - just as in our memories - there can be contradictions and in which different levels can overlap or replace each other as if in a cross-fade.

Passing of time, so fundamental to Wagner and more broadly to drama itself, is key to the unfolding of the first, most complex (here) act, as well as to its relation with the second and third. A more wholesome, more necessary ritual, that of breakfast, of breaking bread, enables its religious-theological counterpart, seemingly understood or at least capable of understanding in Wagner’s own Feuerbachian terms, to engage in that passing, to speed things up (in fruitful counterpoint, even dialectic, with the score. The latter days of Parsifal’s week of incarceration, demarcated by video, pass more quickly, then, than those at its beginning. 

Parsifal, Kundry (Anja Kampe)

At that act’s close, there is no ‘Voice from Above’; it is Kundry herself, returned to capture the moment visually, for which Parsifal has now learned to pose, flexing muscles so as to make his way in a world both old and new. Klingsor’s world, attached (even physically as well as conceptually) to that of the prison, is that of a glossy, fashion magazine: one with pretension, no doubt, that it tells a ‘story’ with its images—and indeed with the copious words seen on screen, of Kundry’s article to date. It is not finished, though, and he compels her to return to it, to continue her work with Parsifal. (And why not, one might ask; surely prison and its conditions require reporting on. Doubtless they do, but by whom, and to what end?) The Flowermaidens, part of this world and dressed accordingly, do their bit, but it is of course only Kundry who will succeed, her (Klingsor’s) exploitation of the released prisoner every bit as disconcerting, as inciting to voyeurism, as what we saw earlier on film. Stripped, ritually yet trivially, and not knowing where to turn, desperately trying to cover what is both his humiliation and his sexuality, Parsifal, now clad – captured, in more than one sense – in fresh underwear and the tightest of leather trousers, must fulfil his side of a bargain in which he does not know the stakes, indeed to which he can hardly be said to have consented in the first place. But is that not generally the case with bourgeois contracts? (Recall the runes of domination on Wotan’s spear, or the ’terms of employment’ in a hellish factory.) Parsifal, then, is reborn, in typically ‘religious fashion’, but it is sour, straightforwardly wrong. This is, after all, the ‘rose of Hell’, replete with serpent for Parsifal on film to model. The design of the black T-shirt he is eventually permitted to don doubles up as that for the headscarves of forced memories of Herzeleide. Such is the plan. In this struggle, part of which is the vain attempt of the older Parsifal to help his younger self, predestination must play its part, as always it must in narration if it is to be narration at all. 

Parsifal and Kundry

Both worlds, in any case intimately connected, come together in the third act, as they do in the work ‘itself’. In an intriguing twist, the ‘swan’ prisoner appears to come back to life, though again the question must be asked as to whether we should believe what we are told. We arguably have no choice, and that may be the problem. Rather as Christ might come down from the Cross in Gurnemanz’s narration, that is our current lot, shaped by memory and experience. In related fashion, we are reminded that performance, whatever ideological ritual-literalists may tell you, will always offer a dialectic between fidelity and infidelity. If not quite to the extent of the deeply faithful Herheim, there is also much, doubtless for many a surprising degree, that was faithful to stage direction. I cannot remember, for instance, the last time I saw an actual chalice raised on stage, yet here it i. Unless I was missing something – quite possible with so much going on, on different levels – Titurel is not seen onstage, though the recent tendency, contra Wagner, has been to render him visible.

Amfortas (Jordan Shanahan)

All this would be as naught without performers able to bring the vision to life and to contribute much of their own. Jonas Kaufmann sang the title role in 2021. It is difficult to think of an exponent – at least one who can sing it – more different vocally from Kaufmann than Vogt. Both, however, are excellent actors as well as singers, and Vogt’s compassionate retelling and participation, very much progenitor-to-Lohengrin, would surely have satisfied even his vocal detractors. Parsifal’s words – and notes – rang forth with admirable clarity and connection, their intermittent unworldliness not only a feature but a dramatically productive one. Anja Kampe’s Kundry, similarly engaged but in a very different way, was admirable too, adapting chameleon-like to changing circumstances whilst nonetheless remaining herself. Jordan Shanahan gave a rich-toned yet vulnerable, deeply human portrayal of Amfortas, ever founded in Wagner’s text. As Gurnemanz, Günther Groissböck was more active participant than often one sees and hears, but also perhaps more changed by the experience.

Kober’s musical direction likewise accentuated ‘fidelity’. It was not a reading to give rise to thoughts of ‘his’ Parsifal, as might, say, Thielemann’s or Rattle’s. There is room for both, and in reality there is a spectrum as in staging. At any rate, this gave the impression of releasing both the outstanding Vienna orchestra and Wagner’s score to do their dramatic work, alert to the latter’s melos and its demands in tandem with the staging, but also enabling them to arise. The depth of orchestral sound was a joy, though never a joy merely in itself; again, it always sounded dramatically founded. There were a few strange balances, in particular with respect to lower brass, though that may have been an oddity of the acoustic more than anything else. Choral singing was similarly outstanding throughout, a vital contributor to and participant in a drama that should – and here did – become more mysterious with every retelling.

In that, surely, Parsifal unites, whatever its heterodoxy, the human and the divine. As Janáček wrote above the score of his final drama, From the House of the Dead, ‘In every creature, a spark of God!’

Parsifal, Deutsche Oper, 8 March 2024

Amfortas – Jordan Shanahan
Titurel – Andrew Harris
Gurnemanz – Günther Groissböck
Parsifal – Klaus Florian Vogt
Kundry – Irene Roberts
Klingsor – Joachim Göltz
Knights of the Grail – Patrick Cook, Youngkwang Oh
Esquires – Sua Jo, Arianna Manganello, Kieran Carrel, Chance Jonas-O’Toole
Flowermaidens – Flurina Stucki, Sua Jo, Arianna Manganello, Hye-Young Moon, Mechot Marrero, Marie-Luise Dreßen
Voice from Above – Marie-Luise Dreßen

Director – Philipp Stölzl
Co-director – Mara Kurotschka
Set designs – Conrad Moritz Reinhardt, Philipp Stölzl
Costumes – Kathi Maurer
Lighting – Ulrich Niepel
Revival director – Silke Sense

Chorus, Men of the Extra Chorus, and Children’s Chorus of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin (chorus masters: Jeremy Bines and Christian Lindhorst)

Opern-Ballet, Statisterie, and Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin

Donald Runnicles (conductor)

PARSIFAL von Richard Wagner, Deutsche Oper Berlin, copyright.
Image: Matthias Baus

Memory plays all manner of tricks: major and minor. I could have sworn I had seen Philipp Stölzl’s Deutsche Oper Parsifal twice before this, distinctly recalling having revisited it. I actually have no record of having done so, and am reasonably sure I would. I was also more enthusiastic the first time I saw it, in 2014, than now, describing it – admittedly for the vocal performances as much as the production – as ‘a Parsifal demanding both to be seen and to be heard’. Now it seems to me that it fulfils its repertory role, but is in looking somewhat tired. What has happened in the meantime? The tempting answer would be Stefan Herheim’s Bayreuth production, which transformed experience and understanding for so many. I myself have thought of it as akin to Patrice Chéreau’s Ring; things can never be the same again. I still do, but in this case the chronology does not fit, Herheim having been seen for the last time in 2012. It may have had a role in raising expectation and achievement across the board. Ironically, a major production from the intervening years, Dmitiri Tcherniakov’s Parsifal for the house across town, has in retrospect a few points in common with Stölzl, perhaps more in terms of appearance than substance, yet it remained by some way the bolder experience. (Click here for a brief comparison of Herheim and Tcherniakov.) Maybe this just needs more time devoted to revival (a well-nigh insuperable problem with repertoire houses). Or perhaps all this talk of comparison is a little decadent, and we should simply concentrate on what lies in front of us. 

What, then, lay in front of us here? In broad terms, Stölzl’s concept, insofar as I understand it, presents Monsalvat as a Templar-like community that has not only become tired, but deadly in preservation of long since dead rituals. Fanatics keep alive certain external forms, albeit in the form of weird tableaux vivants, which tellingly freeze rather than develop. Control, as in the typical secular claims against ‘religion’, is all—of the self and others, bloody (self-)flagellation included. These doubtless just about keep things going, but whatever it may have been that animated the community in the first place, presumably in some sense the Grail or related to it, has long since vacated the premises. Klingsor’s anti-Monsalvat is not merely the same: the cave within clearly hosts a different cult. There is something disquietingly orientalist, if not nearly so blatant as Uwe-Eric Laufenberg’s Islamophobic farrago at Bayreuth, to it; that may, of course, be deliberate, in playing with our conceptions. There is, though, I think, a strong implication that they ultimately have more in common than separates them. And the way the Flowermaidens emerge from the stone, becoming something otherwise through minimal shedding of costumes and clever lighting, is a nice touch. 

Presumably the whole thing, though, is a delusion: anti-religion claiming its title, against Wagner, though in common with many who have admired him. Talk of renewal, let alone that extraordinary – almost always ignored or underestimated – third-act claim of taking Christ down from the Cross, is probably just mumbo-jumbo; it certainly seems to be a lie. When Parsifal returns, Amfortas impales himself on the spear: a way out for him, though not necessarily for those left behind. Perhaps, as I noted last time, Stölzl heeds John Deathridge’s warning against resolution in ‘high-minded kitsch’, for redemption is an alien concept, one that never arises. The problem for me was not so much the grim framing, as the danger that by now the production had become its own ritual, in danger of succumbing to something not a million miles away from what it claimed to portray. 

Image: Bettina Stöß

Donald Runnicles led a performance not so very different – as memory serves – from Axel Kober ten years ago, though probably still more secure. He and the splendid Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper (the chorus too) put not a foot wrong throughout. This was not the sort of performance one might characterise as a particular ‘reading’; Runnicles’s collegial brand of music-making is not about that. Instead, he drew on what is, by now, clearly deep knowledge and understanding of the score to present it as faithfully as he could, neither merely framing nor inciting the action, yet considerate of the competing demands that go towards performance of opera (even, or especially, one calling itself a Bühnenweihfestspiel). If there were times when I might have preferred the orchestra to take the lead more strongly, there is room for various approaches here. 

Runnicles’s musicianship unquestionably allowed the cast, entirely new from ten years ago, to shine. Klaus Florian Vogt’s voice is, to my ears, more suited to some aspects of Parsifal’s character than others. He comes across, like no other, as father of Lohengrin (whilst still tempting Nietzsche’s mischievous question: how did he manage that?) There were a beauty and clarity to line and verbal projection that are not readily to be gainsaid, though ultimately I missed a sense of development. (One might, I suppose, argue that that is less needed in this production than in many.) Günther Groissböck’s Gurnemanz intrigued, not so much because he looked younger than many, but because he acted younger, particularly in the first act, there being a creditable distinction between both portrayals. Here was a charismatic leader, not some old bore, with interesting implications for those who listened and followed, and the life of the community as a whole. Jordan Shanahan proved an unusually likeable Amfortas, although he certainly had us share his pain too. As Kundry and somewhat like Runnicles, Irene Roberts seemed more concerned to bring out the text than present a strong ‘reading’ of her own. This she did with great skill, as did the cast as a whole. What was the problem, then? Perhaps there was none after all, or rather it was mine.

Bayreuth Festival (2) - Parsifal, 15 August 2023

Festspielhaus

Amfortas - Derek Welton

Titurel - Tobias Kehrer

Gurnemanz - Georg Zeppenfeld

Parsifal - Andreas Schager

Klingsor - Jordan Shanahan

Kundry - Ekaterina Gubanova

Knights of the Grail - Siyabonga Maqungo, Jens-Erik Aasbø

Squires - Betsy Horne, Margaret Plummer, Jorge Rodriguez-Norton, Garrie Davislim

Flowermaidens - Evelin Novak, Camille Schnoor, Margaret Plummer, Julia Grüter, Betsy Horne, Marie Henriette Reinhold

Alto solo - Marie Henriette Reinhold

Jay Scheib (director)

Mimi Lien (designs)

Meentje Nielsen (costumes)

Rainer Casper (lighting)

Joshua Higgason (AR and video)

Marlene Schleicher (dramaturgy)

Bayreuth Festival Chorus (chorus director: Eberhard Friedrich)

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra

Pablo Heras-Casado (conductor)

To move from Dmitri Tcherniakov’s gripping Flying Dutchman to Jay Scheib’s new and much-trumpeted, Artificial Reality-enhanced Parsifal veered towards regression from the sublime to the ridiculous. I should state that I was not one of those with the spectacles necessary to see the ‘enhanced’ version, my short-sightedness being (just) too severe. But since most in the Festspielhaus audience did not have the glasses, it does not seem unreasonable to write about what I could see, whilst noticing access issues that surely require resolution.

I wish I could tell you what Scheib’s production is about. It certainly does not seem to be founded in knowledge of, or even interest in, Wagner and Parsifal. ‘When I think of the word “Bühnenweihfestspiel,’ Scheib tells us in the programme, ‘I think first of all about a celebration. We are opening a festival! Let’s get the party started!’ Leaving aside what is presumably an unintentional hommage to the former Labour MP Keith Vaz, it is difficult to know where to start. Perhaps with advice to look up the ‘weih’ part of the word in a dictionary, and thereafter to consider what ‘consecretion’ might entail. Or even just to acquaint oneself with the plot, let alone with Wagner’s writings. Good things can, of course, proceed from misunderstandings or misappropriations; the problem is that very little at all proceeds from this or from anything else.

What do we have, then? It looks somewhat like a computer game, I think, though I am hardlly the best person to know. That, I suspect, is the ‘aesthetic’, but I may be wrong. What action there is unfolds against some of the most hideous designs I have had the misfortune to see, accompanied by apparently equally meaningless activity and lack of activity. Strange outfits sported by some of the knights in the first act suggest a directorial attempt to tell us he too has done some drugs in his time. I was unsure for a while whether the peculiar shapes on them were intended to evoke bacteria - wounds of their own? - but Gurnemanz’s sudden acquisition of them on a garish, presumably sacerdotal cloak and equally sudden dispensing of them suggested not. The poor souls looked like refugees from a discontinued children’s television programme. Earlier, indeed in the first-act Prelude, Gurnemanz has sex with a woman, tastelessly magnified on live camera. Who she is I have no idea, but she returns to stand and then walk around in the third act, before embracing him at the close. 

Amfortas’s blood, not unreasonably, appears for a while to be a preoccupation, the wound rather monstrously magnified on camera during Gurnemanz’s first-act narration. Parsifal smashes the grail at the end, though with what import again I have no idea. Certain people walk around or wear slightly different clothes. There are two Kundrys, I think, one of whom silent, sometimes mirrors the action of the other and sometimes walks around in a circle. Others, above all Parsifal and Kundry in their great confrontation in the second act, seem entirely abandoned and have to fend for themselves. And the Barbie-meets-Benny Hill aesthetic of that act, sadly lacking the intellectual heft of either, is not an experience I should wish even on Mr Vaz. That Klingsor wears heels seems a peculiar, carelessly offensive translation of self-castration. To be brutally honest, though, it is difficult to care. So boring, I am sad to say, was this hapless production that it almost had me long for the prior nadir of Uwe Eric Laufenberg’s staging (2016-19), though at least it had none of Laufenberg’s Islamophobia. Illumination such as that offered by Stefan Herheim (2008-12) will always remain a rare experience, but surely a director should be able to do, or at least try to do, better than this.

Sadly, this made it difficult, at least for me, to care much about or even to attend to the musical performances. Pablo Heras-Casado’s conducting was generally fluent enough on the micro-level, but imparted little sense of a greater whole. String tone was sometimes strangely thin, though to his credit, Heras-Casado seemed largely to have the measure of the particular challenges presented by conducting in Bayreuth’s covered pit. The audience, though, was wildly enthusiastic. So too was it for most of the singers (with none of the incomprehensible booing heard the previous night). For me, insofar as I could tell beyond the production, they were more impressive than moving. Andreas Schager was his usual indefatigable self in the title role. We are lucky to have him and his seemingly boundless enthusiasm, although his voice is no longer so fresh as it was. Ekaterina Gubanova similarly gave much as Kundry; her attention to the equally exacting demands of words and music was noteworthy throughout. So too was Georg Zeppenfeld’s as Gurnemanz, though Heras-Casado’s lack of greater structural command did not assist the narrations. Derek Welton’s Amfortas was finely sung throughout, as were the choral contributions. A concert performance would, frankly, have enabled greater appreciation both of these performances and of Wagner’s drama.

Salzburg Festival (3) – VPO/Barenboim: Saint-Saëns and Wagner, 22 August 2022

Grosses Festspielhaus

Saint-Saëns: Samson et Dalila, op.47: Act II
Wagner: Parsifal: Act II

Elina Garanča (soprano)

Brandon Jovanovich (tenor)

Michael Volle (baritone)

Members of the Young Singers Project

Concert Association of the Vienna State Opera Chorus (chorus director: Jörn Hinnerk Andresen)

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

This was, alas, very much a concert of two halves, disturbingly so. For reasons that I hope will be obvious, I shall concentrate on what was best; there is neither critical nor broader human need to hammer home the shortcomings.

Programming was unusual, yet revealing: an excellent case of using a cast to think what might conceptually as well as musically be possible. Consider what these two acts, premiered within five years of one another, have in common or in meaningful contrast, and the answer is quite a lot. Samson et Dalila is not, I think, a theological work; formal affinities to oratorio notwithstanding, it treats with religion, as do many nineteenth-century operas, as an engine of drama and colour. Parsifal most certainly is a theological work; we should probably not get too hung up on whether to call it an opera at all, but its dissociation from common operatic practice is undeniable, even extreme. Both acts, however, deal with seduction of a quasi-consecrated hero with a religious (and political) mission, by an exotic temptress with whom, at least in part, it is difficult not to feel some degree of sympathy. Indeed, as John Snelson remarks in his programme note, hearing these two acts divorced from their predecessors (however much we may still bear them in mind) enables us to observe the action more ‘from the perspective of the women’, even arguably intensifying ‘the hypnotic force they exert as they propel the dramas to contrasting climaxes’. Saint-Saëns’s ambiguous musical debt to Wagner was certainly in evidence here too, perhaps unsurprisingly given the conductor was Daniel Barenboim.

What was surprising was that Saint-Saëns fared so much better overall than Wagner. The initial orchestral sound we heard from the Vienna Philharmonic was, to my ears, perfect in balance, colour, and harmonic grounding, its darkness seemingly transposed from Siegfried’s forest. It was inviting, intensely so, with promise—not least of danger. On entry, Elina Garanča could likewise hardly have been improved upon: flawless in delivery, dignified and rich of tone, her (Dalila’s) made mind up, her lines despatched with duly operatic grandeur, even hauteur. The orchestra spoke and commented upon the action, much as in Wagner, though rightly also with reference to a long French history of orchestral recitative dating back at least to Rameau. There was certainly more than a little Berlioz to be heard; I soon found myself wishing for a Troyens from these forces, whilst knowing in my heart of hearts that it was already too late. Barenboim’s ear for motivic unity extended over sections of the score, but also across the entire act, imparting a unity necessary yet sadly all too rare in this repertoire. Michael Volle made for a commanding High Priest of Dagon, his typical sensitivity to words and music married to extraordinary dynamic and colouristic range. Brandon Jovanovich, our Siegmund-on-Seine, was as ardent a Samson as one could have imagined, playing nonetheless on a fine ambiguity between hero unmediated and a character compelled (or choosing) to play that role. The climactic duet between Samson and Dalila was, quite simply, a privilege to see (such acting too!) and hear, all the while knowing Dalila ultimately was in control.

The Parsifal Prelude was more deliberate, at its best evincing the spirit of a Klemperer, certainly oozing Tristan-esque malevolence. I listened for as long as I could in that vein and, to be fair, there was much in the orchestral cauldron still to admire, at least in the first scene or two. The first, orchestral intimation of Klingsor’s magic garden, for instance, appeared before our ears’ eyes with all the freshness of continually renewed experience. Whether that were the VPO’s or Barenboim’s, however, soon became a moot point. Samson et Dalila certainly does not play itself; the talk I heard from some about the conductor’s disengagement at this stage was just that, talk. It was, sadly, shown all the more to be so by much of what we heard of Parsifal, in which a disaffected orchestra at times seemed more or less to have given up, kept together (just about) only by the extraordinary commitment of three outstanding soloists. One made what one could of it; at least I did. Concentrating on the poem, I heard all the more in this context just how much of Wagner’s language is steeped in Lutheran theology. So many of the words could have stepped straight out of Bach; in a sense, they had. The luminosity of the orchestral grail, here with a distinctly Viennese tinge, beguiled as ever. Ultimately, though, this was difficult to listen to, as well as to watch.

Barenboim does not need critics, even those who are long-term admirers, to tell him what to do. I hope, though, that those close to him will counsel caution, for his recovery is clearly far from complete. If, for now, that entails fewer, shorter concerts, then for his sake I hope he will consider that path.

 

Wagner games

 Was Parsifal robbed?

Wagner and Gobineau

(Article, ‘Gobineau, (Joseph) Arthur, Comte de,’ first published in The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia, ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013))

Gobineau, (Joseph) Arthur, Comte de (b. Ville d’Avray, 14 July 1816; d. Turin, 13 Oct. 1882), novelist, diplomat, essayist, ethnologist. Protégé of Alexis de Tocqueville, who as Foreign Minister appointed Gobineau his Cabinet Head. Gobineau’s diplomatic career took in Germany, Persia, Brazil, and Sweden. In Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (The Inequality of Human Races, 1853-5), Gobineau made racial distinction – white (intelligent, courageous), black (sensual, brutal), and yellow (materialistic, feeble) – history’s guiding principle. The white race, whether Germanic, ancient Greek, or Indo-European (“Aryan”), enabled civilization. Apparent exceptions, such as China, were ascribed to white influence. Civilization partly depended upon miscegenation, interracial breeding, yet in that dilution lay its downfall. Gobineau was not anti-Semitic; he admired the effort of “white” Jews through Mosaic Law to maintain their “purity.” Tocqueville protested that Gobineau’s argument was probably wrong and certainly pernicious.

Palazzo Vendramin, Venice, 1870, photograph by Carlo Noya

The Wagners briefly met Gobineau in Rome in 1876. There is neither evidence nor likelihood that Wagner read Gobineau or learned of his ideas until after their 1880 meeting in Venice; Wagner makes no mention of Gobineau’s theories before 1880, nor does Cosima in her diaries. Thus, despite the claims of writers such as Robert Gutman (Richard Wagner: The Man, The Mind, and his Music, ch. 13), the possibility of influence upon Parsifal, whose poem was essentially completed in 1877, its “orchestral sketch” in 1879, tends towards zero. Gobineau visited Wahnfried in 1881 (when Wagner presented his collected writings to “the Count”) and in 1882.

“Scientific” fatalism might appeal to Wagner as Schopenhauer’s disciple, though not as revolutionary. Gobineau presented not a political program, but an alleged scientific truth, echoing the Enlightenment project of discerning fundamental historical laws, akin to those of Newton – or, as later racists would prefer, Darwin. Gobineau believed in human degeneration; Wagner varied. Whereas Gobineau’s driving force was miscegenation, Wagner, in a late echo of Feuerbach, pointed to dietary change. Though Wagner seems to have come to attribute some importance to miscegenation, he introduced a gendered element and retained the prospect of regeneration or redemption through art and religion. Thus an 1881 Brown Book entry, possibly intended in part to correct Gobineau’s non-racial essay, La Renaissance: “In the mingling of races, the blood of the nobler males is ruined by the baser feminine element: the masculine element suffers, character founders, whilst the women gain as much as to take the men’s place. (Renaissance). The feminine thus remains owing deliverance: here art – as there in religion; the immaculate Virgin gives birth to the Savior.” (BB/E, 23 Oct 1881). Gobineau denied universality and founded morality upon ontology: Aryan deeds were good because they were performed by Aryans. Wagner, however, desired universal redemption, Jews included; morality should transform ontology.

Yet, as with Schopenhauer, Wagner found “confirmation” of previously held views, and “corrected” instances in which both writers erred. Cosima describes Wagner, during Gobineau’s 1881 visit, as “downright explosive in favor of Christian theories in contrast to racial ones” (Cosima Wagner's Diaries, 3 June 1881). Correspondence demonstrates mutual respect but both men standing their intellectual ground. Despite some writers’ claims, Gobineau’s influence on Wagner was minimal, differences more revealing than correspondences. However, the pan-Germanist Ludwig Schemann and other members of the Bayreuth Circle founded a Gobineau Association in 1894, transforming Gobineau’s pessimism into a racial and political opposition between Aryan and Jew. Cosima dissociated herself and the Festival.

Eugène, Eric (ed.), Richard et Cosima Wagner/Arthur Gobineau: Correspondance 1880-1882 (Saint-Genouph: Nizet, 2000).

Schemann, Ludwig, Gobineau. Eine Biographie, 2 vols. (Strasbourg: Triibner, 1913-16).

Wagner and German History

(Article on 'German History' first published in The Cambridge Wagner Encylopedia, ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013))

1. Napoleon, France, and the Wars of Liberation
2. Saxony and Germany
3. Wagner, Bismarck, and German unification
4. Wagner’s Writings on German History
5. Wagner and German History after 1883



As with many of Wagner’s ideas, it is all too easy to present, selectively or unwittingly, an assemblage of quotations “proving” a certain line, whereas one might just as readily demonstrate the contrary. Was Wagner “nationalist” or “universalist”? Does he properly belong to “the Right” or to “the Left”? The answer has often been formulated beforehand in essentialist terms, dependent on whether one wishes to convict a monster or absolve a genius. The twentieth-century “German catastrophe” (Friedrich Meinecke) looms ominously over such decisions, not just in sensationalist popular treatments, but in the work of Theodor Adorno – just as in more general controversies concerning nineteenth-century German history, above all the claim of a Sonderweg, or “special [German historical] path,” at its most extreme, viewing the Second Reich merely as a prelude to the Third. Unsurprisingly, Wagner’s attitudes towards a German nation, which, for most of his life, lacked concrete political unity except in the past, proved mixed, complex, and subject to development. However, one thread running through his ideas remained historical: the state of the German nation was in many respects to be attributed towards its particular history, which remained very much an ongoing tale, awaiting resolution.


1. Napoleon, France, and the Wars of Liberation

Battle of Leipzig: Johann Nepomuk Hoechle and Franz Wolf  (1835)

Thomas Nipperdey opened his history of nineteenth-century Germany with the words, “In the beginning was Napoleon.” They might also hold the secret to Wagner’s history of nineteenth-century Germany. 1813 was the year of the Battle of Leipzig and also the year of Wagner’s birth in Leipzig. Napoleon’s defeat, following his retreat from Russia, hastened the collapse of the First Empire, and pushed back French forces from German soil. Those German states allied to France now joined the opposing coalition. The legend of the Wars of Liberation, in which free Germans rather than their princes vanquished the French foe, began to be told and re-told, memorialized in popular rather than official monuments across a “nation,” a concept given new life by the French Revolution, still ruled over by those compromised princes. One can trace back Franco-German enmity as far back as one wishes, but the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48) and subsequent French political and cultural hegemony cast lengthy shadows. Eighteenth-century princes might imitate Versailles, but national aspirations pointed away from civilized court and salon to a truer, more honest culture, grounded, for instance, in the forests of the Brothers Grimm – or that from which untainted Siegfried emerges.

“Germany” often had truer existence as an opposing cultural force to France than as a political entity, not least during the 1840 Rhine crisis. Wagner’s miserable, homesick sojourn in Paris (1839-42) sharpened that tendency in his case. If meretricious entertainment (Meyerbeer) were French, then true art might be German. A performance of the German Romantic opera, Weber’s Der Freischütz, made a huge impression at this time: “It seems to be the poem of those Bohemian Woods themselves” (SSD 1:212).

2. Saxony and Germany

Crucial to understanding Wagner, though often overlooked, are his birth and childhood in the Saxon cities of Leipzig and Dresden. Transformed by Napoleon from an electorate into a useful allied kingdom in 1806, Saxony had the misfortune to emerge from the Battle of Leipzig on the losing side. Most Saxon troops defected to the allied forces; King Frederick Augustus I was imprisoned; the state itself seemed imperiled, Saxony proving the great loser from the German states at the 1814-15 Congress of Vienna. Though Prussia failed to absorb her entirely, the remnant of the Wettin kingdom held but three-quarters of the territory of the new Prussian province of Saxony.

Congress of Vienna: August Friedrich Andreas Campe

As Germans, looking askance at recent French cultural and political domination, increasingly wished for some form of national unification, questions arose: in what form and under whose aegis? A German Confederation formed part of the post-war settlement. Would this safeguard individual states’ rights, or furnish a battleground upon which Austria and Prussia would fight for supremacy? Would there be popular unification founded upon a national movement, as desired by many of the 1848-9 revolutionaries, Wagner included, or a traditional power-political aggrandizement by one or both of the two great German powers? And where would this leave other German states, members of the so-called “third Germany,” such as Saxony and Bavaria? Nineteenth-century history did not lead inevitably to Bismarck’s German Empire which, by excluding Austria, divided rather than unified the German nation. Until the Battle of Königgrätz (1866), there was everything to play for, and the French enemy, now under Napoleon III, remained to be defeated.


When Wagner, then, came to advise Ludwig II, earlier experience informed his judgment. Wagner remained at best ambivalent concerning the other German princes, yet suspicion of Prussia, a “barracks state” for many other Germans, always formed a crucial part of his outlook. Bismarck secretly made indirect contact with Wagner, attempting unsuccessfully to have him secure Bavaria’s neutrality between Prussia and Austria (Salmi, 197-99). The contrast, however exaggerated, between Prussian militarism and other states’ – Bavarian, Saxon, etc. – cultural achievement was a mainstay of discourse within those states. “Nationalism” involved many competing strands.


Moreover, though one does not necessarily associate Wagner later in life with Saxony, we find him in Leipzig, publicly and otherwise, more often than we might suspect. Nietzsche wrote to his friend, Erwin Rohde, of attempts to effect a first encounter: Wagner was staying with relatives in Leipzig, unbeknown to the press. When they met, Nietzsche was enchanted by Wagner’s reading from Mein Leben a scene from his Leipzig student days and observed, not for the last time, Wagner’s fondness for the local dialect (Letter of 9 Nov. 1868).


3. Wagner, Bismarck, and German unification

Saxon and Prussian troops in the Dresden Neumarkt, Saxon uprising 1849 (painter unknown)

Wagner and Bismarck were both Germans; neither would have denied that, nor wished to do so. However, particular and particularist identities – both Protestant, but in many respects opposed – counted too. Wagner, on account of his role in the Dresden uprising, was barred for eleven years even from entering the German Confederation. It would take longer still before he would be permitted to return to Saxony. The grudging nature of the Saxon king’s initial concession was mirrored in Wagner’s claim – irrespective of whether one believes him – that he felt no emotion upon his return to German soil (12 August 1860). During exile, Wagner had been a German outcast, indeed outlaw, just like Die Walküre’s revolutionary Siegmund: “I was always outlawed.”

When German unification, such as it was, came from above, through Prussian aggrandizement, it is therefore unsurprising that Wagner’s initial approbation – again, one should not neglect the power of anti-French sentiment in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1, witnessed in Eine Kapitulation – soon turned sour. Admiration for the Chancellor’s achievement – “an honest Prussian who succeeded in carrying out a diplomatic coup: ‘At that time he still knew nothing about the German swindle, he was a complete Prussian’.” – is more than balanced a fortnight later by: “That is why I curse Bismarck – for dealing with all these very important problems like a Pomeranian Junker.” “Curse” was obliterated by an unknown hand and replaced by “deplore,” testimony to family sensitivities concerning Wagnerian German identity (CWD, 31 Oct. 1882 and 14 Nov. 1882). Karl Marx could not have been further from the truth, political as well as aesthetic, when answering, at the time of the opening Bayreuth Festival, the persistent question, “What do you think of Wagner?” with the dismissal: highly characteristic of the “New German-Prussian empire-musicians” (Letter to Jenny Marx, August/September 1876).

4. Wagner’s Writings on German History

Wagner’s writings expressed such ambivalence and ambiguities. Die deutsche Oper (1834), his first published piece, expresses the wish that German opera were more open to French and Italian influences. However, during his “revolutionary” period, it becomes clear that the universal artwork of the future will transcend mere national style not so much through synthesis as by development of largely Teutonic art. An intriguing and often confusing companion to the aesthetically-inclined essays is Die Wibelungen. A conflation of history and myth presents correspondences between, for instance, Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and Siegfried, not only as historical-mythological figures but as revolutionary inspirations. It is hoped that these German heroes, asleep in the Kyffhäuser Mountains, might return, though an original (1848) exhortation for such an awakening was omitted in a subsequent published version, indicative perhaps of Wagner’s disillusionment concerning national revolution. Whoever Barbarossa and Siegfried may have been, they were not Prussians.

Subsequent interest in German history tended, in the spirit of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, to extol German art at the expense of German politics. A collection of essays written for Ludwig II was published in 1867, its title, Deutsche Kunst und deutsche Politik, reflecting this shift, likewise the contemporary essay, Was ist deutsch? (unpublished until 1878) asking, “what is German?” Influence and regard of Constantin Frantz are marked. Just as Hans Sachs proclaims that holy German art will endure no matter what political calamity might befall the Holy Roman Empire, so Wagner now chooses the forlornly French-periwigged Bach as epitome of the German spirit, his music triumphing despite both his wretched, unrecognized existence as choirmaster and organist, and Germany’s catastrophic political fortunes. (Lutheran-Bachian chorales loom large in the Meistersinger score, likewise neo-Bachian counterpoint.) Even when the Germans subsequently attempted democracy and revolution, they merely aped the French; German achievement lay with Goethe and Schiller. Enemies within were as much to blame as those without; what remained of the German spirit was imperiled by an alliterative trinity of J’s: jurists, Junkers, and Jews, elsewhere joined by Jesuits and journalists (SSD 10:61).





5. Wagner and German History after 1883


Subsequent generations have often striven to dissolve these ambiguities, or simply failed to notice them. National Socialism provides perhaps the most flagrant example, but it is far from alone. When Thomas Mann challenged hardening nationalist orthodoxy by presenting a more interesting, complex Wagner in a 1933 address, Leiden und Größe Richard Wagners (“Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner”), he was rebuked in an indignant “Protest by the Richard Wagner City Munich,” which spoke on behalf of a “national restoration of Germany … [having] taken on definite form.” Though signatories, including Richard Strauss, Hans Knappertsbusch, and Hans Pfitzner, were not all National Socialists, this was one example of an effort to dissolve the ambiguities sketched above, or a failure to notice them. Such elision of Wagner with Nazi goals has continued to haunt Wagner scholarship and reception into the twenty-first century. The anti-Reich Wagner of Was ist deutsch?, let alone more universalist writings, would surely have objected.





However, performance may herald a degree of hope. Some stage directors, such as Stefan Herheim and Peter Konwitschny – notably both musicians themselves, able to confront Wagner’s dramas musically – have grappled more seriously with the multi-faceted view of German history evinced by Wagner and his role within it. Exemplary in this respect was Herheim’s Parsifal at Bayreuth, simultaneously re-telling Wagner’s story of Parsifal and the work’s reception story. Electrifying was the unfurling of swastikas, long absent from the Festival, as Weimar-artiste Klingsor cast his spear, but still more of a challenge to New Bayreuth orthodoxy was the reproduction on stage in the third act of Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner’s 1951 claim that politics had no place in such a festival. German history always was more interesting than that, as Herheim’s contradiction bravely demonstrated.



Thomas Mann, “Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner,” in Essays of Three Decades, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Knopf, 1976): 307-71.
Friedrich Meinecke, The German Catastrophe: Reflections and Recollections, trans. Sidney B. Fay (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1950).
Friedrich Nietzsche, Selected Letters,  trans. and ed. Christopher Middleton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969)
Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 3 vols., vol. 1, “1800-1866: Bürgerwelt und starker Staat” (Munich: Beck, 1998).
“Protest der Richard-Wagner-Stadt München,” Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, 16/17 April 1933, repr. and trans. in Sven Friedrich, “Ambivalenz der Leidenschaft – Thomas Mann und Richard Wagner. Zum 125. Geburtstag Thomas Manns,” in: Programmhefte der Bayreuther Festspiele (2000).
Hannu Salmi, Die schriftstellerische und politische Tätigkeit Richard Wagners (Turku: Turun yliposito, 1993).
Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire, 1871-1918, trans. Kim Traynor (Oxford, Berg: 1997).