Future imperfect
The world has come to an end and we are at the end of the world, the collapsed ruins of a bridge that can no longer be crossed. There is no greenery; the few trees that are left are dead and being chopped down for fuel. Shell-shocked survivors wander through this hellscape, fighting over the scraps of whatever is left. This is the milieu of director Calixto Bieito’s Parsifal seen at the Stuttgart Staatsoper on Sunday March 20.
In the director’s vision, a tentative social order has emerged here centered around leaders who dominate through a combination of charisma, intimidation, half-remembered religious rhetoric, and careful distributions from their caches of water, alcohol and drugs. Followers cling to their desire for spiritual meaning in this battered existence, finding their last shred of hope for the existence of God in the few remaining scavenged religious artifacts. Nonetheless, their faith is being overwhelmed by their doubt.
The staging was as bleak and brutal focusing on the abuse of power that seems inseparable from religion. Gurnemanz is an abusive thug, who beats one of his young charges (i.e. the sacred swan) to death as a lesson to the others and then tries to blame Parsifal for the crime. Parsifal’s resiliency in the face of Gurnemanz’s intimidation prompts Gurnemanz to con Parsifal into battling Klingsor. He gives him a couple of happy pills and drags him to a rally of the Grail Knights. There is no transformation scene, but Parsifal does become spaced.
Amfortas enters carrying a large battered metal tub (the Grail?) and is in great psychic pain. Titurel, in a suit and sunglasses, controls the unruly Grail Knights because he controls the plundered religious artifacts that they use as signifiers of his family’s power.. By the end of Act I, however, the Grail Knights are openly expressing their doubts in their “faith”.
Act II begins with Klingsor storming through his domain shooting out long arcs of fire with a flamethrower, and then pulling the buried Kundry from the scorched mud. His flower maidens are zoned-out brutalized women wrapped in plastic held together with a few strategic pieces of first-aid tape. At Klingsor’s command they start to draw flowers on themselves in red lipstick, but their efforts at drawing devolve into disoriented, lunatic scribblings. Parsifal arrives and marvels at this sight in a state of infantile wonder. He kills one of the flower maidens as a child might rip apart a toy to see what’s inside.
Kundry takes advantage of his vulnerable state by letting him suckle at her breast and presenting him with a toy tractor somehow recovered from Chez Herzeleide. As Kundry becomes more agitated and summons help, Parsifal looks around him for some way of protecting himself and finds a large fence pole, which Klingsor defines as the “spear”
Klingsor wrestles Parsifal for the spear and Parsifal stabs him with it. and then hurls his defiant imprecations of “you know where to find me” directly at the audience as if to challenge them to return after the interval. Kundry surveys the situation in horror and then cuts out her own tongue as punishment for her own failure.
Act III felt less compelling after the extreme, cogently argued drama of the earlier acts, because too much of the direction was concerned with confronting the audience with their expectations of Parsifal, rather than continuing the grim narration. The now-blind Gurnemanz recognizes Parsifal and his spear; Kundry elevates Parsifal on a battered airport luggage cart, anoints him and decorates him in Godspell-ish costume that she has been carrying around with her in a worn-out shopping bag. She then adorns him with every conceivable matter of religious ornament including a bust of Wagner. The sight of Parsifal as a “Kitschmas” tree brought some titters from the audience.
For the Good Friday Music, Gurnemanz dips into his secret stash and blisses out. Suddenly, the doors to the auditorium fling open and Gurnemanz’s charges enter in a halo of light wearing their cherubic uniforms. Snow even falls briefly. Clearly, Bieito is taunting the audience by giving them such a deliberately saccharine, drug-induced display for the religious climax of the work.
Dark reality returns when the Grail Knights chase down the naked, senile Titurel, throw him into the Grail / tub, and hack him to death with an axe. Parsifal appears amongst this chaos and releases Gurnemanz from his agony by killing him with the spear.
Then, just as arbitrarily, he touches Titurel and Amfortas and revives them, still battered and bloodied. Parsifal strips naked, climbs into the tub, and carried off in triumph. Only Kundry remains; she pulls the last item in her Redemption Preparedness Kit, a can of snack food; she then sits munching, devoid of expression or emotion as the music quietly fades.
Bieito’s Parsifal differs from a more traditional regie production in that it does not seem to be motivated by an intellectual Konzept. Instead, the work feels more visceral, not a point-by-point refutation of the meanings that the work has taken on for the Wagner faithful, but a defiant cry of outrage at those who are drawn in by the seductive harmonies and dilettante pantheism of the work without contemplating the exploitation of women and abuse of religious and moral authority in the opera.
He uses all the means at his disposal to shake the audience out of the mind-numbing spell cast by the work, a spell more powerful than anything Klingsor could devise. Even so, there still is a humanity to the staging. Bieito does allow Parsifal to be bettered by his quest and find a usual mission in the comfort he can give to others even if Parsifal doesn’t understand the source of his newfound power. Parsifal is especially attentive to Kundry; the most abused character of all. So maybe there is a small possibility of hope to be found even in this staging.
Overall, I found it to be an extraordinarily powerful production that managed to navigate the difficult boundary between subverting the audiences’ expectations and subverting the work’s meaning to serve the director’s personal agenda. This version inspired a lot of reflection and processing afterwards, something better suited to a festival setting or a Regietournee.
Luckily, the musical performance was festival-quality in the excellence of execution, attention to detail and commitment from all participants. The fact that it was a mid-season revival of a physically challenging production made this achievement mind-boggling (As an aside I will add that the Carmen the night before was executed at a similar level both musically and dramatically).
Manfred Honeck’s conducting was bracingly fast, but never rushed. He shaved well over a half hour off the performance times we are used to at the Met, bringing the performance more in line with the Hermann Levi’s timing for the very first performances. This only served to underline the drama and free it from the plodding stasis frequently inflicted on this work in the name of profundity*.
Andrew Richards was the charismatic, ardent Parsifal and he sang with freshness and power. His is an important voice and one hopes that some American theaters sign him up for some future repertory before his dance card is filled in Europe.
Christiane Iven was a ferocious, formidable match for him as Kundry. I had previously wondered whether it was possible for singer to give a truly demented performance within the potential constraints of a regie production; she demonstrated that the answer is clearly yes. This is a real dramatic soprano voice and she handled the extreme tessitura of the part with seeming ease.
Gregg Baker has been MIA in New York for some time now and in that period, his voice has found more power and richness than I recalled. He did not stint in summoning forth Amfortas’ agonies and I hope his recent foray into the German rep gets a wide exposure. Claudio Otelli was another new singer to me and he found more complexity in Klingsor than usual.
Only Attila Jun disappointed as Gurnemanz. The voice is certainly powerful and sonorous, but his portrayal lacked nuance and he seemed to be going through the staging assigned to him, rather than inhabiting the director’s vision of the character.
*Yes, I know Toscanini’s Parsifal was the slowest of them all; but not having heard those performances I can’t judge whether he made such slow tempi work.
Photo © Martin Sigmund
“Instead, the work feels more visceral, not a point-by-point refutation of the meanings that the work has taken on for the Wagner faithful, but a defiant cry of outrage at those who are drawn in by the seductive harmonies and dilettante pantheism of the work without contemplating the exploitation of women and abuse of religious and moral authority in the opera.”
Jesus. If Bieito is so repulsed by ‘Parsifal’ – and all signs indicate that he is – why stage it? Why even bother? It strikes me as disingenuous – not mention cheap, crass, and manipulative – for director to exploit a public forum in order to vent his disdain for the work he is supposedly ‘directing’; not to mention the obligatory humiliation of the audience implied in such an agenda. If harassing and belittling the audience is so sacrosanct to Bieito’s vision then, frankly, he does not deserve to have one.
Where do you get that Bieito is repulsed by “Parsifal?” Hearing his thoughts on it I never came away with that. He speaks of it as a crisis of religion, and our obsessions with it – even as we live in a society that has moved away from “traditional” religion. He seemed in awe discussing the “architecture” of Wagner’s score, the layerings of meaning in the libretto, and the power the story still has to us, not only as a sort of ancient miracle play, but a timelessness of man manipulating his world and surroundings – and fellow man. From all reports, most of the audiences in two sold-out runs felt neither harassed or belittled.
I never understand the psychology of these accusations.
People like Bieito can more or less pick and choose what they want to direct. Why would anyone say ‘Oooh, I hate that, I’m going to choose to devote a few months of my life to it.’
In answer to your question:”Why would anyone say ‘Oooh, I hate that, I’m going to choose to devote a few months of my life to it.”
A recently retired opera director was quoted a number of years ago ( upon assuming his post) that he actually HATED opera and was going to do something about it ( “it” being understood as opera and not his hatred)
I don’t think the psychology is quite so remote. Often people take on tasks that they hate in order to “reform” them. That’s well and good, except to the people who don’t feel they need reforming.
Such may be true (a director hating opera and “doing” something about “opera”) but Bieito’s comments consistently show someone in awe of the operas he takes on. His vision is clearly not shared by some, but many seem to appreciate it – including a number of singers, like his current Parsifal cast.
A recently retired opera director was quoted…
I’ll write the blind items here, thank you. If the person in question was quoted, then cite the quote. If not, what you’re saying is so vague as to be utterly useless.
In fact, one can not be a blind idolater of a work and still think it worth study and the months of work necessary to interpret it. For that matter, an artist may find the struggle of making sense of an initially attractive work far more stimulating than a smoothly reverent attitude.
But, anyway: do you mind please telling us who and what the hell you’re talking about?
You have missed the point about as completely as it is possible to do so. The “defiant cry of outrage” the writer perceives is not against the work itself but rather against ” those who are drawn in by the seductive harmonies and dilettante pantheism of the work…”, i.e., audiences and interpreters who (in Bieito’s opinion) overlook or gloss over certain disturbing complexities in the text in favor of other “feel-good” elements.
The Lehnhoff Parsifal at ENO was one of the great events in my musical
life. Bieito seems to take it in a similar direction BUT the essential thing that gets me into the opera house is not textual considerations but “seductive harmonies” and implicit “pantheism”. I agree with the ‘bad boys’ AND the ‘feel-gooders’. My worst experience with Parsifal was a religioso horror at Bayreuth directed by Wolfgang Wagner which closely followed ALL stage directions.
I would say, having seen both productions, that the similarities are superficial. Each production uses the idea of a post-apocalyptic milieu, yes, but for Bieito this is only a jumping-off point for a radical rethinking of the nature of the Grail Brotherhood (here, a cult cynically manipulated by Titurel through the conflicted Amfortas) and especially the character of Gurnemanz, who is a sort of obsessed front man for the cult, willing to manipulate, conceal important facts, threaten violence and even downright lie in order to coerce Parsifal into buying into his role as “Erloeser.” (Gurnemanz even tricks Parsifal into ingesting psychedelic mushrooms just before the Grail ceremony to heighten the experience.)
The irony of this production is that Parsifal is just some random punk who happens along at a point when Gurnemanz is violently ranting about the “reine Tor,” and in trying to bully the boy into becoming the Grail’s new protector, he quite accidentally sets him onto the path that will eventually lead to exactly that result.
And yet, even the “triumphant” ending of the opera is left up in the air. Parsifal first kills Amfortas with the spear, then brings both Amfortas and Titurel back to life and sends them on their way. He then strips off the cassock with the dangling religious symbols and climbs into the metal tub the Brotherhood has been using for their human sacrifices, which the chorus elevate like a coffin and carry offstage, with the company following. It is totally ambiguous whether this is supposed to represent a new, enlightened leadership for the Brotherhood, or, conversely, Parsifal’s psychotic decision to offer himself up as the next “Liebesmahl.”
Ah! It looks a case of suspected ‘deja vu’- like some of us believed possibly happening, when we were mentioning Kosky as a director.. The same apparent syndrome all over again which we previously discussed here, when mentioning Brian di Palma’s early film, ‘Hi, Mom!’. Perhaps Stuttgart has never ever heard of, or seen the movie.
Instructions -(Straight out of any Anarchist’s Bible): Take an offered directing job, mock the work to be produced , virtually spit at the audience for attending and accepting what you did, privately sneer at your defenders, get hailed for being a genius, and then go cash the pay check!
The trouble with Harry . . .
A wonderful review that has sparked an equally wonderful discussion! Thank you, Ms. Fatale!
Fantastic insight Ms. Fatale.
I see, the controversy lives on. And I think that is regie theater’s greatest gift. The ignition keys. People talking, debating, intellectualizing and philosophizing.
And a little birdie tells me there IS quite a good dvd done. Give it time. It will surface, I’m sure.
Much to my mother’s chagrin…
Hooray! Great news!
P.S. about the above post 13: For those who don’t know already, if you click OperaRocks’ name you’ll find that the above news is from an excellent source. I’m surprised there’s not more excitement about it here.
OperaRocks is no stranger to Parterre. And he KNOWS we love him!
Howdy, CruzSF, speaking of love, I was wondering if you’ve listened to the recent CD of “Ercole sul Termodonte”?
Is this the recording with JDD, Villazon, Damrau, and an all-star cast? I’m afraid I haven’t yet. Do you recommend it?
I’ve been rotating “Rape of Lucretia” (Rigby/Maxwell/Opie/Hickox) (tonight, I’m seeing “Lucretia” for the first time) and “Stabat Mater” (JDD/Netrebko/Brownlee/Pappano).
I hope you’re well, No E. Glad to see you on here more frequently.
This is HAPPY HAPPY news, bro!
Here I go…tip-toeing thru the tulips
http://www.tubechop.com/watch/144940
Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!! What a surprise THIS was! (BTW, that Russian maiden sounds pretty amazing – more then than now!)
I’d say the Placidity factor was a tad exaggerated…
At last. I can’t wait for it.
Now, which “Parsifal” as an introductory recording? I’m sure the Cher Public has opinions…
Yes, that Ercole has the proverbial all star cast. I know you are a big fan of JDD. She sings Ippolita and I think she does a really nice job. She has a particularly lovely aria toward the beginning of Act II, “Onde Chiare”. Villazon sounded surprisingly strong.
I also loved this Ercole, and, if I might add, there is a really great Vivica Genaux there, apart from DiDonato, of course. I wad surprised how good Villazon sounded, too.
Cruz, have you seen the Lucretia DVD with Rolfe-Johnson, Harries, Rigby, Opie, conducted by Lionel Friend? I found it amazing, and it kept me glued to the screen for nearly two hours, although I actually only intended to take a look….
was*. Sorry, mezzanotte here.
Liana, I haven’t seen the DVD, but I’ve just put it at the top of my Netflix queue (I know, I’m OLD school).
Beware. I sat down to “take a look” at 1 a.m, and stopped watching around 3. And couldn’t sleep afterwards anyway….
Hmm. I’m usually an insomniac to begin with. What could I play after the video to put me to sleep?
For me, Chopin Nocturnes and/or Gregorian chant always do the job. Or nearly so…
I should give Chopin’s Nocturnes a try. Bruckner symphonies have done the trick for me in the past.
Are you staying up for Le Comte Ory? (I’m about to leave the office.)
Yes, or at least i’ll try. It’s actually the reason why i’m lurking at Parterre instead of slowly getting asleep in my bed
Enjoy! I’m sorry I have to miss most of it due to my live opera plans. And hey, H-K Hong is being interviewed tonight!
Thanks. Enjoy your Lucretia (if that doesnt sound very good, well, you know what i mean anyway
)
CruzSF: weren’t the Goldberg Variations the traditional choice for late-night narcotizing?
I’ve also been listening to a lot of Valentin Silvestrov lately – many of his pieces, like the second string quartet, sound like the kind of music you’d experience before dying.
Also: Vladimir Martynov – Come In! Lovely, lovely album.
Hahaha. Liana, I do know what you mean. You’re never less than a sweetie.
m. croche: Goldberg Variations are a time-tested accompaniment for bedtime, to be sure. I’ll look up Silvestrov and Martynov. I always find your suggestions to be interesting.
Speaking of which, I’ve had a difficult time finding a recording of Honegger’s String Quartet No. 2, which you recommended a few weeks (on a much different thread). Can you recommend one that you like most?
Hello CruzSF: Praga Productions/Harmonia Mundi put out a few Honegger discs for the centenary in 1992 and one of them. vol. 3, has a nice performance by the Martinu Quartet along with other non-quartet chamber music by the composer. Then in 2000 the Erato Quartet released a CD of all 3 quartets for Aura Music. My recollection is that I prefer the Martinu Quartet’s performance (more atmosphere, more style). But the Erato readings are tautly expressive and both recordings feature some lovely playing. Don’t neglect the symphonies, either!
Thanks for the details, m.croche. Both of those recordings should be easy to track down.
My finger has been hovering over the Buy button on Amazon, just waiting for your response.
In general, I’m not a big fan of Villazon, but if I don’t have to look at him, I suppose he’s all right. I do like JDD, and even like her CD “Diva Divo,” although it’s not her strongest singing. I suppose that puts me in some kind of JDD cabal.
May I join
?
I’ll be in good company, then.
I haven’t been as much under the JDD spell until now. The Divo/Diva and the Vivaldi were a one-two punch. I really liked them both. Of course if ya sing something from Massenet’s Ariane ya gets extra points from me. As for Villazon….I do like him, but Ercole is not really a huge role, and he performs it well, so I think you would find him acceptable
I’ll find out soon enough. It’s on its way from Amazon. I know I’m probably too late to hear Villazon live, but I’m glad he can pull it together for recordings. Maybe a certain Golden Girl and friends can fin second career doing only recordings.
Does JDD have a cabal? I thought that was only for Radvan. I guess I am a member of both cabals as I love JDD too.
If not, we just founded one. Open to al willing to join (or so I hope)
.
How about at the beginning?
shhhh. dont tell anyone.
grazie tanto! stunning…
Wonderful! Thank you!
This blows me away.
I suppose a sense of un-wholeness, a feeling of a crack in the existential fabric, is somewhere at the root of most Western drama, but you’d have to be a megalomaniac like Wagner to address it head-on. Offhand, even in Shakespeare, King Lear is the only play I can think of that is willing to confront directly what our recently introduced friend Kleist called “the fragile structure of the world.” (Okay, maybe Measure for Measure too.) Like the Ring and Tristan, Parsifal gets down into the mud and wrestles with the problem. I’m quite sure it doesn’t win, but it makes a serious try.
What I find so powerful in this clip is that Bieito is willing to do with Parsifal what Wagner was willing to do with the world – to wrestle with the underlying sense of loss that is the engine driving the whole plot. Even in a completely conventional production, the Grail society is sick. The spear is lost and everyone has to rely for their spiritual nourishment on a diseased, tormented intermediary. Seing that brought forward with the kind of careful detail that Bieito shows here is at least as emotionally engaging to me as watching a bunch of guys in monks’ robes hang out in the woods.
And if I’m interpreting correctly what I’ve seen so far about how the production ends, Bieito is also willing to treat Wagner’s “redemption” for what it is: an attempt to will wholeness through artifice. Whether that attempt succeeds for us individually or not, even within the limited confines of a theater, probably depends on how willing we are personally to follow the new Parsifal in his bathtub. Even if that willingness doesn’t extend beyond the theater doors.
“Seing that brought forward with the kind of careful detail that Bieito shows here is at least as emotionally engaging to me as watching a bunchy of guys in monks’ robes hang out in the woods.”
Bravo! Batty – you expressed perfectly what I’ve been attempting to share with others about my feeling towards this Bieito production. Parsifal is, hands down, my favorite opera (I’m perhaps obsessed with it) and I’ve found of late I’m leaning towards productions like Lehnhoff’s and Bieito’s than I am more “traditional” Tales of the Grail settings.
CruzSF – I love the Armin Jordan set, reissued in 2009. Not as lugubrious and teutonic as some others sets. I think Harry loves this one a lot also, so it is not just me.