Wagner - Parsifal (Budapest, 2022)

Richard Wagner - Parsifal

Hungarian State Opera, 2022

Balázs Kocsár, András Almási-Tóth, István Kovácsházi, Andrea Szántó, András Palerdi, Michele Kalmandy, István Rácz, Károly Szemerédy, Eszter Zavaros, Anna Csenge Fürjes, Tivadar Kiss, Barna Bartos, Lilla Horti, Ildikó Megyimórecz, Lusine Sahakyan, Beatrix Fodor, Boglárka Brindás, Melinda Heiter, Bea Egyed, Laura Fehér, Virág Rovó, Judit Németh, József Mukk, András Káldi Kiss, Benjámin Taba, Milos Katonka

OperaVision - 15th April 2022

Parsifal is not like any other opera, and not just because Wagner called it a Bühnenweihfestspiel "A Festival Play for the Consecration of the Stage" for Good Friday. It operates on a deep level beyond the surface narrative, exploring issues of faith and brotherhood, the common condition of being human in infinite space and time as a physical being and a spiritual one, the condition of living through pain, the desire to seek release and redemption. So all-encompassing is its view of humanity that even that is a poor and inadequate description of a work that I have barely scratched the surface of in many reviews, so evidently it's going to be even more difficult for a director bringing it to the stage and seeking to illuminate a part of the work or even more ambitiously, the whole.

What should be more evident if you can't follow the narrative or probe its underlying meaning, is that the music expresses what Parsifal is about and touches the listener much more directly than any idea a stage director might have. It's always interesting to see what a director chooses, how ambitious he is, how successful he is, and I personally never fail to find something new in this music drama each time someone else works with it. I'm not sure how successful or ambitious the 2022 Good Friday production directed by András Almási-Tóth for Budapest will be seen to be, but it has some ideas that get across the intent of the work, which regardless impresses by the sheer majesty and unparalleled brilliance and beauty of the work itself.

In fact the first idea that this production seems to employ is one similar to the recent Vienna State Opera production. A little confusingly it tells us during the opening scene that the events have already taken place, that the fellowship of the Knights of the Holy Grail has fallen, Amfortas no longer able to sustain them through the painful ritual of revealing the Grail. Using a double actor for the young Parsifal, the older man looks back on the events that took place when he first arrived at Montsalvat with some measure of regret at his foolishness and naivety.

It's an idea that works well enough and a little better than the Vienna production since it doesn't try to extend this division throughout the whole work. It also succeeds in choosing to have the events of the opera take place in a fairly neutral setting. Act I looks like it is set in a car showroom with large windows, not some mythical land or castle of Montsalvat. The knights wear modern dress but retain some of the ceremonial trappings of the knights, some wearing puffer jackets others armoured breastplates.

As far as the key scenes of Act I go within this setting, the director retains some of the formality of the rituals and traditions, the communion the brotherhood of the Knights with the Grail. ​The Verwandlungsmusik scene takes on a Stanley Kubrick 2001: A Space Odyssey-like aspect, going down a wormhole of kaleidoscopic lights. Act I ends with the young Parsifal wandering about the stage lost, moved but unsure what he has witnessed. His eyes have been opened but there is a long journey ahead to understand and fulfil his own role in bringing a message of redemption for mankind.

In Act II the Flowermaidens are dressed in white robes and garlands in a scene of pagan worshipping around trees in the courtyard of Klingsor's castle. Some semi-naked nymphs are draped over branches like forbidden fruit. Adam and Eve figures, looking lost, briefly appear in the moments up to Parsifal's kiss of revelation with Kundry, when he is struck with a deeper understanding of love and compassion. It's at this moment that the young silent actor playing Parsifal disappears and István Kovácsházi's mature singing Parsifal takes his place in the scenic drama.

Act III returns to the Montsalvat that we saw initially, showing the change that has happened in the years of Parsifal's wandering. It's a bare room with a bed on one side and swan in a glass case on the other. Kundry raises the screen to reveal the returned enlightened Parsifal as a knight in black armour holding the spear. The idea of a return to innocence, kindness and redemption is shown in a doubled scene where a second Kundry washes the feet of a child, a motherly gesture that is key to Parsifal's understanding of love and compassion, as well suggesting the Christian ritual washing away of sin through baptism and anointment; an attainment of purity and rebirth. The barren world is also reborn, surrounding the room with projections of green forest that dissolve into bold key leitmotif words and phrases from the opera; 'die Wunde', 'der reine Tor', 'der Speer', 'der Graal'.

Whether any of this adds anything new to the work is debatable, but certain elements come to the fore and, such is the nature of this work, there are a variety of personal interpretations that will depend on the receptiveness of each individual viewer and listener. Kundry, as is often the case, can be the key to the work and stood out for me here. She - moreso than Amfortas - represents humanity's progress, her endurance of suffering, shame and failure throughout the ages, longing for peace and sleep, for release, to be relieved of the weight of knowledge. She is the past that humanity wants to reject or deny, and is scorned by the Knights who aspire to more noble aims. Aspects of her pain and foolishness and attainment of purity are replicated and given other dimensions by the Knights of the Grail, the suffering of Amfortas, the conflict and innocence of Parsifal.

Similarly, no matter how you continually attempt to reduce the work down to narrative, themes and descriptive words, it always fails to adequately convey what Parsifal is about. It's a work that gains in weight and meaning with each passing year, with each new performance and production, accumulating history, connecting humanity with the modern world and what is currently going on. If you want to see the current conflict in Ukraine in it, it's there, so all-encompassing is the work, and it doesn't even need a director to make that explicit. It's there inside the individual to bring their understanding and experience of the world to it. Wagner's Parsifal is a supreme work of art in that respect, living and open to continual re-evaluation, never to be pinned down to one thing or another.

It is nonetheless performance art and interpretation is relevant. Here conducted by Balázs Kocsár at the recently renovated and reopened Ybl Palace in Budapest it came across as powerfully as it should. The strongest performances here I felt were from Michele Kalmandy as Amfortas and Andrea Szántó as Kundry. There was nothing special about the interpretation, but both sung it well. The same could also be said of András Palerdi as Gurnemanz and István Kovácsházi as Parsifal, although both were just a little under-powered, lacking the emotional depth for the expression of compassion. István Rácz was a fine Titurel.

Henze - Elegy for Young Lovers (Armel, 2016)

Hans Werner Henze - Elegy for Young Lovers

Franz Liszt Academy Budapest, 2016

Gergely Vajda, András Almási-Tóth, Kim Boram, Ákos Ambrus, Botond Ódor, Karina Szigeti, Lusine Sahakyan, Diána Kiss, Alexandra Ruszó, Viktória Varga, Xénia Sárközi, Kristóf Widder

Armel Opera Festival/ARTE Concert - 2 July 2016

Hans Werner Henze's idea of opera is very much a theatrical one, where the music is in service to the drama and capable of expressing deeper psychological levels. Elegy for Young Lovers in particular is a dramatic ensemble piece that delves into the lives of a diverse group of characters and attempts to show different sides to their personality and to how they interact with one another. Using multiple singers for several of the roles, the Armel Opera Festival performance of the Franz Liszt Academy of Budapest's production could be said to be an attempt to give as much of an insight as possible into Henze's musical expression of the drama and the complexities of the characterisation of Elegy for Young Lovers, or it might just unnecessarily complicate it further.

Dealing with the subject of a temperamental poet who uses his close friends and acquaintances as little more than material for his masterpieces, Elegy for Young Lovers is an attempt at a deconstruction of the Romantic ideal of the artist. It's intended to be much in the same vein as the operas of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, but even as they recognised that there was no place for such ideals in the world they lived in, you can still detect a fond reverence and nostalgia for the loss of beauty in a more innocent age in Strauss and Hofmannsthal's Ariadne auf Naxos, Arabella and Der Rosenkavalier.

With a libretto by W.H. Auden and Chester Kalman, the callous poet supposedly based on W.B. Yeats, the treatment is a little less sentimental in Elegy for Young Lovers. Hofmannsthal is even openly referenced in the libretto, as Gregor Mittenhofer - working in his retreat at a hotel in the Alps - reads scornfully through the critical reviews of his latest work, contemptuous of the praise of lesser artists. He's no more interested either in the people that surround him other than for how he can use their own personal troubles and reactions to inform his own work. He's not beyond stirring them up either, manipulating and mistreating them just so he can get a reaction that he can use.

That's largely fine as far as Lina his secretary and Wilhelm his doctor are concerned; they are well used to Mittenhofer's temperamental behaviour and carry on regardless. Even if they receive no thanks for their efforts, they are happy enough to sing their own praises. Elizabeth however is a different matter. The young woman has flattered herself that she is Mittenhofer's muse, and as such is uncertain about whether she should marry Toni, the son of Dr Reischmann, who is in love with her. She decides to tell the poet about Toni but Mittenhofer is surprisingly magnanimous, even encouraging them to set off together, although conditions are somewhat dangerous out there on the Hammerhorn at the moment.

The reason Mittenhofer isn't particularly concerned is that he is currently writing a work called 'Elegy for Young Lovers', and is unhappy about the "emotional untidiness" that exists (in real life and in the work), and it needs to be cleared up. Setting Toni and Elizabeth up to face the world together in a potentially doomed Romantic relationship on the Alps, the young woman forsaking her higher calling for love, should provide the kind of drama that should inspire him to great poetic heights.

There are a number of other characters in the opera, including Hilda Mack, a lady whose husband disappeared 40 years ago, and whose body Josef reports has recently been brought down by the glacier. There is consequently very much an ensemble nature to the work, a puzzle of characters whose lives and reactions are used, manipulated and exploited by the poet, with no real concern for their feelings. Henze's complex theatrical sound world is very much attuned to those rhythms, fitting mood to situation and using the voice as a highly expressive instrument.

The Franz Liszt Academy production uses multiple singers in two of the roles in an attempt it seems to master the challenges of the score as much as to elucidate the behaviour of the characters. Elizabeth is played by no less than three young sopranos here, one who is in love with Toni and uncertain about her position with the poet, one who confesses her love to Mittenhofer and is confused over his reaction, and a third who is the one who leaves and becomes the idealised fictionalised version that the poet has created to resolve this messy dilemma. There are likewise two Hilda Macks in this production, one who is the Romantic ideal of the woman whose husband died on the Alps, the other the rather more prosaic reality.

Strauss and Hofmannsthal, for all their post-modern play on their subjects, might have had a little too much affection for the Romantic ideal to be properly critical of it, but that ambiguity works in their favour. It's difficult to find the same redeeming qualities in Henze's Elegy, or at least the necessary ambiguity of a genuine human response to the subject. It's a little too clinical, and at the same time, it's not really edgy enough, although that is something that is perhaps more to do with the performances. I'm sure Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, the original Mittenhofer, might have presented a more nuanced reading of the poet than Kim Boram - singing in a competition role here - but the singing and the stage presentation are all good nonetheless in this Armel Festival production of an undoubtedly challenging work.

Links: ARTE Concert, Armel Opera Festival