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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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!’
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