Wagner - Parsifal (Bayreuth, 2023)

Richard Wagner - Parsifal

Bayreuther Festspiele, 2023

Pablo Heras-Casado, Jay Scheib, Andreas Schager, Derek Welton, Georg Zeppenfeld, Elīna Garanča, Jordan Shanahan, Tobias Kehrer, Siyabonga Maqungo, Jens-Erik Aasbø, Betsy Horne, Margaret Plummer, Jorge Rodríguez-Norton, Garrie Davislim, Evelin Novak, Camille Schnoor, Julia Grüter, Marie Henriette Reinhold

BR-Klassik livestream - 25th July 2023

There is obviously more than one way to view an opera, particularly so in a work as rich, abstract and enigmatic as Parsifal, but this year's new production by American director Jay Scheib for the 2023 Bayreuther Festspiele actually went as far as delivering a production where the audience watching it could see two different productions playing out at the same time. The was achieved by 'augmented reality', allowing a small proportion of the audience (330 of the almost 2,000 capacity) to see enhanced elements while the majority got the plain vanilla version. As if there could be anything 'vanilla' about Parsifal. While I can't say much about the enhanced version - having watched the non-augmented reality version (or simply 'reality' as most people know it) via a livestream, I have doubts that it could offer anything more than the regular version. And even if that wasn't particularly revelatory, this Parsifal had a few interesting ideas and some fine musical and singing performances.

It's just my opinion of course, but no Wagner opera should be exempt from the kind of restless experimentation, updating, reworking, rethinking, modernisation, whatever you want to call it that Bayreuth often exercises in their stage productions of his works. Some works appear to be more suited to this than others, some are just incoherently thought out, but often they do succeed in inspiring new ways of considering some of the greatest works of opera. Parsifal has less surface narrative than most and is often interpreted in a wide variety of ways, but there are nonetheless deep important spiritual intentions in the work that should not be neglected. But if you can find other ways to tap into this, why not try?

Wagner's music score is more than capable of withstanding any conceptual conceit a stage director throws at it, and it can be just as intriguing hearing what the individual interpretation a conductor can bring to the pace, delivery and detail of the score. If you have that and when you have a good cast, you know the work has everything it needs, and anything else that the stage director decides to focus on is a bonus that you can choose to consider or not. As far as the new Bayreuth production is concerned, the musical under Pablo Heras-Casado is. I've liked others better, but that's just personal preference and as long as the purpose of the music and its relation to the underlying sentiments, philosophy, mood and drama is maintained - which it is here - then that's the basic minimum you can expect. The singing is essential also - you simply can't do Parsifal without strong experienced voices - and looking at the cast here for the roles of Gurnemanz, Parsifal and the Kundry here, there are no worries on that account, but it's supported also by fine performances in the roles of Amfortas, Klingsor, and Titurel. There can be few complaints, if any, on that score.

The deeper message of Parsifal lies in the musical expression, and perhaps even more in the responsiveness of the listener, all of which are more expressive than the relative and deceptive simplicity of the plot outline, which you would think would not allow for any great variance - although many directors have managed to successfully find other creative ways to relate to the underlying tone of the work. One can glance through past reviews here just to see how varied interpretations can be. This long preamble might suggest that I don't have a lot to say about this specific production that I haven't said before and which hasn't been expressed better in other productions - including of course Stefan Herheim's Parsifal at Bayreuth, which I have yet to say anything about - and to some extent it's true that there is not a lot that was inspired about this new version (non-augmented reality version anyway), but it was still good enough to impress.

Leaving aside the augmented reality aspect, one way a director can choose to impose or highlight a certain crucial aspect of Parsifal or any opera work, is by the use of additional silent actors. While most of us don't see the visual overlays, we do see at least one 'invisible' figure, a kind of mirror image of Kundry, or simply 'woman'. Gurnemanz upon waking, or in his waking moments, is seen grappling in the embrace of an unknown woman during the prelude. She appears to be a holy woman, judging from the image of a saint or holy figure on the back of her shirt, or perhaps just appears that way to the devout Gurnemanz. She remains in the background in Act I, tending to the unhealing wound of Amfortas and appears elsewhere throughout the work. Is she a mirror image or expansion of Kundry? In a work where the presence of woman outside of Kundry barely makes an impression other than to lead good righteous men into ruin, Kundry's expansive presence can be extended in a work where compassion is important.

And yet, although many other productions make a powerful Kundry central to the whole ethos and philosophy of the work, that aspect is not emphasised as much, or seemingly as central to the other significant spin that the director places on the work, which is in how the Grail and the worship of the Grail is depicted here. The Grail is shown as a large purple-blue crystal, but more than its physical presence, what it important is how it is depicted as something painful, an adherence to old traditions (and religions?), that need to be cast off for mankind to be free from the weight of the past in order to achieve transcendence. This is hinted at in the second Act, where there is a connection established between the Grail and the cavern where Klingsor resides, which is the same shape and colour as the crystal in Act I. This is taken through to Act III which goes as far as Parsifal destroying the 'grail', the crystal thrown to the ground and shattering into pieces.

Although pain and suffering has always been an essential part of Parsifal, the path to enlightenment being essentially a painful journey, it's a significant departure nonetheless to actually destroy the Grail at the conclusion. Yet somehow this doesn't really achieve the redemptive quality of the work that you expect, but there is clearly an effort made to tie it in with the transformative impact that all the principal figures - and even secondary ones - undergo. Personally, while the set design is at least wholly sympathetic to the work, I think the fine singing is key to bringing this together as successfully as it does. Act I at least has all the beauty, agony and magnificence you could hope for and expect, laying the seeds for what it proposed in the subsequent acts. The set is open and spacious, simple and abstract - a pool, a platform/bed/coffin, a high steel pillar and a circle of light that rises to fill the stage with light during the transubstantiation offering (this one very reminiscent of a Catholic mass communion processional), but it's Amfortas's pain and the performance of it from Derek Welton that hits the mark.

Act II is much more exotically coloured and lit than is usual for the garden of the flower-maidens, appearing genuinely enchanted (and I imagine even more so in the AR version) but again, what really brings it to life is the singing. The struggle between Klingsor and Kundry as he exerts his power over her is excellent, mainly on account of the performances and singing of Jordan Shanahan as Klingsor and Elīna Garanča as Kundry. Andreas Schager has a key role to play as Parsifal of course, and does so with characeristic intensity in this act. Building on the view of the Grail that this production takes, poor Sir Ferris exists as here as a blood splattered dummy in the background while Kundry attempts her seduction of Parsifal. Parsifal is moved to rip out his heart out and compare it to a stone, as he reflects on his failing to recognise what has prevented him from understanding Amfortas/The Saviour's suffering for our sins and begin the search for redemption. Schager makes it feel real and is matched by Garanca's expression of Kundry's torment. It's hard not to be won over, even if there is little that is new expressed here.

I can't say I've ever seen a production of Parsifal that matches the description stage directions for Act III as "A pleasant, open spring landscape with a background of gently rising flowery meadows". More often it looks more like a post-apocalyptic landscape. Here indeed the stage is dominated by some monstrous looking rock crushing truck that houses Gurnemanz, and by a crater in the centre of the stage that doesn't look much like a holy spring. The rock crushing extends then to Parsifal's destruction of crystal, ending the worship of the Grail and the ways of the past. This is also the idea emblazoned on the back of the shirts of Kundry and Parsifal, the former saying 'Forget Me', the latter 'Remember Me', the two of them united in the holy spring. Even Gurnemanz embraces his shadow Kundry. It would seem to have little to do with Wagner's idea of redemption, but it is impossible nonetheless not to be moved by the extraordinary beauty and majesty of this work and what it achieves across four hours.

That at least is supported by truly impressive singing performances and an outstanding chorus. Georg Zeppenfeld is his usual solid impressive Gurnemanz, with grave, clear intonation and authority. Andreas Schager sings with such intensity that he inevitably show a little bit of strain. Elīna Garanča makes her debut appearance at Bayreuth, but I've seen her sing the role of Kundry in an ambitious production of Parsifal at Vienna in 2021 (which interestingly doubled the role of Parsifal as they do with Kundry here). She is even more impressive here and takes the curtain call at the premiere of this new production to deservedly thunderous applause. Pablo Heras-Casado is warmly received for a consistent measured performance dramatically attuned to the stage, that nonetheless (although limited to the sound mix on the livestream) I thought sounded a little lacking in detail in places. There was inevitably a mixed reception for the production team, the louder boos trying to drown out what sounded in the main like welcome applause.

This was not a great production though. Depending on your view it fails to make the essential point of the work or you could think that it finds its own roundabout way around to it, but it has moments that are successful and it looks suitably impressive. Like many of the recent Bayreuth productions however it feels like a kind of halfway house between the extreme much-maligned but fascinating excesses of the last decade and a more traditional production that at least touches base with the original stage directions. The new developments like the use of AR here - which I've read about subsequently and it seems genuinely interesting if a little overdone (reminding me of an initial misguided and eventually rejected idea to do something similar in Robert Dornhelm's greenscreen experiments for his film version of La Bohème way back in 2006) - are welcome, showing a willingness to still trying to extend the word, the music, the significance and the legacy of Wagner into the future while at the same time trying not to lose the traditional unadventurous audience who expect something more respectful or reverential.

External links: Bayreuther Festspiele, BR-Klassik

Strauss - Elektra (Salzburg, 2020)

Richard Strauss - Elektra

Salzburger Festspiele, 2020

Franz Welser-Möst, Krzysztof Warlikowski, Aušrinė Stundytė, Tanja Ariane Baumgartner, Asmik Grigorian, Derek Welton, Michael Laurenz, Tilmann Rönnebeck, Matthäus Schmidlechner, Sonja Sarić, Bonita Hyman, Katie Coventry, Deniz Uzun, Sinead Campbell-Wallace, Natalia Tanasii, Valeriia Savinskaia, Verity Wingate

ARTE Concert - 1 August 2020

Back in 2013, Krzysztof Warlikowski set the Munich production of Richard Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten in an asylum. That's not a particularly original way to deal with such a wonderfully colourful and rich fairy-tale, but it remained largely effective through the power of Strauss and Hofmannsthal's extraordinary vision, with its psychoanalytical undercurrents that Warlikowski was careful not to dilute with too many distractions or modernisms. If there's ever a Strauss opera that deserves to be set in a mental institution though it's Elektra, where the mental disintegration of its lead figure as scored by Strauss is even more extreme than that of the preceding Salome (also recently reworked by this director). Warlikowski doesn't explicitly set this 2020 Salzburg production of Elektra in an asylum, but for all the aberrant behaviour on display in the House of Atreus, it might as well be.

As is often the case it's difficult and usually not particularly instructive to deconstruct Warlikowski's intentions or examine too closely how they align with the themes of the work in question, particularly when he goes overboard in cinematic references such as in the recent production of The Tales of Hoffmann. Some of the director's familiar mannerisms are there in the Salzburg Elektra, but mainly evident only in the set design of his partner and regular collaborator Małgorzata Szczęśniak. They take full measure and width of the Felsenreitschule venue in Salzburg to create a huge (socially distanced) space for the work, much wider than the usual claustrophobic set usually reserved for this intense work. If there's a method to this, it can only be to rise to the scale of the orchestration itself, and in terms of that and Franz Welser-Möst's conducting of the Vienna Philharmonic, it certainly gives full expression to the opera's immense forces.

One side of the stage does indeed have the look of a rundown asylum, with a long narrow communal bath and row of showers with rust stained steel walls on Elektra's side of the House. The water from the shallow pool causes flickering reflections that highlight and suggest the constant uncontrolled agitation of Elekra's mind over the murder of her father Agamemnon and her desire for vengeance upon her mother Clytemnestra. The other side of the stage holds a glass panelled interior room of the palace where Clytemnestra and her maids are bathed in blood red lighting, Warlikowski using video cameras to project what goes on inside. In its totality the set effectively creates an environment that simultaneously reflects the internalised emotions barely controlled by external appearances.

Other than that Warlikowski sticks fairly closely to the ample expression that is already there in the music with few of the distractions or diversions that you usually find with this director. There is an autopsy, a few stray figures who wander dazed onto the stage, some dummies of children, but there are no dancer interludes and no short film introduction, although the scene is set with a recital of backgrounding text before the opera starts. With the spirit of Agamemnon made present, it's clear then that the director wants to bring motivation and characterisation to the fore and, aligned with the score, it's impossible not to feel Elektra's pain on a deep and visceral level which, without taking away from the quality of the poetry and the psychological depths explored, is surely where opera is most successful and notable.

Crucially, you can't really achieve that level of dramatic intensity without an Elekra to match it and, well, there was little doubt that on her recent performances of growing power and intensity, Aušrinė Stundytė would be capable of measuring up to it. It's an outstanding performance, the Lithuanian soprano as ever almost completely immersed in character (to be completely immersed would surely be next to madness). But a damaged Elektra can't work in isolation. Warlikowski takes care not to present Clytemnestra as a domineering caricature and sung by Tanja Ariane Baumgartner, we see a more troubled and not unsympathetic figure who has been a victim of circumstances, but still very dangerous. Asmik Grigorian also permits you to have some sympathy for the usually wet Chrysothemis, the force of her delivery undoubtedly contributing to the success of that characterisation.

Make no mistake however, violence, madness and death are the inevitable outcome, deliriously unravelled in Strauss's extraordinary score and put into words in Hugo von Hofmannsthal's very distinctive and poetically rich spin on Sophocles' version of the Greek tragedy. For all the beauty of the language, it distills the essence of the drama down into the big questions and conflicts of life and death, hatred and love, family bonds and debts of honour, irreconcilable extremes that descend into madness and death. Krzysztof Warlikowski effectively visualises that violent climax with large scale projections of splattered blood and masses of flies. Whether you follow it or just feel it, the Salzburg production as a whole certainly succeeds in doing justice to one of the greatest opera works of the 20th century, still capable of leaving you almost breathless and in shock.

Links: Salzburg Festival, ARTE Concert

Wagner - Lohengrin (Dresden, 2016)

Richard Wagner - Lohengrin

Semperoper, Dresden - 2016

Christian Thielemann, Christine Mielitz, Georg Zeppenfeld, Piotr Beczala, Anna Netrebko, Tomasz Konieczny, Evelyn Herlitzius, Derek Welton, Tom Martinsen, Simeon Esper, Matthias Henneberg, Tilmann Rönnebeck 

ARTE Concert 

Although there are many more interesting ways of exploring the themes within them, you can probably get away with presenting Der fliegende Holländer or Tannhäuser in straightforward traditional productions and trust that Wagner's compositions will speak for themselves. The composer's more mature works on the other hand have philosophical content and personal with complex and competing layers and levels that merit the deeper exploration and elaboration of a strong directorial vision. And then you have the problem of Lohengrin.

Lohengrin remains a tricky and a controversial work to approach on account of its nationalistic sentiments and the later appropriation of them by Hitler and the Nazis, who twisted those ideals to appeal to their own ideology of national and racial purity. Wagner's own view is rather more nuanced - although perhaps not quite so much in this work where the composer was just beginning to formulate a view of art, culture, tradition and mythology (to which he was making a not entirely modest contribution) as the founding common values that define a nation, a banner under which to put one's faith and trust as much as in any ruler or religion.

Those values espoused in Lohengrin are perhaps not the same values that persist today, so either the work has to be considered in the context of the time it was written or it must be re-evaluated for its relevance to the present day. Wagner, as a composer, is far too important for his works to remain stagnant relics of a past time. To play the opera straight and ignore the historical legacy of the work however is surely negligent and potentially troubling, but if there is a place where those somewhat conservative values can still have meaning and resonance, it's Dresden.

Christine Mielitz's production of Lohengrin for the Dresden Semperoper in May 2016 is resolutely period and traditional, the treatment serious and respectful, with not a trace of irony or a whiff of modernism. The sets and costumes are lavish, the inhabitants of Brabant all dressed as wealthy burghers and nobles, with even the common people who stray into the dispute over the Duchy that King Heinrich has been called to resolve - and who will no doubt be called upon to fight in his God-ordained war with Hungary - also seemingly dressed in neatly cleaned and pressed rags.

The direction holds to a straight representation of the original stage directions and a broad view of the characterisation. There's no exploration for any deeper or more nuanced characterisation: good and evil hold to their strict Manichean divisions. There's no experimentation or commentary on the work's themes, no rats in a Hans Neuenfels' Bayreuth laboratory, just complete adherence and blind faith in the ability of Wagner's music to speak for itself, just as the work appears to advocate putting one's faith and trust in God and King Heinrich to point the way towards keeping a nation pure. And with a music director like Christian Thielemann at the helm at the Semper that faith isn't entirely misplaced.

Having established (at some length) that there's not a lot to grasp onto here in terms of concept or direction, the Dresden production has more to offer in terms of actual performance. Thielemann captures the full extent of the warm lush Romantic strains of the score, and the choruses are just glorious. Wagner's music for Lohengrin practically glows here. It's in the division of the singing roles however that the interest is likely to be focussed, with seasoned traditional Wagnerians on one side of the divide and a somewhat less conventional line-up on the other side. All perform very well indeed, if not quite in the way you would expect, but the contrasting styles do bring an interesting dimension to the work that isn't otherwise there in the stage production and the direction.

On the Wagnerian 'dark side' (if I may also include Heinrich in there), I have to get Georg Zeppenfeld out of the way first, since his performance as Heinrich is every bit as reliably brilliant as you might expect, particularly if you've seen him sing this role faultlessly and with considerable character several times already. Although he can sing with more colour and expression in Strauss, I find that Tomasz Konieczny's baritone singing for Wagner sounds rather harsh and steely. It's perhaps a little better suited to the villainous Telramund here than Wotan however. Evelyn Herlitzius can also be variable in her Wagner roles, and her high pitch and delivery sounded a little too close to toppling right over the edge, but again that can work within the context of the characterisation for Ortrud, and Herlitzius, as she often does, certainly makes an impression.

The Wagner virgins (if I may be permitted to describe them as such) are nonetheless two of the finest singers in the world today, better known for their performances in the very different Italian and principally Verdi repertoire. Who wouldn't be fascinated to hear Anna Netrebko and Piotr Beczala sing the roles of Elsa von Brabant and Lohengrin? Netrebko had at least road-tested the role of Elsa just prior to her performances in Dresden with a run at the Mariinsky in Moscow, and she's typically assiduous in her preparation and technique, demonstrating here that she is well up to the demands of the role. Her German diction leaves something to be desired however, her enunciation rather woolly and almost completely indecipherable.

That aside - and it will be a bigger deal for some to dismiss so easily - her dramatic performance is good and it really is fascinating just to hear that type of voice and the sheer quality of Netrebko's voice in this role. The same goes almost exactly for Piotr Beczala, particularly when Klaus Florian-Vogt's distinctive light lyrical tone has more or less monopolised the role of Lohengrin in recent years. It's not exactly a Heldentenor voice, but there is a heroic delivery and brightness here, Beczala taking on the role with the kind of confidence and charisma that it requires. If Mielitz's direction doesn't have anything new to bring to Lohengrin, Netrebko luxurious tones and Beczala's warm brightness blend gorgeously with the golden glow of Thielemann's conducting in a way that suggests a whole new way of hearing the work.

Links: Dresden Semperoper, ARTE Concert