There is the grail, the spear, the wound that will not heal. There is a solemn, life-sustaining ritual. There’s a false paradise and an outsider who will redeem all. Even by Wagner’s standards, Parsifal is a heavily symbolic work – and nowhere more than at Bayreuth. It was the only work composed specifically for this theatre’s acoustic and for decades, Wagner’s family prevented performances elsewhere.
Despite such significant baggage, this latest revival of Jay Scheib’s 2023 production provoked only half-hearted booing amid energetic applause for the musicians. The grail has become a large blue crystal accompanied by a light show. Kundry, the femme fatale, gets an avatar who seduces the usually unimpeachable Gurnemanz as the curtain rises, while filmed in closeup. The filming continues as Amfortas’s wound is unwrapped, poked and slowly sewn up, the nauseating results dominating Act 1 from a stage-wide screen. The evil sorcerer Klingsor is a kind of dodgy uncle in pink velvet, dry-humping the stolen spear; his flower maidens occupy a luridly decorated concrete dungeon where the corpses of previous visitors lie on bloody mattresses and Parsifal is stripped down to what look like a tween’s pyjamas, hearts galore. Violence is ubiquitous. There is no “good” here, just shades of “complicated.” The result is both bleak and emotionally monochrome.
Musically there was more variety. Miina-Liisa Värelä’s Kundry exuded goth energy, her low notes chilling, her melodies all liquid ferocity – bewitchingly joined up where Andreas Schager’s Parsifal tended towards fragmentary notes and syllables when he wasn’t singing at full pelt. Georg Zeppenfeld was an appealing Gurnemanz, his bass-baritone glowing and supple, and Vitalij Kowaljow a vigorously stentorian Titurel. Jordan Shanahan (Klingsor) used his bass like a weapon, hard-edged and sleek. As Amfortas, Michael Volle roared and raged but was most compelling in his painfully lyrical outbursts in Act 3. The chorus was well blended, its diction crystalline. Under Pablo Heras-Casado, the orchestra was inconsistent. Intonation and ensemble in Wagner’s chordal motifs were unreliable, the smallest problems laid bare in this softly lucid acoustic. Yet elsewhere the subtle symphonic fabric reached seamlessly from exquisitely textured detail to swathes of almost infinite richness.
· Parsifal continues at the Bayreuth festival until 25 August.
