The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (22 page)

In performance

Naturalistic representations of sixteenth-century Nuremberg tend to make the opera look kitsch and Toytown, but productions which insist on interpreting the story as a fable of the spirit of insular conformity which ultimately led Germany to Nazism have become even more tiresome and clichéd.
Perhaps the most successful modern staging has been that of Herbert Wernicke, seen in Hamburg and Paris in the 1980s, which depicted an undercurrent of youthful riot and anarchy running counter to the rigid social demarcations that govern the vigilant and close-knit community of Nuremberg.
How seriously to take Beckmesser’s unpleasantness is a matter of great debate – there is evidence that Wagner intended the portrait to
caricature the hostile critic Eduard Hanslick.
Others have suggested that he is a Jewish bogeyman in disguise.

Recordings

CD: Elisabeth Grümmer (Eva); Rudolf Kempe (cond.).
EMI 64154–2

Ben Heppner (Walther): Wolfgang Sawallisch (cond.) EMI 555 142 2

Parsifal

Three acts. First performed Bayreuth, 1882.

Libretto by the composer

Wagner’s last opera is based on the medieval epic poem by Wolfram von Eschenbach, a German offshoot of Arthurian mythology.
Its symbolic import reflects elements of the philosophy of Schopenhauer (the idea of renunciation), Buddhism (Kundry’s reincarnations, and Parsifal’s pilgrimage towards enlightenment) and racist theory (the problem of regenerating a decadent culture).

The libretto was first drafted in the late 1850s, although the music was not written until 1878–82.
Until the First World War, great efforts were made to prevent the work, ‘a sacred stage festival play’, from being performed anywhere outside Bayreuth, and only recently has applause been considered an appropriate response to the solemn Christian ritual which closes Act I.

Plot

The castle of Monsalvat is inhabited by an order of religious knights who guard the Grail of the Last Supper and the Spear which pierced Christ at the crucifixion.
The order’s leader, Amfortas, once set off with the Holy Spear to vanquish Klingsor, a wizard who had been denied membership to the order and then turned vengeful.
Klingsor trapped Amfortas
in his magic garden near Monsalvat and commanded his agent, the beautiful Kundry, to seduce him.
Klingsor then seized the Holy Spear and stabbed the unmanned Amfortas with it.
Amfortas returned to the Order of the Grail, but the wound inflicted by Klingsor refuses to heal and the Order of the Grail has fallen into terrible decline from which it can only be redeemed by ‘a pure fool made wise by suffering’.

When the opera opens, the squires of the order, led by the elderly knight Gurnemanz, are preparing to bathe Amfortas’s wound.
Kundry, who schizophrenically embodies many aspects of womanhood, rushes in exhausted, dishevelled and hideous.
She brings Arabian balsam, which she compassionately presents to soothe Amfortas’s pain.

One of the sacred swans of the order is callously shot down by a wandering youth.
When questioned by an angry Gurnemanz, he reveals that he knows nothing about himself – neither his name nor his origins.
Gurnemanz believes that he may be the redeeming ‘wise fool’, and leads the nameless youth to witness the ceremonial unveiling of the Grail.
The youth watches the solemnities without any sense of understanding, though a cry of pain from Amfortas shocks him.
Gurnemanz hustles the youth out of the chapel.

From the tower of his magic castle, Klingsor orders Kundry – now transformed into his glamorous agent of evil – to ensnare the youth as he wanders away from Monsalvat.
Klingsor’s Flower Maidens lure him into the magic garden, and Kundry calls out his long-forgotten name – Parsifal.
He listens entranced as she tells him how she once saw him as a baby at his mother’s breast and how his mother had died of grief after he had wandered off and not returned.
Parsifal’s feelings of love for his mother are revived and confused by his carnal desire for Kundry.
When she kisses him, however, he leaps up, suddenly seized by the memory of Amfortas’s pain and an awareness of his suffering.

Kundry now begs Parsifal for help, explaining that she was eternally doomed centuries ago when she blasphemously laughed at Christ on the road to crucifixion.
The purity of his
love would bring her release.
But Parsifal resists, knowing in some way that his responsibility lies with Amfortas.
Kundry angrily turns back to Klingsor, who throws the Holy Spear at Parsifal.
Parsifal catches it and makes the sign of the cross, at which Klingsor’s castle and his magic is instantly destroyed.

Years pass.
The Order of the Grail has continued to decline, and Gurnemanz lives in the forest as a hermit.
One Good Friday, he discovers Kundry lying prostrate near his hut.
She does not speak, except to beg that she be allowed to serve – in expiation for her sins.
Then a mysterious knight appears – it is Parsifal, returned from long years of wandering during which he has matured spiritually.
To Gurnemanz’s joy, he carries the long-lost Holy Spear.

The knights are burying Amfortas’s father Titurel, and Amfortas, exhausted by pain, begs them to put an end to his tormented life, too.
But when Parsifal touches his wound with the Holy Spear, he is miraculously healed.
Kundry dies, released from her spiritual torment, and as spring brings renewal to the natural world, so Parsifal brings redemption to the Order.

What to listen for

Debussy famously said that the music of
Parsifal
was ‘lit from behind’ – an attempt to describe its uniquely translucent orchestral sound, often compared to the effect of Impressionist painting.
Slow in pace but mesmerizingly tense, the drama moves with a trancelike fluidity that seems to float outside the normal limitations of time and space.
The baritone role of Amfortas offers the most vocally gratifying music in the opera, while the schizophrenic character of Kundry – mother and lover, whore, witch and Magdalen penitent – offers its greatest challenge.
Her lines lie high for a mezzo-soprano but low for a soprano, and the long lyrical stretches of Act II mount to a climax of fervent hysteria.
Act III, however, presents her with only two almost-spoken words to sing: ‘Dienen, dienen’ (‘to serve, to serve’).
The rest is eloquent silence.

Parsifal’s
dissolution of harmonic definition was hugely
influential on the development of modern music, and works as different as Elgar’s
The
Dream
of Gerontius
and Debussy’s
Images
sought to emulate its dreamy intensity and radiant luminosity.

In performance

Parsifal
was the opera that reopened Bayreuth after the post-Nazi hiatus in 1951, in a production by Wagner’s grandson Wieland that would set the tone for the next generation.
Instead of the naturalistic presentation of the forest and temple of Monsalvat and Klingsor’s castle and garden, complete with the spectacular transformation scenes characteristic of pre-war productions, came a concept that eliminated virtually all specific imagery and focused instead on varying degrees of light and darkness, which made the drama universal, timeless and archetypal.

In the 1980s, producers like Götz Friedrich became interested in the sociological implications of the plot, and new visual contexts evolved.
The Knights of the Grail were seen less as Christian pilgrims than as members of a sinister secret society and the Flower Maidens were often dressed up (or down) to suggest the inhabitants of a brothel.
In the 1990s, a much-travelled production by Klaus-Michael Gruber evoked a more complex and ambiguous atmosphere, using images drawn from surrealist painters like Paul Klee and Max Ernst.
Others have chosen to underline, with varying degrees of sensitivity and crassness, the parallels between the racist élites of the Nazis and the ‘brotherhood’ of the Grail.

The opera continues to pose many problems to directors: how to avoid the bathos of the shot swan plopping down on to the stage, for example, how to suggest Kundry’s multiple personalities, and how to avoid kitsch in the presentation of the Flower Maidens.

Recording

CD: Jess Thomas (Parsifal); Hans Knappertsbusch (cond.).
Philips 416 390 2