New Met Parsifal

[Chaszz]

I'm going to see this new production on Feb. 27th, and wonder if anyone has seen it and has an opinion on it.

[bhodges]

I am also going on the 27th. There's an interesting little piece in this week's issue of The New Yorker (in the "Talk of the Town" section) about one of the (cough, cough) special effects. 

Reports from friends are mixed, mostly positive, with high praise for Jonas Kaufmann.

--Bruce

[Chaszz]

I saw this Wednesday evening. The visual production was a little too grim and colorless, browns, blacks and grays with occasional spotlighted whites, but apart from that was effective and even painterly. The groupings of the figures, and the landscape and cloud-shifting sky were superb and reminiscent of painters including El Greco, Le Nain, Ruisdael, Goya and Gericault. The solemn choreography and interactions among the characters was very moving and tender. I've never felt Amfortas's pain as much or in as prolonged a way as here, where he is unable to walk and carried around slumped between two men who are bowed over by his weight.   

Jonas Kaufmann, though not big-voiced, has a beautiful voice and was a great Parsifal. Rene Pape was superb as Gurnemanz. Peter Mattei was a great Amfortas, his voice beautiful though wracked with pain, self-pity and guilt, and Katarina Dalayman was a fine Kundry. Conductor Daniele Gatti could have provided a little more body and volume, but apart from that coaxed a marvelous evening from the great Met orchestra -- slow, measured, sonorous and mesmerizing. This, combined with the sensitive tenderness of the groupings, the choreography and interactions among the players, and the solemn sets, created a truly absorbing and engrossing Parsifal, almost overwhelming in its impact.

There has been advanced the notion that Wagner, not much of a Christian, in Parsifal used Christianity to symbolize a more universalist ethos, giving the public his philosophy of compassion filtered through the Christian mythology they lived with and could automatically understand.  He even started and abandoned a Buddhist opera once, and perhaps Parsifal is the Buddhist opera brought to completion under a veil of Christian symbolism. After all, he doesn't mention Christ's name once in the 5 hour work.

All that was hard to believe here, with the repeated returns to references to the Savior, the Grail, the Blood, the Flesh, the blood in the Grail Chalice refreshed by drops of Amfortas's blood, the Cross, how he died for our sins, drink my blood, eat my flesh, Good Friday, more blood, and on and on and on. It would seem that if Christianity here were a translucent cover, it would not need to be so concrete, specific, repeated and, yes, blood-laden.

My own opinion is that Christianity is here evoked as a myth which can work powerfully on the artist's audience, who are steeped in it to a greater extent than they are in the Norse myths. He has rewritten the myth in his own terms, much as he did the Norse myths, generalized it and here paralleled it with a new hero. But I think he means in the rewriting to have it resonate on a deeper level, to give society the religious experience through art that is lacking in the modern churches, rather than to have it stand for a different myth or set of myths. The overarching message of pity and compassion can after all be drawn out of a rewritten Christianity directly rather than out of Buddhism filtered through Christianity. In the spirit of Occam's razor, I think in Parsifal Christianity stands for -- Christianity.

This production was worthy of the composer's intent. If Wagner wanted to provide a substitute for religion in art, this atheist thinks and feels that goal was accomplished here.

[Wendell_E]

Thanks for the review.  I'm hoping to catch the "Live in HD" presentation this morning/afternoon, if I can get off from work early enough.

[Chaszz]

Thanks for the review.  I'm hoping to catch the "Live in HD" presentation this morning/afternoon, if I can get off from work early enough.

Und?

[Wendell_E]

I went. I saw.  I liked.  A lot.  Hope it comes out on DVD.