<<  -- 6 --  Malcolm Miller    THE BAYREUTH EXPERIENCE

Parsifal, 11 August 2005 :

Iconoclastic, challenging, provocative, witty, and sometimes gratuitous, ineffective, tasteless or just plain silly, this was a Parsifal to remember, an individual production by Christian Schlingensief that attested to the inspiring progressive spirit which may yet flower in Bayreuth. Of course the music was immaculate, conducted as it was by the eighty-year-old Pierre Boulez, still apparently as youthful in spirit as when he first conducted Parsifal at Bayreuth in 1961. The booing at the end of Acts I and III was a signal of the conservative attitudes in Bayreuth as well as of loyalty to the purist values of Wagner interpretation and especially that of Parsifal, which was written expressly for Bayreuth. Yet the boos aimed at the Director were drowned out by the cheers and ovations for singers and conductor.

The problem with the production was its departure from the extensive stage directions in the original work, particularly their Christian symbolism. Yet the work has undertones of wider issues and it is these which the producer, a young and dynamic enfant terrible of the German stage, has attempted to draw out in contemporary imagery. If there were shortcomings, it was in the efficacy of presenting these ideas rather than the ideas themselves, and in some sense any radical reading is bound to meet with resistance even from the most liberal listener and Wagnerian. One of the strengths of the designs were the quotations from popular culture, for example some pop-art cartoon props, Hollywoodesque Marilyn Munroe costumes for Kundry, and allusions to the symbolism of Dan Brown's best-selling, compelling pot-boiler The Da Vinci Code, in which the Holy Grail is connected with the eternal feminine, manifest as Mary Magdalene as progenitor of the biblical line of royal descent. Schlingensief goes further, apart from images of pentacles, roses and other symbols, he shifts the notion of a grail cup (the original Parsifal Grail hangs in the Wagner Museum in the 'Wahnfried') from metaphysical symbol rather questionably into a rather earthy tribal African sacrificial blood rite, involving dead animals and large naked women.

The traditional plot is recast in a colonial African context. The Act I Grail castle guarded by Gurnemanz is in fact a type of headquarters in some African state where the government is both white and Western: Robert Holl as Gurnemanz gave a commanding performance throughout with a towering bass voice, especially in Act III. Here the ramshackle buildings, the barbed wire and the African servants and militia spell colonial corruption. It is known that Schlingensief visited Namibia during his formulation of the production and introduced this African element at that point: for him it is a comment on an unsavoury aspect of Germany's colonialism and a particular massacre of tens of thousands, the 100th anniversary of which resulted in reparation claims which were not accepted, and thus is of contemporary relevance. Kundry was boldly portrayed by the American Michelle de Yong, shifting identities from glamorous model to raunchy militia, while Alfonz Eberz' passionately sung Parsifal was also the least dramatically involving, due to the over fussy cinematically inspired mechanics of the staging.

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