Like the Grail, this opera only feeds the watcher who delights in the good. As such it should be less popular than it is, but the music is so beautiful it will never disappear from the repertoire.
At the beginning of Krzysztof Warlikowski’s production, during the long prelude a large screen almost as wide as the stage and two-thirds as high suddenly shows a hand reaching up from beneath with a pencil. It writes AMOUR. A few bars later it erases these letters and writes FOI. Then it half-erases this and overwrites ESPERANCE. These three great virtues of the Church tell us or remind us what it is for man to be good, and what the goods are that life offers to man. In the manner the writing was done the erasures suggest self-correction, error, and even a little frustration. The last one, hope, is perhaps the easiest for us to rest with, and the opera can begin.
The action takes place before the large screen. Gurnemanz and his knights are dressed in modern suits, except for a young boy in a light brown shirt among them who somehow isn’t part of the action. When Gurnemanz narrates the stories of the founding of Montsalvat and of Amfortas’s disastrous venture into Klingsor’s realm, the boy has sat himself on a table at stage right with dangling legs drawing the story in crayon and pencil, and it appears on the screen behind the actors.
For Amfortas’s entrance the screen moves to the right and we see him upstage in a hospital bed. Kundry is able to visit at the foot of it. Titurel comes onstage in a wheelchair, rather then lying not quite dead in an open casket, according to the libretto. At Parsifal’s entrance the entire screen moves upward. Behind it we see what first appears to be a steeply raked amphitheatre, where the knights have gathered to find out who shot the swan. After the hospital bed we think perhaps it is an operating theatre as at a medical school. It’s equipped with two pairs of sinks, from one of which Kundry will get some water for Parsifal when he swoons after hearing, from her, that his mother is dead. Just what this structure is is unclear, but it stays on the stage throughout so we come to think of it as a fixture used in many ways rather than asking it to be a statement in itself. In fact, the things that are going on “anyway” are what bear the special message of this mise-en-scène, and it is a profound one. The young boy is fragile humanity whose fate depends on things far beyond his ken. Rituals embody truth but if the truth is lost in persons’ hearts, the rituals become opaque. Who will teach the children? The ritual might be hocus-pocus but what the fool does recognize, through “compassion,” is the anguish of the priest who finds himself having to help others while the prayers he makes on their behalf only re-open the wounds of his own guilt. The congregation has him in the position of a mediator successive to Jesus; following their logic, he is put in the position of being punished on the cross for fornication.
There is another unscheduled individual who appears on the stage in all three acts. It is a thin woman in a plain black dress with short grey hair. She is, I realized at the end, an angel — the perfect bookend to the child extra, the one who knows everything instead of nothing. The audience is placed in the middle between these two extras, and the audience’s thrillingly greatest moment comes when it is itself placed within the demesne of the Grail, later in Act One. When Gurnemanz announces he will conduct Parsifal there, the medical amphitheatre begins to rotate. Around its outer circular backside it is a field of vertical bands of blue and white light that flow behind each other. Parsifal notes he is moving without walking and Gurnemanz makes his famous comment, “In this demesne, time becomes space,” a thing given an empty profundity in the post-Einsteinian age. It just means that truth is present, rather than somewhere else you have to go to: we have all had the experience that illumination gives us extra room and freedom to move in it. Wonderfully, when he is told this, Parsifal becomes unable to take the next step, halting and uncertain as we all find ourselves to be when we are over our heads in truth. The angel in the black dress helps him along, and Gurnemanz reaches out for him to take the leap and come across to him as a father teaches his child to swim.
The Second Act begins with the intense scene between Klingsor and Kundry. I can report there is still no need to look past Waltraud Meier for voice, acting ability, or womanness. Klingsor wears a black cape with a threatening red suit beneath. When he claims that he alone is immune to Kundry’s seductive powers and she reminds him it is because he castrated himself, she grabs him by the crotch. Then he takes off his black cloak and shows his threatening superman suit in red. There is already a bed on the stage, on the far left. Klingsor actually pushes her into it and gets on top of her, then gets up and rearranges himself. When it is time for the Flower Maidens to come on, everything slides left except the bed. Parsifal shows up and the maidens dally with him. The publicity photos show him tied to a chair wearing only the ungainly underwear of a Wagnerian tenor, but I can report that this stage is reached only gradually and doesn’t last long. For our purposes what needs to be said is that Parsifal goes with the flow.
Meier’s thousandth impossible portrayal of Kundry portrays most of the complexities. Her description of Herzeleide’s feelings turns her into Herzeleide; Parsifal’s discovery of the connection between his attraction for her and Amfortas’s lament comes as a disappointment to her at the same time as an access to a salvation she cannot believe is really real; her continued resorting to seduction falls on deafer and deafer ears; at the end she lies supine before him legs spread. Salient in this whole sequence is that at her penultimate attempt his shirt again comes off (for the second time in the act), but he dons instead the bedsheet as an improvised cape that makes him look like he has angel wings.
Act Three begins with a film instead of music, an excerpt from a 1947 movie by Rossellini of Nazi Berlin. The audience greeted it with catcalls. In the film a young boy clambers up into a building and unaccountably jumps to his death. The amphitheatre from Act I is in shambles. Kundry moans and Gurnemanz tries to revive her by massage. Parsifal returns, not in the heavy black armor of the libretto but the makeshift ragtag of anybody, bearing this huge spear.
The first tear jerker came when Gurnemanz and the nameless boy start serving the grail: Kundry and Parsifal are sitting beside each other on the ground looking at each other. The second, and climactic, was when Parsifal had healed Amfortas with the spear and had assumed the service of the Grail: Kundry and Amfortas, whose sin had brought them Parsifal who has now absolved them, may, and do, halting but resolute, run to each other and embrace. They have become two humans whose stupid lives have occasioned something sublime — how far from Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman and the hill of beans?
The orchestra played flawlessly. The remote horns and choruses spread throughout the hall were managed without error. The conductor, Harmut Haenchen, reached heightened crescendos where they really matter. And Stig Anderson, our substitute for Parsifal, filled in for an unorthodox reading without a glitch. The star of the show was of course Ms. Meier, whose acting in Act Three played as important a role as her singing in Act Two. – Kenneth Quandt
