Speranza
Parsifal on Stage
Strange planetary alignments in Act II, from
the 2007 production in Naples.
On his first visit to
Bayreuth in 1882, the Swiss producer Adolphe Appia declared:
If every aspect of
the auditorium expresses Wagner's genius, everything the other side of the
footlights contradicts it. This criticism was echoed by the Irish dramatist G.B.
Shaw.
Although Wagner was the greatest dramatist of the nineteenth century, his
naturalistic stagings came to be regarded as backward-looking.
Yet there were
some who regarded the 1882 production of Parsifal as definitive (as Lucy
Beckett, in her Cambridge Handbook, still does); the increasingly dilapidated
sets for that production were used, with little modification, until
1930.
Right: Paul von Joukowsky's model for the magic garden of act
2, in the 1882 Bayreuth production. ©Cologne Theatre Museum.
Bayreuth
1918-1939
When Winifred Wagner tried to introduce a new staging, Wagner's
daughters Eva and Daniela circulated a petition, which declared that the
original sets on which the eyes of the Master had reposed possessed a timeless
validity and must be preserved.
This petition received the signatures of, among
others, Richard Strauss, Toscanini and Newman.
As a final resort, the old guard
appealed to Adolf Hitler for support.
But this was a grave miscalculation.
Winifred's chosen stage designer was Alfred Roller, who was also greatly admired
by the Führer, whose own sketchbook from Vienna in 1903 contains a drawing of
the second act of Roller's Tristan.
However, Roller's staging was, in essence,
little different from the original.
In 1937 this staging was replaced by
another, also stylistically conservative, by the young Wieland Wagner.
The only
innovation in this staging was the use of a projected film during the
transformation scenes.
In the reopening of the Bayreuth
Festival in 1951, Wieland Wagner shocked the Wagnerian world by adopting, in his
new staging of Parsifal, the minimalist ideas set out by Appia in his Basle
staging of Die Walküre.
Appia had seen that a naturalistic pictorial
representation, no matter how skilful, was unsuitable for Wagner's music.
He
preferred fully three- dimensional, semi- representational sets and exploited
the developing technology of stage lighting, just as Richard Wagner surely would
have done.
Under Appia's influence, Wieland turned the operas inside out,
preferring at first abstraction and later a pervasive psychological symbolism to
bring out the (Jungian and Freudian) mythic dimensions of the works. Ernest
Newman wrote in the Sunday Times:
This was not only the best Parsifal I have
ever seen and heard but one of the three or four most moving spiritual
experiences of my life.
Left: Friedrich's production for Bayreuth
1983. ©Bayreuther Festspiele.
In
staging Parsifal, the producer and designer are faced with challenges quite
different from those encountered in staging the Ring.
In the latter, abstract
concepts - renunciation, inheritance of the world, etc. - are initially
presented by characters, situations and events, which give them dramatic
precision and which anchor the motifs that appear later as reminiscences;
whereas in Wagner's last music-drama, the philosophical and spiritual absolutes
that are at the heart of the work are not resolved until the last act. Wieland
explored the symmetries and parallels in the work. For example, the parallels
between the situations of Amfortas and Kundry; the opposites of Titurel and
Klingsor; and the naturally unchaste Flower maidens contrasted with the
unnaturally chaste Grail Knights.
The
questions raised by this staging opened up many new possible views of the work
which have been explored by other producers and designers. In 1978, Harry Kupfer
mounted a radically new staging in Copenhagen, with designs by Peter Sykora,
which emphasized the human rather than the symbolic elements of the work. He
made a new ending for the work, in which Amfortas dies, and Parsifal leaves the
stage with Grail and Spear, followed by Kundry.
Left: Seattle
2003, producer: Françcois Rochaix, designer: Robert Israel. ©Chris
Bennion.
In Stuttgart, Götz Friedrich directed the work with a strong
focus on what he saw as the central issues, with the Grail Knights deeply
divided at the end of the work (as they appear to be in the score). Gunther
Uecker's designs were radical and highly symbolic: Klingsor's castle was an Iron
Maiden, a medieval instrument of torture, with an American- musical chorus of
Flower maidens. The sets divided the stage into three levels, and Friedrich
separated narration (on the forestage) from dramatic action (on the main stage)
and supernatural events (on the back stage).
Right:
In the Lehnhoff production (Chicago version) Kundry -- here seen attacking
Parsifal in act II -- was inexplicably dressed as a chicken. In this production
there was no physical Grail but only an orange glow, diffusing from somewhere
offstage.
Left: Parsifal goes clubbing in the second act of the
recent Paris Opéra production.
In other opera
houses, unfortunately, there were less imaginative productions by producers with
little or no insight into the work.
At Covent Garden, it was said by many that
the Terry Hands production, with designs by Farrah, was significantly improved
when a stage hands strike caused it to be given on a bare stage.
The failure of
this production was surpassed in inanity later at the same house, when Bill
Bryden set the action as an end-of-term play in a boarding school.
The most radical production to date must be that
of Robert Wilson at the Hamburg State Opera (later adapted for LA Opera).
In
this production, all of Richard Wagner's stage directions were discarded.
The
singers were required to move slowly with stylised gestures, accompanied by an
extremely complex lighting plot. During the transformation music, a giant
doughnut descended to mate with a pyramid. Nobody who saw it had any idea what
it was about, but some thought that it was unusually beautiful; which is, very
often, what a newcomer to the work experiences anyway. In the Amsterdam
production (directed by Grüber, with sets designed by Aillaud and Dobroschke),
later restaged for Madrid, the second act was dominated by a large white shark
suspended above the stage. When the production was reworked for Covent Garden,
this act took place underwater and the entire business was decidely
fishy.
Right: The violation of a doughnut: the Act I
transformation scene, in the LA staging by Robert Wilson. © LA
Opera.
Left: Act II from the recent Covent Garden production, in
which the flowermaidens became sea anemones. © ROH Covent
Garden.
We enter a new millennium, in
which there is much talk of new beginnings, it might be an appropriate time to
consider new possibilities for future productions of Wagner's last music-drama.
Of course, this is only part of the wider issue of how Wagner's music-dramas can
(or should) be presented on the modern stage. The momentum of New Bayreuth seems
to have been spent; although in the next few decades, no doubt there will be
some new productions inspired by those of Wieland Wagner; and there will also be
some that react against the New Bayreuth style. The neo-Brechtian
interpretations of the Berlin producers still seem to be regarded as models,
although these too are becoming reduced to clichés.
Today it might no longer
be possible to present Parsifal as a religious mystery play.
But the connection
between the work and religion (or more accurately, spirituality) remains strong,
however often producers may declare that they intend to dispense with all of the
religious or supernatural elements of the work (and in their place substitute
banality).
One aspect of Parsifal that seems to have been little explored,
except in the most superficial way, is the influence of Indian literature; even
though attention was drawn to this aspect of Parsifal as early as 1891 (in an
article by K. Heckel in the Bayreuther Blätter).
Not only Christian symbols, but
also those of Buddhism, and perhaps Hindu concepts too, were woven into this
work (but not voodoo symbolism, like that shown in the photograph below!).
Whilst it might not be possible to present the work as a coherently Buddhist
drama (which in my view it is not), the possibility of approaching Parsifal from
a Buddhist viewpoint seems to be promising and it is surprising that there has
been no serious attempt at such a production to date ¹.
Then there is the
intriguing possibility of a New Age production, with the Grail Temple as a stone
circle and a large crystal in place of Klingsor's mirror.
Above all the work must be presented from an understanding of the text, an understanding
that has been all too rare in Parsifal productions of recent decades.
There are
so many riches in the poem itself, so many subtleties to be made visible, that
it is quite unnecessary for producers to import alien concepts; they can leave
their baggage (and especially their decomposing rabbits) at the
door.
Right: Act II of Parsifal from the recent production in
Munich.
Another dimension that might be explored in new
productions is the spectacular, as in the Naples production shown at the top of
this page.
Wagner liked to be at the leading edge of stagecraft, however awkward
pictures of his own productions might appear today, it can be argued that to
fulfil his intentions, productions of his works should be kept at that leading
edge.
Below: A production of Heart of Darkness, from the Bayreuth
Festival for Decomposing Roadkill. ©Bayreuther
Festspiele.
Transformation scenes in which trees move around
the stage and become pillars of the Grail temple (an idea first suggested by
Adolpha Appia have become a tiresome cliché. Projection onto the cyclorama (a
technique that Bayreuth used as early as 1876) or back-projection onto screens
could be developed, given sufficient imagination, to produce spectacular
transformation scenes at a fraction of the cost of moving pillars2.
Wagner was a
pioneer in the used of electric lighting on stage (even in 1882 the Grail was
electric); state-of-the-art lighting was a vital element of the New Bayreuth
style; and recent Bayreuth productions have used laser effects. Given that many
recent productions have partly or completely dispensed with a Grail, it would
seem to be a good time to reverse this trend with a magic Grail that will
impress a modern audience as much as the electric Grail of 1882 must have
impressed the audience of that time. Kinder! macht Neues! Neues! und abermals
Neues! 3
Below: New concepts at Bayreuth 2008. Producer: Stefan Herheim,
Stage design: Heike Scheele, Costumes: Gesine Völlm, ©Bayreuther
Festspiele.
We are indebted to John
Musselman for information about the Nicolas Joël and Pet Halmen production of
Parsifal at the San Francisco Opera in 1988. This production featured a large
statue of the Buddha Shakyamuni and other Buddhist references. In the "Parsifal
on Stage" chapter of A Companion to Wagner's Parsifal, Katherine R. Syer notes
that in the Aarhus production of 1991, directed by Klaus Hoffmeyer with designs
by Lars Juhl, the knights were depicted as Buddhist monks.
Extensive use of projections was, indeed, a feature of the Schlingensief
"performance art" production. Unfortunately the projections were often more
visible than the action on the stage, which took place in Stygian
gloom.
Wagner writing to Liszt, 8 September 1852.
Saturday, February 23, 2013
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