Parsifal, and Wotan's Wolfgang's Farewell
Aug. 29th, 2008 05:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakParsifal is never going to be anyone’s favourite Wagner opera: too esoteric, and of course as with every Wagner opera you have the ongoing debate about whether or not the composer’s views are expressed in the work (and I’m not talking about the older Wagner’s enthusiasm for Buddhism, of which there is quite a lot of Parsifal). At the same time, Parsifal will never go entirely out of fashion, either. It wasn’t just Wagner’s last opera but the only one he wrote already knowing what an opera in the Festspielhaus would sound like, having produced the Ring there already, it contains some incredibly beautiful music, and there is nothing quite like listening to it in Bayreuth. It was the first opera I ever heard there, having gotten a ticket via a friend, more than a decade ago, it was this year’s new production, and it was the opera with which the 57 years of Wolfgang Wagner’s rule as head of the Bayreuth Festival ended, last night. Yours truly and the aged parents were in attendance, and it was captivating, at times highly irritating, and oddly touching.
Mum, self and friend at Bayreuth yesterday:
Some more background stuff, before I give you details on the Parsifal production. You see, the Wagner family is, just like the Mann family, a provider of real life soap opera that can compete against any old Ewings or Carringtons. *dates self with reference to 80s tv* Wolfgang, grandson of Richard, originally planned on retiring a couple of years ago. But he wanted first his second wife, Grudrun, and then their daughter Katharina to succeed him. Which the board of the foundation currently financing the festival was dead-set against and flatly refused. Whereupon Wolfgang retired from his retirement and declared he’d stay on some more years, hoping to wait them out on the Katharina question. Meanwhile, his late brother Wieland’s daughter Nike and his daughter from his first marriage, Eva, were also campaigning for the succession. In recent years, Katharina started a very skilful media campaign, got some productions of her own onstage elsewhere and then last year in Bayreuth, earning herself the reputation of something of a rough diamond/ a talented mess, depending on whom you ask. Meanwhile, the foundation suggested Eva, hoping old Wolfgang would find his older daughter acceptable. Also, she’s been heading the Avignon festival for years. She also shared an age with second wife Gudrun, and supposedly they cordially despised each other. Anyway, Wolfgang refused. Eva then allied with Nike and they petitioned the foundation together. It looked like a continued deadlock between Wolfgang and the Stiftungsrat (the foundation board), when suddenly this year, Gudrun Wagner died at age 63. Which nobody had expected; Wolfgang with his 89 years was the one whom everyone was counting to die very soon, especially considering last year he was already rather fragile.
This changed the situation entirely, because Katharina, who looks like one of nature’s skilful power players, stunned everyone by successfully approaching her older half sister and wooing her away from cousin Nike. Now Katharina and Eva petitioned the foundation board, with Wolfgang’s support. (To no one’s surprise, he declared he’d resign, with this year’s festival being his last; in the state he’s in, and without Gudrun, nothing else was imaginable.) The official decision by the board will be made next week, but nobody is betting on poor Nike anymore.
Anyway, in recent years, new productions, including Katharina’s Bayreuth debut last year with the Meistersinger, got rather mixed reviews. This year’s Parsifal, by contrast, got almost universal critical praise. How come? Well, now that I’ve seen it: for starters, as opposed to the Schlingensief fiasco a couple of years ago, Stefan Herheim, the director, actually came up with something that was both a concept and pure theatre. He made his three acts a quick run through German history from the Wilhelminian time the opera was written in till post WW II Germany. And he tied it very much to Bayreuth, as act I opens in what is clearly the villa Wahnfried (aka the house which Wagner build for himself in Bayreuth and where the family lived until the 1950s; today it’s a museum). Act I ends as the Wilhelminian age did, with everyone heading off to World War I; act II opens in a field hospital, with Klingsor’s flower maidens very much hallucinations of the wounded soldiers, and culminates, back in Bayreuth, in the appearance of the Nazis (first time the swastika has been shown there since World War II, and of course everyone and their opera glass in the audience was aware of the entire Winifred Wagner/Hitler backstory at that moment), resulting in the ruins familiar from the pictures of the bombed Bayreuth, and act III, the one about renewal starting among the ruins with Wolfgang’s and Wieland’s famous declaration opening the 1951 festival ( essentially “dear visitors, please don’t talk about politics, from now on, we’ll be about art” which was the quintessential 1950s attitude towards recent history; massive self confrontation and thorough examination of the Third Reich was something that didn’t start until the later part of the 1960s) and ending in the Bundestag and Parsifal accomplishing his salvation act by vanishing while through an effect with mirrors that was fantastic and among the most theatrical, in the best sense of the word, that I’ve ever seen, the audience in the festival themselves were projected both on stage and into the image of the world that had taken central place instead of Parsifal: no more messiahs and leaders, you can only save yourselves. What made this not-lecturing was that Herheim never drew direct analogies, i.e. nobody WAS Wilhelm, Hitler, or Adenauer – for example, Amfortas in act III confronting the Grail knights in the German parliament setting was very much the confrontation with the past hitherto avoided, the reminder that those wounds caused and wrongs committed are still there and have to be acknowledged instead of buried before any healing can be done, but he wasn’t standing in for any particular figure from post war German history - and all the singers portraying roles were directed to act as well as sing, not be caricatures relying on satire.
While this trip through German history was going on in the background, the actual plot was heavy on the Freudian imagery, which admittedly Wagner is asking for, in general as well as in Parsifal in particular, what with the crucial event that awakens Parsifal to awareness of sexuality and compassion both being a kiss a woman intent on seducing him explicitly claiming she is standing in for his mother. “Der Mutter letzten und der Liebe ersten Kuss” (“your mother’s last, your lover’s first kiss”), indeed. Herheim added a prologue played out through the overture in which we see Parsifal’s mother Herzeloyde die, and the child Parsifal, refusing to kiss her, running away; when he returns later, she has transformed into a seductive corpse, and on one level, you can interpret the entire rest of the opera as a guilt-ridden nightmare of a boy becoming adolescent, with Kundry – who is his nurse in the prologue and becomes an androgynous Marlene Dietrich avatar when the background action has arrived in the Weimar republic – inevitably becoming his mother’s doppelganger for the seduction scene. Then, interestingly, grown up Parsifal becomes her doppelganger for the last act, when he’s returning as everyone’s saviour; hair, costume, etc. are identical, and you get the implication they’ve saved each other (especially since Kundry does not die).
The singers were all in fine form. Now I’ve heard Kwangchul Yun, who played Gurnemanz, in all baritone roles Wagner has to offer, and he was superb as always. Mihoko Fujimura, who stole the show in the Götterdämmerung in her one scene as Waltraute and earlier in Rheingold as Erda two years ago, made an excellent Kundry, and Detlef Roth, who played Amfortas (complete with crown of thorns) wins both for singing and best pronouncing of words. Parsifal himself, who is the Wagner tenor with the least to do when it comes to leads but very tricky to get right if one doesn’t go for satire (he’s not an obnoxious teen with superpowers like Siegfried, or a suffering lover like Tristan), was sung by Christopher Ventris and pulled off the naiveté early on, the transformation scene with Kundry and the return-as-knowing-and-saving-through-compassion Parsifal in the last act.
If I have one complaint, then that the conductor evidently thought he had to compete with James Levine for slowness, and that I’m not sure the Third Reich appearance at the end of act II works entirely. I mean, I get the idea and the concept, and I think it’s a more thought out confrontation than Katharina Wagner’s brief allusion in last year’s Meistersingers, but letting the Nazis appear in Klingsor’s realm could be interpreted smacking of “the devil made them do it” excuses, though I’m sure by the rest of the production it wasn’t meant that way.
Now, once the orchestra had stopped playing there was much applause, and after the leading singers plus the conductor had taken their bows, the curtain openened and we didn’t just see the entire orchestra on stage (in t-shirts and jeans, which is a Bayreuth thing – the Bayreuth opera house is constructed in a way that keeps the orchestra entirely hidden from public view, so they can wear whatever they like, and usually it’s very very hot in Bayreuth in the summer, so no suits), but Wolfgang Wagner amid the singers. Which was when everyone got up and gave him a fifteen minutes standing ovation. Wolfgang got critisized for a lot of things over the years, with the way he pushed his younger daughter on the Wagner foundation just being most recent one, but he also got credited with a lot, from consistently trying to get challenging and inventive directors and conductors for the festival over the decades to supporting them despite his own taste being more traditionalist (the way he defended the legendary Chereau/Boulez Ring in the late 70s was a case in point; back then, the traditionalists were in uproar like you wouldn’t believe) to keeping the whole thing going and organized (Wieland died early). You look at him and see a living piece of theatre history, and since he manages to resemble both Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt, musical history; but of course you also look at him and are aware his mother Winifred adored Hitler and raised her children to call him “Uncle Wolf”. (Which makes Wolfgang W. probably the last living person on the planet who had used the “Du” form when addressing Hitler.) Of the whole dire history of anti-Semitism in the family, and so forth. It’s an odd, odd feeling. I’ve met him five times, and except for the last two, when he wasn’t in a good state of health and could hardly speak at all, found him interesting to talk to, with a sense of humour not that apparent from his press interviews and still curious about the world, with the subjects ranging from his late father’s (that would be Siegfried, one of those doomed son-of-a-genius types who composed as well but as Son-of-Richard never made a career out of it; he was also a repressed homosexual, hence the very late marriage to Winifred which produced Wieland, Wolfgang and Friedelind) ability to talk in Franconian accent and Hochdeutsch (= equivalent of BBC English) both to why Spaniards like Domingo are great for singing German opera (no problem with the ch, which throws native English speakers as well as the French) to favourite holidays (Hungary in his case). But there is no way you can bring up childhood friendships with mass murderers without either being insulting or trivializing, and so I didn’t.
Last night in Bayreuth when Wolfgang Wagner was on the stage making his farewell after more than five decades, there were a few individual hisses and boos, though I suspect these were more because of the succession question or Wolfgang as a director (his own last stage production was a Parsifal, too, but years ago – that was the first Bayreuth production I ever saw, with Domingo as Parsifal – it wasn’t wildly inventive, but solid, with good performances cajoled out of the singers) than because the older history. The hisses were drowned in the applause. As ways to leave the stage go, this was a good one.
Mum, self and friend at Bayreuth yesterday:
Some more background stuff, before I give you details on the Parsifal production. You see, the Wagner family is, just like the Mann family, a provider of real life soap opera that can compete against any old Ewings or Carringtons. *dates self with reference to 80s tv* Wolfgang, grandson of Richard, originally planned on retiring a couple of years ago. But he wanted first his second wife, Grudrun, and then their daughter Katharina to succeed him. Which the board of the foundation currently financing the festival was dead-set against and flatly refused. Whereupon Wolfgang retired from his retirement and declared he’d stay on some more years, hoping to wait them out on the Katharina question. Meanwhile, his late brother Wieland’s daughter Nike and his daughter from his first marriage, Eva, were also campaigning for the succession. In recent years, Katharina started a very skilful media campaign, got some productions of her own onstage elsewhere and then last year in Bayreuth, earning herself the reputation of something of a rough diamond/ a talented mess, depending on whom you ask. Meanwhile, the foundation suggested Eva, hoping old Wolfgang would find his older daughter acceptable. Also, she’s been heading the Avignon festival for years. She also shared an age with second wife Gudrun, and supposedly they cordially despised each other. Anyway, Wolfgang refused. Eva then allied with Nike and they petitioned the foundation together. It looked like a continued deadlock between Wolfgang and the Stiftungsrat (the foundation board), when suddenly this year, Gudrun Wagner died at age 63. Which nobody had expected; Wolfgang with his 89 years was the one whom everyone was counting to die very soon, especially considering last year he was already rather fragile.
This changed the situation entirely, because Katharina, who looks like one of nature’s skilful power players, stunned everyone by successfully approaching her older half sister and wooing her away from cousin Nike. Now Katharina and Eva petitioned the foundation board, with Wolfgang’s support. (To no one’s surprise, he declared he’d resign, with this year’s festival being his last; in the state he’s in, and without Gudrun, nothing else was imaginable.) The official decision by the board will be made next week, but nobody is betting on poor Nike anymore.
Anyway, in recent years, new productions, including Katharina’s Bayreuth debut last year with the Meistersinger, got rather mixed reviews. This year’s Parsifal, by contrast, got almost universal critical praise. How come? Well, now that I’ve seen it: for starters, as opposed to the Schlingensief fiasco a couple of years ago, Stefan Herheim, the director, actually came up with something that was both a concept and pure theatre. He made his three acts a quick run through German history from the Wilhelminian time the opera was written in till post WW II Germany. And he tied it very much to Bayreuth, as act I opens in what is clearly the villa Wahnfried (aka the house which Wagner build for himself in Bayreuth and where the family lived until the 1950s; today it’s a museum). Act I ends as the Wilhelminian age did, with everyone heading off to World War I; act II opens in a field hospital, with Klingsor’s flower maidens very much hallucinations of the wounded soldiers, and culminates, back in Bayreuth, in the appearance of the Nazis (first time the swastika has been shown there since World War II, and of course everyone and their opera glass in the audience was aware of the entire Winifred Wagner/Hitler backstory at that moment), resulting in the ruins familiar from the pictures of the bombed Bayreuth, and act III, the one about renewal starting among the ruins with Wolfgang’s and Wieland’s famous declaration opening the 1951 festival ( essentially “dear visitors, please don’t talk about politics, from now on, we’ll be about art” which was the quintessential 1950s attitude towards recent history; massive self confrontation and thorough examination of the Third Reich was something that didn’t start until the later part of the 1960s) and ending in the Bundestag and Parsifal accomplishing his salvation act by vanishing while through an effect with mirrors that was fantastic and among the most theatrical, in the best sense of the word, that I’ve ever seen, the audience in the festival themselves were projected both on stage and into the image of the world that had taken central place instead of Parsifal: no more messiahs and leaders, you can only save yourselves. What made this not-lecturing was that Herheim never drew direct analogies, i.e. nobody WAS Wilhelm, Hitler, or Adenauer – for example, Amfortas in act III confronting the Grail knights in the German parliament setting was very much the confrontation with the past hitherto avoided, the reminder that those wounds caused and wrongs committed are still there and have to be acknowledged instead of buried before any healing can be done, but he wasn’t standing in for any particular figure from post war German history - and all the singers portraying roles were directed to act as well as sing, not be caricatures relying on satire.
While this trip through German history was going on in the background, the actual plot was heavy on the Freudian imagery, which admittedly Wagner is asking for, in general as well as in Parsifal in particular, what with the crucial event that awakens Parsifal to awareness of sexuality and compassion both being a kiss a woman intent on seducing him explicitly claiming she is standing in for his mother. “Der Mutter letzten und der Liebe ersten Kuss” (“your mother’s last, your lover’s first kiss”), indeed. Herheim added a prologue played out through the overture in which we see Parsifal’s mother Herzeloyde die, and the child Parsifal, refusing to kiss her, running away; when he returns later, she has transformed into a seductive corpse, and on one level, you can interpret the entire rest of the opera as a guilt-ridden nightmare of a boy becoming adolescent, with Kundry – who is his nurse in the prologue and becomes an androgynous Marlene Dietrich avatar when the background action has arrived in the Weimar republic – inevitably becoming his mother’s doppelganger for the seduction scene. Then, interestingly, grown up Parsifal becomes her doppelganger for the last act, when he’s returning as everyone’s saviour; hair, costume, etc. are identical, and you get the implication they’ve saved each other (especially since Kundry does not die).
The singers were all in fine form. Now I’ve heard Kwangchul Yun, who played Gurnemanz, in all baritone roles Wagner has to offer, and he was superb as always. Mihoko Fujimura, who stole the show in the Götterdämmerung in her one scene as Waltraute and earlier in Rheingold as Erda two years ago, made an excellent Kundry, and Detlef Roth, who played Amfortas (complete with crown of thorns) wins both for singing and best pronouncing of words. Parsifal himself, who is the Wagner tenor with the least to do when it comes to leads but very tricky to get right if one doesn’t go for satire (he’s not an obnoxious teen with superpowers like Siegfried, or a suffering lover like Tristan), was sung by Christopher Ventris and pulled off the naiveté early on, the transformation scene with Kundry and the return-as-knowing-and-saving-through-compassion Parsifal in the last act.
If I have one complaint, then that the conductor evidently thought he had to compete with James Levine for slowness, and that I’m not sure the Third Reich appearance at the end of act II works entirely. I mean, I get the idea and the concept, and I think it’s a more thought out confrontation than Katharina Wagner’s brief allusion in last year’s Meistersingers, but letting the Nazis appear in Klingsor’s realm could be interpreted smacking of “the devil made them do it” excuses, though I’m sure by the rest of the production it wasn’t meant that way.
Now, once the orchestra had stopped playing there was much applause, and after the leading singers plus the conductor had taken their bows, the curtain openened and we didn’t just see the entire orchestra on stage (in t-shirts and jeans, which is a Bayreuth thing – the Bayreuth opera house is constructed in a way that keeps the orchestra entirely hidden from public view, so they can wear whatever they like, and usually it’s very very hot in Bayreuth in the summer, so no suits), but Wolfgang Wagner amid the singers. Which was when everyone got up and gave him a fifteen minutes standing ovation. Wolfgang got critisized for a lot of things over the years, with the way he pushed his younger daughter on the Wagner foundation just being most recent one, but he also got credited with a lot, from consistently trying to get challenging and inventive directors and conductors for the festival over the decades to supporting them despite his own taste being more traditionalist (the way he defended the legendary Chereau/Boulez Ring in the late 70s was a case in point; back then, the traditionalists were in uproar like you wouldn’t believe) to keeping the whole thing going and organized (Wieland died early). You look at him and see a living piece of theatre history, and since he manages to resemble both Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt, musical history; but of course you also look at him and are aware his mother Winifred adored Hitler and raised her children to call him “Uncle Wolf”. (Which makes Wolfgang W. probably the last living person on the planet who had used the “Du” form when addressing Hitler.) Of the whole dire history of anti-Semitism in the family, and so forth. It’s an odd, odd feeling. I’ve met him five times, and except for the last two, when he wasn’t in a good state of health and could hardly speak at all, found him interesting to talk to, with a sense of humour not that apparent from his press interviews and still curious about the world, with the subjects ranging from his late father’s (that would be Siegfried, one of those doomed son-of-a-genius types who composed as well but as Son-of-Richard never made a career out of it; he was also a repressed homosexual, hence the very late marriage to Winifred which produced Wieland, Wolfgang and Friedelind) ability to talk in Franconian accent and Hochdeutsch (= equivalent of BBC English) both to why Spaniards like Domingo are great for singing German opera (no problem with the ch, which throws native English speakers as well as the French) to favourite holidays (Hungary in his case). But there is no way you can bring up childhood friendships with mass murderers without either being insulting or trivializing, and so I didn’t.
Last night in Bayreuth when Wolfgang Wagner was on the stage making his farewell after more than five decades, there were a few individual hisses and boos, though I suspect these were more because of the succession question or Wolfgang as a director (his own last stage production was a Parsifal, too, but years ago – that was the first Bayreuth production I ever saw, with Domingo as Parsifal – it wasn’t wildly inventive, but solid, with good performances cajoled out of the singers) than because the older history. The hisses were drowned in the applause. As ways to leave the stage go, this was a good one.
