Berlin Festtage (2) - Parsifal, Staatsoper Berlin, 8 April 2017

Klingsor (Tómas Tómasson) and the Flowermaidens
Images: Ruth Walz

Schiller Theater

Amfortas – Lauri Vasar

Gurnemanz – René Pape

Parsifal – Andreas Schager

Klingsor – Tómas Tómasson

Kundry – Anna Larsson

Titurel – Matthias Hölle

Squires – Sónia Grané, Natalia Skrycka, Florian Hoffmann, Michael Porter

First Knight of the Grail – Michael Smallwood

Second Knight of the Grail – Dominic Barberi

Flowermaidens – Katerina Tretyakova, Adriane Queiroz, Anja Schlosser, Sónia Gráne, Narine Yeghiyan, Natalia Skrycka

Voice from Above – Natalia Skrycka

 

Dmitri Tcherniakov (director, set designs)

Elena Zaytseva (costumes)

Gleb Filshtinsky (lighting)

Jens Schroth (dramaturgy)

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus master: Martin Wright)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

 

With this, my third visit to Dmitri Tcherniakov’s Parsifal, I have now seen the production as many times as I did that of Stefan Herheim at Bayreuth. I shall spare you the ritual Herheim encomium on this occasion; anyone interested may seek out either my earlier reviews (here, here, and here), or the chapter I have devoted to the staging in my book, After Wagner. Suffice it to say that, developing as it has each year, again like Herheim’s staging, Tcherniakov’s production is now thoroughly established as one of the most thought-provoking, deeply troubling stagings since Herheim’s breathed its last in 2012. (Again, should anyone be interested, I shall have an article in the July issue of The Wagner Journal, looking at both stagings and their relationship to psychoanalysis.) It is just what musical drama should be, and just what clueless reactionaries loathe – because, like all great drama, it points the finger at them. If you want somehow to feel better about yourself, then Parsifal and Wagner are certainly not for you, any more than Sophocles, Shakespeare, or Mozart are. If, however, you want to begin to understand why you should not feel so good about yourself, here you are.

 

For at the heart of Tcherniakov’s staging, it seems to me, perhaps increasingly so, is the Freudian, indeed Nietzschean insight (not just theirs, by any means) that human existence is founded upon a lie. The first chapter of Beyond Good and Evil opens with the challenge: ‘The will to truth, which misdirects us toward many adventures, that fabled truthfulness, before which all philosophers hitherto have paid obeisance … why not rather untruth? … Who is Oedipus here? Who the Sphinx?’ From such perspectivism (back) to (the birth or death of) tragedy is, in a way, a splendidly anti-Nietzschean journey, especially when it involves the Wagner drama Nietzsche affected above all to hate. Here, nevertheless, it is – and it is perhaps not idle to note here the Russian –Mussorgskian (Khovanschina) and Dostoevskian – ‘look’ to Tcherniakov’s designs and direction for a Monsalvat community of what we might well call Old Believers. (But do they, fundamentally, believe? Why should we take them at their word?) Nihilism needs to be fought against, but how, and how could such battle succeed? Is the only conclusion itself nihilistic? No wonder the world of Dostoevsky seems hinted at – although it is rightly left to us to do much of that thinking; Nietzsche’s perspectivism is incorporated rather than denied (aufgehoben, if you will).

 

Titurel increasingly seems to me one of the most important keys to the work; he certainly is to the staging. Sung here by Matthias Hölle, there is little doubt that he is continuing to run the show. Indeed, as part of the ritual, whatever that ritual may be, he puts himself in his coffin, to emerge again once ‘it’ is over. Amfortas, whilst he can hardly be ignored in any production, seems perhaps still more central to the first and third acts than often he is. The identification with and perversion of traditional images of Christ – tradition is a dangerous, if necessary thing – comes across more strongly than ever on this occasion. He is presented as an object for us to behold, to admire, whether we like it or no; draining of blood for the ritual from his own side harrows, yet we cannot look away. There is, indeed, perhaps greater emphasis on the history of this strange community than in previous years. The slide show in which Gurnemanz educates his charges with images past – recollections, actual or false, of Wagner’s own Siena Cathedral taking pride of place – makes its point especially clearly. Whatever it is that is going on, whatever it is that is taking its inspiration and its justification from this alleged history, is losing its power to convince. Lies do that, although that does not stop us telling them, believing them.

 

The shock of the second act naturally registered most strongly of all when new in 2015. What we see when the curtain rises seems entirely new, although we come to realise that its actual framework remains from the first act; it has, however, almost literally been whitewashed. Presentation of Klingsor as an almost stereotypical tabloid image of a paedophile – one can almost see the chasing headline ‘MONSTER!’ – replete with repellent comb-over, surrounding himself with Flowermaidens as little girls in flowery dresses (some of them with dolls, performing the same role in miniature) continues to provide a discomfiting way in to the exploration of Parsifal’s sexuality that lies at the very heart of this act. Klingsor’s overt wandering of hands when he sits himself next to Kundry and her revulsion remind us there is nothing voluntary about this alliance, and, more generally, that abuse breeds abuse. So when Kundry makes Parsifal remember (or invent?) his past, the abusive lineage is extended further. (‘Who is Oedipus here? Who the Sphinx?’) The dumb show of recollection in which his mother walks in on his first tentative steps with a girl instils greater trauma than previously: upon Parsifal, visibly shaking for much of what follows (brilliantly acted by Andreas Schager), but also seemingly upon Kundry, whose production from her sinister bag of tricks of a white shirt, bloodied from a wound like that of Amfortas (perhaps it actually is from his wound?) provides a more overt connection with the business of the outer acts than we have previously seen. Parsifal was not the only one to be shaken by what he experienced; I was too. No wonder he drives the spear through Kingsor at the close of that act. The trauma of male adolescent sexuality is perhaps less often treated with in opera than one might expect. Tcherniakov makes a huge step in redressing that imbalance.

Parsifal (Andreas Schager) and the Flowermaidens

 

Memory plays tricks – as we see on stage. It is therefore perhaps unwise to attempt extended comparisons between different incarnations of staging and performance. Certainly Daniel Barenboim’s conducting and the playing of the Staatskapelle Berlin would have little to fear from such comparisons. Suffice it to say that this great orchestra’s immersion in Wagner’s music continues to reward. Here, it was the darkness of sound at the darkest of Wagner’s moments that perhaps made the greatest impression upon me, the prelude to the third act a case in point, still more so the continued development of its material throughout the act. Lower strings told one so much of what one needed to know, even if one were somehow managing to ignore, or to misunderstand, what was going on onstage. Barenboim’s ideal combination of structural command and dynamic impetus underlay everything we heard. Revealing encounters between stage action and pit action (Wagner’s fabled orchestral Greek Chorus) were many; that between the rotational cycles (see Warren Darcy’s chapter, ‘“Die Zeit ist da”: Rotational Form and Hexatonic Magic in Act 2, Scene 1, in William Kinderman and Katherine Syer (ed.), A Companion to Wagner’s ‘Parsifal’) and Klingsor’s creepy, childish self-rotation centre-stage is but one instance. The stage listens to the pit, and vice versa.

 

So too, of course, is that the case when it comes to our cast of singers and outstanding chorus (and extras too). Schager’s portrayal of the title role once again offered a near-ideal sound; he is unquestionably the Heldentenor of our age. His acting skills, as previously mentioned, are almost as crucial, especially his ability to evoke all manner of visual adolescent awkwardness. Anna Larsson’s Kundry offered something intriguingly new when we saw her too caught in the headlights of her own (well, ultimately Klingsor’s) trap in the final quarter of an hour or so of the second act. Otherwise, she sometimes seemed a little less settled, less compelling in the role than her predecessors, although her vocal tone often proved a considerable pleasure in itself. Lauri Vasar’s Amfortas was another new assumption. I found it quite spellbinding: as rich and/or as agonised of tone as need be, in perfect, often complex, relation to what we saw onstage. His way with words was equally impressive. When speaking of richness of tone, one can hardly fail to think of René Pape, whose reprisal of Gurnemanz continued to offer the excellence this production demands (and almost always receives). His almost slow-motion stabbing of Kundry gives the lie to claims that his musico-dramatic gifts are only, or even mostly, vocal. Tómas Tómasson has made this Klingsor his own – and continues to do so: of the outstanding performances to be seen and heard here, his is far from the least. Smaller parts were all well taken, often outstandingly so. This is a Parsifal that will not let go.

Berlin Festtage (2) - Parsifal, Staatsoper Berlin, 25 March 2016

Images from 2015 premiere: Ruth Walz
Titurel (Matthias Hölle), Amfortas (Wolfgang Koch) and ensemble

Schiller Theater

Amfortas – Wolfgang Koch

Gurnemanz – René Pape
Parsifal – Andreas Schager
Klingsor – Tómas Tómasson
Kundry – Waltraud Meier
Titurel – Matthias Hölle
Squires – Sónia Grané, Natalia Skrycka, Michael Porter, Roman Payer
First Knight of the Grail – Paul O’Neill
Second Knight of the Grail – Dominic Barberi
Flowermaidens – Julia Novikova, Adriane Queiroz, Anja Schlosser, Sónia Gráne, Narine Yeghiyan, Natalia Skrycka
Voice from Above – Natalia Skrycka

Dmitri Tcherniakov (director, set designs)

Elena Zaysteva (costumes)
Gleb Filshtinsky (lighting)
Jens Schroth (dramaturgy)

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus master: Martin Wright)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

 

This was, most likely, the best Parsifal I have ever heard. Perhaps it was not quite the best I have seen, but it was not so very far off. Stefan Herheim’s Bayreuth production remains – well, its unanswerable self, or rather its self which permits of so many questions and answers that it continues to develop in the mind long after it was last seen in 2012. Dmitri Tcherniakov’s staging is a masterpiece, too: very different, of course, as it should be. Indeed, of the post-Herheim stagings I have seen, it is unquestionably the greatest. Returning to it, following its 2015 premiere, Tcherniakov has, in good Werkstatt Bayreuth fashion, made some changes. I am not convinced that they are all for the better, but then nor was I with Herheim. They nevertheless keep one on one’s toes, or keep one’s eyes on whatever they should be on, and forestall any disastrous lapse into ritualism.

Not, of course, that the audience by and large noticed. The preposterous prohibition on applause was still being enforced by those who may know some Wagner but understand nothing of him. Protecting a ritual which has long lost its justification, if ever it had one; mindless veneration of a sinister cult: yes, look around you and see our present-day guardians of the Grail. One does not even have to have a developmental view of an artwork to appreciate the utter folly of treating the first act as a Christian rite. One simply has to listen to the words. What Wagner presents is heretical in the extreme, as much a Feuerbachian inversion, even a black mass, as anything else. And it is a representation, a dramatisation, not the thing itself. Is that so difficult for someone sitting in a theatre to understand? Do people attending a performance of Don Giovanni think the singer playing the Commendatore has really just been murdered? Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren, this is not the St Matthew Passion, for which there are perfectly good reasons to behave quite differently; you are not part of a congregation. By all means, feel no need to applaud; that is your prerogative. However, you have no right to enforce your uncomprehending choice upon others; even Bayreuth has given up on that. If you doubt me, read The Master himself: his Religion und Kunst.

 

The great irony is, of course, that a few moments’ attention to Tcherniakov’s staging would have told them the same too. Here we have a religious community of a decidedly Russian nature: a community of Old Believers, possibly. Khovanschina certainly comes to mind. Yet it is clearly a sham. To us, to the leaders, perhaps to those participating; that latter point is unclear, productively so. But Titurel’s ritualistic staging of his own death in the first act and re-emergence from the coffin once ‘it’ is all over stands at the very heart of the drama. He is a sinister, charismatic dictator: the cult leader we all know and fear. Moreover, his sadism in insisting, for whatever reasons, that his son, Amfortas go through what he must time and time again, chills to the bone. The identification between Father and Son of the (un-)Holy Trinity is clear, not least through Amfortas’s Christ-like stance. Where Wagner’s Third Act makes the still extraordinary claim that it is necessary to prevent Christ from ascending to the Cross in the first place, here we see the consequences either of that failure to prevent – perhaps, or, as we shall find out, chez Tcherniakov, perhaps not, to be reversed – or of a descent into meaningless from something that perhaps once was achieved. The child, even when grown adult, is the victim. For Hegel and his followers, amongst whom we should certainly count Wagner, the agony of the god-man on the Cross was a paradigmatic case in every sense. As with most great productions, we find, dialectically, fidelity in infidelity: perhaps all the more so experiencing the work on Good Friday.

 

Parsifal (Andreas Schager) and Flowermaidens

Freud is, of course, never far away in Parsifal; nor is he here. That abuse is paralleled, echoed, even prefigured in the extraordinary Second Act. Where Tcherniakov’s sets had previously offered the backdrop for Gurnemanz’s slide-show of past Parsifal glories, Wagner’s own inspirations coming back to life (possibly deceptively, not unlike a visual game of Call my Bluff), now they seem literally to have been whitewashed, as the nightmare of child abuse is re-enacted and intensified. Kundry, who has a past not only with Amfortas, not only with the others mentioned when Klingsor summons her, but also, most intriguingly and frighteningly, with Gurnemanz too, brings Parsifal to the realisation that he had no choice but to kill his mother. In the show enacted before him and us, the girl we see – sister or girl-next-door? – arouses him, he touches her, and then Herzeleide walks in. The girl having been struck by his mother and banished, he tries it again with her. Does he know what he is doing when touching her breasts? Herzeleide certainly does, and so she must die. Orchestrating the show is, of course, Klingsor, whose paedophilia and exploitation of paedophilia are shockingly clear – perhaps shockingly too from our instant reaction to his stereotypical ‘weirdo from around the corner’ costume. Is our initial rush to judgement part of the problem? Perhaps; perhaps not. Flowermaidens with dolls, themselves dolls, initially having been the objects of potential rescue by our have-a-go hero, Parsifal, yet casually forgotten still more quickly, perhaps, than Herzeleide had been, Kundry was always going to have to take centre-stage with her bag of tricks, clutched close to her during the preceding act. I am not quite sure that the more conventional method of seduction on offer this time around was so successful, Kundry, as so often, shedding her outer layer; that coat having been left on all the time in 2015, it is now shed to reveal a blue dress. Startling yes, unlike everything else, but perhaps more of a tradition that Tcherniakov had initially seemed willing to resist.

 

Not to worry: much remains to provoke, not least the offstage kiss. What happened? We shall never know. It traumatises, though, damaging yet another human life, just as the panoply of events, ‘real’ and ‘remembered’ has been doing during both acts – and will continue to do so in the third. That, I think, might be the reason for the relative lack of ‘drama’ in that final act. What might be taken as running out steam is part of the point. It lulls us into a false sense of security, only to be cruelly woken up by Amfortas’s searching the coffin for the missing Titurel, and finally for Gurnemanz’s closing murder of Kundry. Whatever it is that has been going on has led, once again, to the most extreme of measures; Parsifal might be doing the right thing in carrying her away, but is he as clueless as he was before, whatever the claims of durch Mitleid wissend? Kundry now, unlike 2015, appears already to be dying, before Gurnemanz reaches her. Has she tricked him, tricked us; has she actually found agency through premature death? Or does that not just return us to Wagner’s highly problematic insistence upon female sacrifice? That I found an intriguing addition to the production; I was less clear why she does not take the doll out of her bag again in this act. I need to see it again, I think: just as well it is programmed for Holy Week, 2017.

None of that would make so searing an impact, of course, without outstanding performances from all concerned. Daniel Barenboim’s conducting of the superlative Staatskapelle Berlin confirmed that he is surely the greatest Wagner conductor alive, or at least at work. (I think we can sadly presume that we shall hear no more Wagner from Bernard Haitink, although we can hope to hear much else, in the concert hall.) Barenboim’s command of line was here beyond reproach, but never at the expense of drama, of ‘deeds of music made visible’ – or here, in a further dialectical twist, made once again audible. It is his near-Furtwänglerian ability to combine so many musico-dramatic imperatives that most impresses, or rather that one hardly notices, so ‘right’ does it seem. And so ‘right’ does this great orchestra sound, its dark German strings guardians, or better developers, of tradition. They know, and so do we, that Mahler, Schoenberg, Boulez, et al., have extended our ears; they know, and so do we, that Mahler, Schoenberg, Boulez, et al., could not have done so without Wagner. Wagner’s orchestral Greek Chorus deepens the deception onstage and its implications.

 

Klingsor (Tómas Tómasson) and the Flowermaidens

 

Once again, then, the dialectic between fidelity and infidelity thickened, yet also clarified, the plot. The actual chorus was magnificent too. Tcherniakov’s blocking is that of an Old Master – almost literally, in the not-quite-Biblical scenes we see painted onstage, especially at the horrifying close. They look outwards, frozen, perhaps in fear: what are we to make of it? Their singing was equally impressive; indeed, there was no distinction readily to be made between the visual and aural aspects of their work, which is just as it should be.

Andreas Schager’s Parsifal was truly a thing of wonder, without question the greatest I have ever heard. The beauty and strength of tone to be heard from this truest of Heldentenors, is joined by perhaps a greater variegation still than last year. His acting the gawky adolescent was again uncanny (unheimlich, one might better say). So too was the transformed man of peace (or of fanaticism?) of the third act. What did it mean, the way he was looking at, singing at, Kundry? There was much for us to ponder, those of us who cared to look and to listen. René Pape, despite the occasional verbal slip, made still more of his words than last year as Gurnemanz. (Again, I hasten to add, that is not a criticism of 2015, more a judgement that this was better still.) His beauty of tone is the stuff of legend, and so again it was here. He clearly benefited greatly from Tcherniakov’s direction, just as Tcherniakov greatly benefited from his artistry. Wolfgang Koch was, I think, certainly of healthier voice than last year; hearing a Wotan, who sometimes sounded just like a Wotan, in the role offered all manner of interesting critical possibilities. Moreover, one felt, almost literally, his agony. The nastiness, the sadism, in their different yet ultimately similar ways, of Tómas Tómasson’s Klingsor and Matthias Hölle’s Titurel were crucial elements of the unfolding drama; theirs were no ‘minor’ roles.

 

Waltraud Meier’s Kundry was always going to be special; I heard her penultimate performance, her last hurrah reserved for Easter Monday. As ever, there was no gainsaying her commitment, especially during the second act, in which she threw everything she had, and then some, into what seemed like the performance of a lifetime, however many performances of a lifetime she had actually given. Comparisons with Anja Kampe last year would be superfluous, even if Kampe had not been ill; both are great artists, but the occasion of bidding farewell to a role with which Meier has been for so long been so closely associated was something of which no one would have been unaware. No one who attended this Parsifal, who watched and listened, will forget the almost incredibly high standards of musical performance and dramatic intelligence from all concerned.

Berlin Festtage (2) - Parsifal, Staatsoper Berlin, 28 March 2015

 

Images: Ruth Walz

Schillertheater

 

Amfortas – Wolfgang Koch

Gurnemanz – René Pape

Parsifal – Andreas Schager

Klingsor – Tómas Tómasson

Kundry – Anja Kampe

Titurel – Matthias Hölle

Squires – Sónia Grané, Annika Schlicht, Stephen Chambers, Jonathan Winell

First Knight of the Grail – Paul O’Neill

Second Knight of the Grail – Grigory Shkarupa

Flowermaidens – Julia Novikova, Adriane Queiroz, Sónia Gráne, Narine Yeghiyan, Annika Schicht, Anja Schlosser

Voice from Above – Annika Schlicht

 

Dmitri Tcherniakov (director, set designs)

Elena Zaysteva (costumes)

Gleb Filshtinsky (lighting)

Jens Schroth (dramaturgy)

 

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus master: Martin Wright)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

 

The Berlin State Opera’s new production of Parsifal could hardly have been burdened by greater expectations with respect to conductor, orchestra, cast, and director, let alone their combination, yet reality did not disappoint. Parsifal-stagings must now be considered post-Stefan Herheim, just as much as an earlier era thought of pre- and post-Wieland Wagner. (We still do too, of course, even those who never saw Wieland’s legendary Bayreuth staging.) Dmitri Tcherniakov proves, unsurprisingly, very much his own man; it would be as absurd to imitate Herheim as it would his predecessor. But perhaps, consciously or otherwise, he may be understood to continue some of the psychological explorations which seemed increasingly to come to the fore in the final two years of Herheim’s production.

 

 

The outer acts, in their different but similar ways, suggest a Russian thinker approaching Wagner. Crowds, their detailed yet certainly never pedantic direction long a Tcherniakov speciality, offer ample possibility for comparison. (That word ‘possibility’ is crucial here; like Herheim and indeed many of the most interesting contemporary opera directors, Tcherniakov seems more concerned to open up possibilities than to present definitive verdicts.) Modern, relatively indistinct dress does not distract, but suggests sameness and indeed an ossified dedication to something that no longer pertains: a lesson for ‘traditional’ staging fetishists, among others. (Kinder, macht neues!) But Tcherniakov does not disregard religion as religion; it is not a proxy for political or æsthetic concerns. As in Wagner, the relationship is complex, indeed provocative.

 

There is here a (once) Christian theology gone wrong, as Wagner’s conception of Monsalvat demands. Just as in the second act of Götterdämmerung, when increasingly desperate pleas are made to gods who have already departed the stage, so in Parsifal, the crowd continues to believe and to act out of desperation from that belief, or at least to act as if it still believed. A world of Russian holy men, perhaps allied to the mendicants of Boris Godunov, or indeed to the anti-Wagnerian challenges of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, reacts with that of Wagner’s still-live (and later, Tcherniakov’s still-life) contest between Feuerbach and Schopenhauer. These are old believers and, perhaps, Old Believers; certainly the final outward turn of the community on stage, magnificently presented as if a revivification of an Old Master painting, suggests Khovanschina with a Goya-like twist. Will the new rule, political or monastic, of Parsifal bring more of the same – Gurnemanz, after his shocking stabbing in the back of Kundry, seems effortlessly to have transferred his loyalty to the new regime – or something different? We do not know; nor do they. Who or what, if anything, has been redeemed? What we do know is that Gurnemanz has swiftly put paid to the 'purely human' - as the younger, Feuerbachian Wagner would have had it - rekindling of sexual relations between Kundry, or Woman, and Amfortas, or Christ, or at least Jesus of Nazareth.

 

 

There are certainly clues. Amfortas is identified more with Christ than I can previously recall. He is carried by the knights so as to make him, however unhappily and unwillingly, a visual if perhaps not spiritual reincarnation. More disturbingly still, we see during the final scene of the first act, a re-enactment not only of Amfortas’s wounding but also of some form of transubstantiation, or perhaps mere vampirism, of his own blood. The sustenance drawn may well be nothing – a negative reading of Feuerbach – or it may even be primarily vengeful. There is no doubt, however, that this sick community requires it, and, most intriguingly of all, it is commanded by Titurel, whom we see walk on stage and enter his coffin. Is he a fraud or a thaumaturge? The knights are desperate for him to touch them. He certainly appears to be pulling the theological strings of a cult that has become nasty indeed.

 

The sameness of the first act – the scene does not shift during the Transformation Music, and indeed the production here burns as slowly and yet as brightly as the work – receives its response in what to begin with seems the unconnected action of the second. Here, Tcherniakov offers a brave, challenging exploration of sexuality, above all of those paedophiliac tendencies our society would desperately wish away as aberration, as the misdeeds of individual ‘monsters’. Klingsor, the very image of a tabloid newspaper’s ‘paedophile monster’, has built a home with his daughters, the Flowermaidens. Some are young; some are older; all are dressed as ‘pretty girls’. Such is clearly what has proved the undoing of Monsalvat’s knights. He clearly repels Kundry, not least when he paws her, but she of course remains in his power. (Perhaps because he has put himself beyond the ‘moral’ pale? Very Nietzschean. Or perhaps we might think of Crime and Punishment.)

 

 

When in Klingsor’s power, she is certainly willing to learn from his example, or from what it might suggest. Her kissing him already suggests an inconvenient truth concerning the complexity of abuse. Wagner’s proto-Freudian path of realisation is given shocking realisation in Kundry’s education of Parsifal, partly visualised in the staging of his memories. He and Herzeleide were close, perhaps too close. She is furious when she sees his adolescent first exploration with a girl-next-door, or perhaps even his sister. The emotional fall-out kills her, just as Kundry tells him – and us. Kundry, however, attempts to play upon those complex feelings, to reignite them, reintroducing him to the miniature rocking horse with which once, under Herzeleide’s spell, he had played. Quite what happens remains unclear, since the moment of the ‘kiss’ – is it perhaps more than that? – takes place off stage. The transformation it effects, when undressed, Parsifal, followed by Kundry, runs back on stage, is, however, never in doubt. The would-be sign of the Cross in this dark world is Parsifal’s piercing of Klingsor with the spear.

 

A crucial feature of the production that has tied both acts together is the circular seating and action of the respective crowds: knights and Flowermaidens. Sickness pervades both; they may well be more closely connected. The third act continues the work of drawing the two together, though again, suggestively rather than didactically. Ritual to drama – to ritual aufgehoben by drama. But was it the wrong drama? When, in the third act, Amfortas opens his father’s tomb and has the body fall to the ground, is that simply revenge for the inhuman treatment – the abuse – our Christ-like, yet ultimately not-so-very-Christ-like, victim has suffered? Or is it also perhaps a hint at the death of God, Titurel being his father? Nietzsche as well as those Russian writers seems hinted at, or at least available. Nihilism or theological rescue mission? As when one reads Nietzsche, perspectivism demands and yet obscures the answers.

 

Tcherniakov has staged a number of operas in Berlin with Daniel Barenboim, but this is the first Wagner drama, and indeed Tcherniakov’s first Wagner outside Russia. Barenboim has, of course, considerably longer experience, and put it to great use. The expected long line both complemented and, in its dialectic with tonal and timbral variegation below and/or above, questioned the ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’ of what we saw on stage. The extraordinary world-weariness, which must yet go on, of the Prelude to the third act would have been worth the price of admission alone, not least on account of the superlative playing of the Staatskapelle Berlin, for whose dark-hued contribution throughout, occasionally disrupted by woodwind screams so vivid that they seemed the timbral instantiation of Kundry’s chromaticism, no praise could be high enough. Indeed, the road to Schoenberg, Webern, and to Boulez – his ninetieth birthday honoured in these Staatsoper Festtage – became apparently clear, in all its Boulezian complexity. Stage action may not have been subject to serial procedures, but in some sense its interlocking with the score through such close musico-dramatic collaboration, suggested such an analogy. Certainly, Boulez's proliferative technique is worth considering not just as having roots in Wagner, but as one potential tool in our quest to understand him.

 

Much the same might be said of the work of this excellent cast. Andreas Schager cemented his reputation as the finest Heldentenor alive, indeed the finest I have heard in the flesh. His tone beguiled yet remained at the service of the text. Moreover, his movements on stage offered a well-nigh perfect portrayal of the awkwardness of an adolescent discovering his sexuality. His reluctance to show himself, hiding himself under his hood, pulled down by Herzeleide and Kundry alike, finds its counterpart in his persistent changing of clothes: seemingly a desire to be clean that can never be fulfilled. Anja Kampe triumphantly overcame illness so as fully to inhabit her role. She seemed less to play Kundry than simply to be Kundry, tireless in fulfilling the demands placed upon her by Wagner and Tcherniakov alike. René Pape’s sonorous Gurnemanz, perhaps more beautifully sung than any I have heard, was chillingly brought into question by that final act of slaughter. Tómas Tómasson’s Klingsor and Matthias Hölle’s Titurel both impressed greatly too, like Kampe loyal servants to composer, to director, and most crucially of all, to the fusion of the two. Wolfgang Koch's Amfortas entered into that musico-dramatic realm with exemplary marriage of Wort und Ton: Sachs turned (very) sour. Choral singing and acting were likewise of the highest standard throughout, a credit to Tcherniakov, to Barenboim, and to chorus master, Martin Wright.

 

Why, then, was there such appalling booing to be heard at the end, including, incomprehensibly, some apparently levelled at Barenboim? The answer, alas, is all too readily apparent. If there is anything an unthinking audience cannot stand it is to be made to think; if there is anything an abusive society cannot stand it is to be shown that it is abusive. Such fascistic behaviour of course confirms the need for the very productions it so threateningly excoriates.