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Wagner’s
final opera is an
extended meditation
on the devastation
of sexual longing.
There is only one
redemption:
resistance. Eros
must turned into
agape -- passion
into compassion.
Wagner based his
libretto on
Christian themes,
using the story of
Perceval, the
Innocent Fool from
the Arthurian
legends of the
Grail. But as a
Schopenhauer adept,
he also leaned on
the Buddhist
principle of letting
go of desire (the
will) to reach
compassion.
The original legend,
in the German
tradition of Wolfram
von Eschenbach, is
very simple: Naïve
and uneducated young
Parsifal witnesses
the agony of the
Grail’s king,
Amfortas (from a
wound contracted by
giving in to lust)
without asking the
healing question:
“What ails
you?” The
innocent fool is
expulsed and, after
twenty years of
wandering in
repentance, gets a
second chance. By
finally expressing
compassion he
redeems Amfortas and
himself and becomes
the new king.
Wagner’s libretto moves the back story about the king’s incurable
wound into the center. It’s all about the fall from grace, from
knightly virtue into the arms of a “terribly beautiful woman.” This
woman is Kundry, a witch who flits through the Arthurian
legends. For Wagner, she must serve the impure knight Klingsor
who tried to control his desires by emasculating himself, but was
still rejected by the saintly brotherhood. The whole second act
reenacts the seduction that got Klingsor his revenge when he
wounded the besotted king with his own spear. This time around,
Kundry tries her “devilish” charms on Parsifal. She must prevent
him from reclaiming the spear and breaking Klingsor’s spell. In
Wagner’s telling, only the sacred spear, supreme symbol of
virility, can repair the damage of surrendering to a woman.
Matthew Ozawa’s Approach
Parsifal has not been performed for a quarter century at SF
Opera. The new production by Matthew Ozawa is a compelling,
interesting attempt to tone down the heavy Christian symbolism
in the story. With beautiful, minimal sets by Robert Innes
Hopkins and striking costumes by Jessica Jahn, Ozawa floats the
opera in a cross-religious-philosophical space. He uses ritual,
often slow-motion movements and dance (choreography by Rena
Butler) to create a sensuous, poetic atmosphere, makes space for
women and invites a contemporary audience to engage.
Ozawa’s concept perfectly harmonized with the orchestra’s
shimmering, lyrical rendition of the score under music director
Eun Sun Kim. Her conducting allowed the singers an almost
belcanto tonality in their extended monologues. Korean bass
Kwangchul Youn as Gurnemanz and SF Opera’s stalwart tenor
Brandon Jovanovich as Parsifal did not have to strain to be
heard, and the SF Opera chorus was impressive in its subtle
layers on- and offstage. Baritone Brian Mulligan as Amfortas was
particularly expressive and gripping in his agony and remorse.
Klingsor’s bullying was easy sport for German bass baritone Falk
Struck. Swiss mezzo soprano Tanja Ariane Baumgartner
rendered Kundry’s grief and feverish outbursts with radiant
conviction in her SF Opera debut.
Production Notes
Right from the start, while Wagner’s searing prelude is heard, the stage opens with intriguing images. Two sets of beds with
sleepers, evoking the monkish simplicity of bunk beds, separate
and one set, linked by a long braid, drifts upward into the art
nouveau foliage of trees. A dream? A levitation? When the old
master instructor, the knight Gurnemanz, wakes the remaining
two sleepers, they are young women, and they, too, are linked by
a single long braid.
The surprises keep coming. The knights appear in white pant
suits with a touch of Cubism, and their headdress evokes a nun’s
wimple as much as an Asian warrior’s helmet. King Amfortas’s
ample robe comes with a grand “satellite” collar. His wound is a
gleaming pink circle of light on his torso. His archenemy Klingsor
shows off a naked torso in a butcher’s apron with vast sashes that
billow with smoke. At the temple of the Grail, three tall dancers
(a woman and two men) perform ritual gestures and turn like
dervishes in carmine coats and intriguing sculpted hats. Parsifal
looks like a youngster sprung from the forest. The sacred swan he
has killed hangs in the tree tops, gleaming with a brilliant red
wound.
Kundry shows up as a world traveler in a shaggy bear coat,
unkempt and wild, before changing in Act II into a sensuous
muslin robe in Egyptian style– the same robe worn by Parsifal’s
mother Herzeleide (Heart’s Sorrow), a dancer who appears to
great effect whenever Herzeleide is mentioned. Both women
have the shiny black hair of legends, reaching to their heels.
When Gurnemanz guides Parsifal to the temple, accompanied by
one of Wagner’s magnificent orchestral interludes, the stage
starts to rotate in double directions and the walk turns into slow
spiritual anticipation. Parsifal watches the ceremony without a
clue, but there is a moment when he spontaneously mirrors the
paroxysm of Amfortas’s pain in his own clenching body. Sent
away afterwards, he is drawn back to the center where the chalice
of the Grail was revealed, and reaches out to it with a gesture of
longing.
In Act II, Jovanovich is convincingly overwhelmed by the
amorous attacks of the flower maidens. I was wondering if their
costumes were a note of irony? They haves a look of “desperate
housewives” in their glitter-kitschy morning gowns that hide
their bodies -- no wonder he would rather flee.
But then the great seduction by Kundry starts. Baumgartner
projects the calm authority of mother and goddess, and she looks
exactly like the dancer who embodies Herzeleide. With her
revelation of his name and childhood, she conjures Herzeleide to
embrace him and draw him into her plot of incestuous reunion
with herself.
Wagner’s Ingenious Temptation
Wagner gives Kundry all the psychological tricks in the box to
shock and entice, and Jovanovich’s Parsifal appears troubled and
torn by desire, unable to resist until, paradoxically, her
passionate kiss tears him away from her. “Amfortas!“ he cries out
in torment. “The wound!”
Wagner only goes so far in revealing what happened here. What
exactly stops Parsifal cold? Terror of incestuous return to the
mother? Terror of sexual surrender? Of falling prey to an
addiction without remedy? Parsifal himself evokes the
unbearable intensity of yearning, “sinful yearning” while the
orchestra rises to a storm of pain and passion, desire and despair.
Then there is the resolution, the leitmotive of Parcifal’s mission:
“Durch Mitleid wissend, der reine Tor” – “Enlighened by
compassion, the innocent fool.”
Faced with the awareness that Parsifal is the chosen redeemer,
Kundry refuses to give up. She, too, shifts into high drama,
reveals the reason of her curse and begs for his mercy: Just one
hour with her, she pleads and insists, and she will be redeemed
while he will “feel like a god.”
It may be the most searing seduction scene in all of opera, and
Ozawa creates a thrilling outcome. When Parsifal won’t
surrender, Kundry’s fury blocks his escape by bringing down the
voodoo dolls or pupae that have been hanging upside down in the
rafters. With their long black hair, they come at him like an army
of demonic bats.
Then Klingsor’s attack with the spear is solved with magical
simplicity: the three priest-like dancers lithely step into the flight
path of the spear and guide it into Parsifal’s hand. Klingsor’s
castle evaporates and Parsifal, in his red coat of armor, spear in
hand, walks away from desire, bent like an old man.
The Happy Ending
Act III presents the return to the now dilapidated temple and
disheartened, sullied-looking brotherhood. In the final
redemption, Parsifal holds the spear to Amfortas’s glowing
wound, and the spear absorbs the pink glow into its tip. After this
act of healing with its sexual overtones, Ozawa continues the
uplifting mood. Kundry, now baptized and redeemed, does not
die (as suggested in the libretto), but steps up to the Grail, hands
the chalice to Parsifal, the new king, and they both hold it up
together until the curtain falls.
It's certainly a satisfying ending to SF Opera’s musically and
theatrically splendid Parsifal. At the same time, it gives one
pause. Is the director saying that now Parsifal and Kundry can get
together after all, in sanctified marriage? Is it a hint to the future,
to Parsifal’s legendary son Lohengrin (another Wagner opera
about aborted desire)?
The audience can free-associate and ponder what Wagner had in
mind with this final work about redemption. Almost five hours of
wrestling with sexual compulsion: one man castrates himself;
another is struck impotent like a bleeding woman; and the third
goes cold turkey into abstinence. Desire and its discontents haunt
Wagner’s oeuvre in many guises. In his book, Wagner and the
Erotic Impulse, musicologist Laurence Dreyfus writes: “Wagner
discovered that music could do what sex could not: sustain
pleasure indefinitely by never allowing it to arrive.” Well, when
redemption arrives, it comes with orgiastic orchestral glory, and
in the final tableau, Ozawa brings it back to the realm of the
senses. A soothing and at the same time thought-provoking
ending.
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