A thousand words is worth a picture
You know how La Cieca gets when one of her darling Regie productions gets dissed sight unseen, as happened on these shores with last Sunday’s unveiling of the Hans Neuenfels Lohengrin at Bayreuth. (Not so much on this site, because La Cieca is happy to report that here at dear parterre.com all schools of opinion—even stupid ones—are given a full measure of respect.)
So anyway, a photo or two of choristers in rat suits do not the experience of a production make. Ten minutes of video highlights is not the ideal solution either, but until some enterprising impresario in the U.S. imports Calixto Bieito‘s take on Parsifal (or we all charter a package tour to Stuttgart), the following selection of video highlights will have to do as conversation fodder. (Anyone who finds extended video of the Neuenfels Lohengrin is asked to alert your doyenne!)
Note: there is a glimpse or two of nudity in the following video, so workers should be cautious.
I think the answer is that Bieto really qualifies as a bonafide sick puppy and Neuenfels is just passé, sick and offensive.
And talking about sick puppies – looks like Pavol is getting down and dirty in Salzburg:
http://operachic.typepad.com/opera_chic/2010/07/petibon-models-lingerie-for-salzburg-and-bergs-lulu.html#more
I love what I’ve been able to see of this Parsifal in video, stills and sounds. A fellow opera lover and Wagnerian saw this production twice and – one not prone towards liking regietheatre – pronounced them amongst the most powerfully gripping evenings of theatre of her life. Her posts on it only made me sorry I couldn’t make this and sorrier still it wasn’t filmed. Bieito can make has of a lot of things, but when he gets it right – it’s nothing short of amazing (e.g., his Wozzeck for the Liceu). This sounds (and from the clips) to be equally amazing. Damn.
make “hash” it was supposed to read . . . not “has.” Sorry!
[Beavis voice] Fire! Yeah Fire! Fire! Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh Fire! Yeah fire is cool! [/Beavis voice]
Wo ist Gott? indeed.
I hope this is filmed and released at some point, I’d love to see the whole thing. I’ve really liked the two clips I’ve seen of this production, some very powerful images there, I loved Parsifal stabbing Klingsor > putting his hand on the wound > then rubbing the blood on his face especially.
Parsifal as drugged out rock star? I like it. I like his voice too, the Staatsoper Stuttgart is a typical European house, about 1300 seats, the one time I was there (the best night at the opera I’ve ever had, Schreker’s Die Gezeichneten) the singers didn’t have to force at all. If you’re interested, it’s being revived in 3/2011 for five performances.
More like this please, La Cieca.
the messiah shall have the best ass of them all
i wonder how it would feel like to have messiah 2.0 bang you while he’s in a total state of wonder-drug euphoria
Is it all that shocking? Its still pretty Christian propaganda-y. If you’ve seen Jesus Christ Superstar is this going to feel like that big a leap forward?
I was very moved. What I see is loss, need, and a painful willingness to grab at anything that offers hope.
One thing that strikes me about the design of this production is how it reminds me of Monty Python and the Holy Grail — not the humor, obviously, but the sense of (medieval) life as grindingly gray, dirty and weary.
After the Bieito, every other production of Parsifal just looks too clean.
VERY GOOD CALL, LA. C……!!
I just saw that flick, in an open-air screening in Bryant Park, last Monday…and while the “yucks” in the flick are sort of dated…and what was “cutting edge” at the time the troupe was doing their schtick is sort of lame, now..
..visually..it did work and ( as an undergrad major in medieval history) sort of is what I felt the era to look like…possibly…
…as does the feeling I get from from this Parsifal…which I don’t from any other………
The Assassination of Wagner’s Parsifal as Performed by the Inmates of Bieto’s Stuttgart Insane Asylum. Check list; Nutter with flame thrower, strait jacket costuming, delusions, cruel predatory behavior, nudity, violence, filth, decay, zombie dementia acting………..perfect!
La:
I have to disagree!!! Do you really mean to suggest that Wagner had anything as outre as social realism in mind when he wrote PARSIFAL??? Heck, even the SOCIAL REALISM of his time was romanticized and sanitized – Dickens, Thackeray. . .
Please explain how a realistic setting has any special validity in Parsifal (over, say, the more typical romanticized mis en scene) given the obvious mythic, fairy tale, NON_REALISTIC (indeed one of the whole points of P., if you ask me, is that the real world of phenomena is UNREAL and false).
I didn’t say realism, I said “dirty.” Unrealistic and even mythic events can certainly happen in dirt and rags.
I would further question your assertion that “the real world of phenomena is unreal” etc. in Parsifal. He doesn’t gain enlightenment through meditation, but rather by suffering in the real world. Parsifal’s real qualification to become the new guardian of the Grail is that he is not working from any abstract philosophical basis, but an intuited empathy gained through real experience.
Though Wagner was influence by his readings in Buddhism (and more so in the same vein via Schopenhauer), his own thought (as expressed in Parsifal was not strictly Buddhist. Essentially his approach was syncretic, combining elements of Buddhism and mystical Catholicism with the early humanistic philosophy inherent in the Parsifal stories he used as source material.
Understood, La C., but your comment did suggest a sudden bent for Parsifal grunge that just didn’t make sense to me.
Also, while I agree that Parsifal cannot be read as “Buddha II, The Revenge” (“This time it’s personal!”), I think that Parsifal, like the Buddha of legend was a young man of tremendous intrinsic gifts who learned the truth of his gift (and of the world) by experiencing the falsity of the world of phenomena.
Kind of like if Mother Teresa had started off as a star on an MTV “reality show” like “The Hills.”
Nice trash Concept, but this looks pretty inept. Everybody seems to be milling about unsure what their character’s motivation is.
Huh? As opposed to normal chorus behavior, which is always meticulously motivated? At least these folks have the excuse of being sick or stoned. I had uneasy flashbacks to some demonstrations I was involved in back in the day…
This is a valid criticism, I think, in that Bieito’s strong suit as a director doesn’t seem to be precision. The movement does look tentative or (unintentionally) clumsy at times. Again, it’s hard to say what the cumulative effect would be in the theater, or if as the performances progressed the movement cleaned up.
The acting standard looks like ham acting from a alternative school bunch of naughty kids trying to shock. Putting on a self written play to show their equally fucked up parents attending, they are feeling still little ‘out of it’ and don’t know how to communicate with the World. Their kindergarten standard plagiarized version of ‘Hair’, with a psychotic touch!
P.S To think people here want to discuss the merits of such shit in the first place….or make statements like ” Gee, I would love to see this Parsifal ‘F………………k!!!!!
@1:55: Dude’s body language/facial expressions/stringy hair are a dead ringer for BOB from Twin Peaks. Also, he’s molesting a bunch of bloody, Saran-wrapped Laura Palmers. AMIRITE???
So, La Cieca, do YOU actually commend this Parsifal conzept?
I mean, enjoy it? If so, share with us your defense of it
and the aesthetic/theatrical values.
BTW, anyone coming to Santa Fe for the Spratlan opera
or what ever, bring WARM clothes. It is being very chilly
at night; lots of rain off and on. Really lovely time here,
but prepare for the opera nights; I see many woolen
scarves, and they help.
Well, okay, I haven’t seen the whole thing (obviously) so it’s difficult to say whether I would say the whole thing would work.
One thing that does seem to be happening for sure, though, is that the singers are strongly physically invested in their acting. It might be possible to get that same level of commitment in a “tabards and tights” traditional visual presentation, but that’s not what Bieito does, so that point is irrelevant in the present case.
What I’m talking about in the previous paragraph is this: there’s a lot of operatic performing (not just acting, but the singing part taken as a thing in itself) where (for example) when the performer is singing “I am going to kill you” all you get from his performance is “At this point in the opera my character is supposed to kill your character.” In a Bieito production, when you’ve got performers like Richards and Milling and the guy who plays Klingsor, when they sing “I am going to kill you,” you really think are terrified that someone is going to end up dead. Unless opera can grab the audience by the throat like that, it’s dead. Again, it doesn’t have to be done a la Bieito, but he does seem to be able to find and tap that unbridled passion in performers.
On a broader plane, what impresses me is that this direction does more than mickey-mousing the text and the music. In other words, if the text and the music are saying “oh what a transcendent moment of beauty this Grail ceremony is,” then why is it necessary to make a redundant visual statement with marble columns and domes and flowing vestments and stately processions? Especially, I would say, since the columns and domes are more or less what we expect to see, or know from the libretto are supposed to be there. What Bieito does in this production I think is to create a visual counterpoint for the text and the music, and in doing so force the audience to re-examine their accepted meaning of that text and music. Yes, it’s beautiful and lofty, but (I think the question is being asked) to what purpose? What if all this gorgeousness is in the service of a lie? What if the whole Grail scene is pretty much a racket devised by a scam artist to keep miserable starving people in their place? What if Gurnemanz has suffered so much in his endless waiting for the new guardian of the Grail to arrive that his reason has cracked, and now he will basically say and do (and believe) any old thing to try to force the latest newcomer into the role of redeemer? (It’s not Bieito’s idea, but Wagner’s, that the path to personal redemption is long and unpredictable, in other words, that if a man is to develop into a savior, he is going to have to do it in his own time and most likely at the cost of a lifetime of suffering.)
So I would say that what is important about this staging is that it forces the viewer to question what he thinks he knows Parsifal is about. The biggest coup, it seems to me, is to set up the end of the action not as a conclusion but as set of possible new beginnings: Parsifal accepts the office of guardian of the Grail and is borne away naked by his followers, maybe to do good deeds of charity and, well, maybe not. Meanwhile, the pregnant Kundry is left behind, forgotten by everyone, eating raw food out of a can. But (who knows?) maybe her child will have an easier way in the world than his suffering elders. By not answering these questions, Bieito leaves the work open: the public continues to consider the philosophical questions after the performance is over.
One technical detail that impresses me is how (at least in the scenes on this video) Bieito finds dramatically motivated reasons to turn the chorus out toward the audience: the Grail ceremony seems to be passing by on the road as the knights hold up their signs, and the Flower Maidens are so listless that all they can do is trudge forward without noticing their surroundings.
Also poetic (and in no way contradictory to the text) are the ideas of making Gurnemanz blind in the final act, or Kundry deliberately cutting out her tongue at the end of the second act.
“What if all this gorgeousness is in the service of a lie?”
Good point. We routinely are impressed by the organizational detail of pomp and circumstance and forget that rites are constructed events. We get taken in by the show. That’s the purpose of show, isn’t it, to make us believers?
What if in fact this is the set of American Idol?
The tenor’s butt was the only thing I found stimulating in the Parsifal clip.
Parsifal is a very skillfully constructed theatre. A production that hews to the piece’s dramatic arc, such as Harry Kupfer’s “space ship” Parsifal for the DeutsStaatskapelle Berlin (alas not yet released in the U.S. on DVD), succeeds because partly because it has an inner logic, a focus, and creditable dramaturgy.
Based on the clip La C posted, the Bieto Parsifal production is a potpurri of disparate ideas that don’t mesh. A rock star Parsifal approach (think Jim Morrison) could certainly work, but Bieto undermines it with a lot of extraneous shock value action, including smearing a blumenmadchen’s body with raspberry jam or whatever they use.
I suppose some will think Bieto is provocatively making a point about cultural degradation, soulessness, etc. But Parsifal is grounded in Bhuddist beliefs about attaining enlightment and redemption.
Based on reports, clips, photos, etc., Bieto wilfully subverts the art form he makes his living from. To return to the anatomical nether region, we’re generally too timid to acknowledge that Bieto is farting in his audiences’ collective faces (and sneering all the way to the bank as he does so).
I’m not sure where people are getting this “rock star” business: because Parsifal has long hair and wears grungy clothes?
And I have to say, I’m getting pretty tired of the argument “I don’t like it (or I don’t get it) so obviously the director is deliberately expressing contempt for the work (or the entire art form of opera).” How about, “it’s not my cup of tea?” Or even “I think the director made a serious effort but missed the mark?” Why must a production you don’t care for always have be this sinister plan to sabotage opera?
As an outlander and so extremely rare attendee at opera performances, regie or not, I can’t add anything of value to that particular discussion. But it has always struck me that opera, whether because of its highly conventional nature or its unusual combination of elements, is prone to these counterpoint effects, certainly as far back as the spectacles of grand opera whose librettos underline their own meretriciousness–the fraudulent pomp of Le Prophete, the tyrannical displays of Don Carlo and Aida–or the self-referential “I hear music” moments of so many operas (including the jokes of L’Italiana, Magic Flute, etc.) These shows have always seemed to me to ask us to see through them (whether with the arguably easy cynicism of Tosca or the more telling questionings of Verdi and Wagner). This isn’t even to mention the powerful ironic effects of music contra words.
I for one didn’t say it was a rock star concept. I said a rock star concept could work.
By now, it’s patently obvious that Bieto doesn’t enough about his art form to approach it in a logical, coherent, dramatically overarching fashion. He comes across as someone with a lot of infantile fantasies and hangups, rather than a disciplined, focused director. Whether his “subervsion” is wilfull or passive-aggressive, or of whatever ilk, it’s still trashing an art form, rather like the child who trashes his room.