Tales from the Island of Serendip 4 4

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Wagner first conceived the work in April 1857 but did not finish it until twenty-five years later. It was first produced at the second Bayreuth Festival in 1882.

 

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For the first twenty years of its existence, the only staged performances of Parsifal took place in the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, the venue for which Wagner conceived the work.

 

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Bayreuth finally lifted its monopoly on Parsifal on 1 January 1914. Some opera houses began their performances at midnight between 31 December 1913 and 1 January. Such was the demand for Parsifal that it was presented in more than 50 European opera houses between 1 January and 1 August 1914.

 

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In 1982 Hans-Jürgen Syberberg created a film of Parsifal in which the action takes place largely within a death mask of the composer. Wagner’s Bayreuth Theatre represents the Grail itself.

 

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The resources of a film studio allowed Syberberg to film the opera against a constantly shifting screen of references and allusions shown by front-projection, thus imprinting his own vision of Parsifal and Richard Wagner in a manner of which a stage-director could only dream.

 

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Whilst also having the other advantage of film, that of showing in close-up the emotion of the opera in the faces of his actors and actresses.

 

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Syberberg wanted the soundtrack to be a separate entity and to use actors who would mime to the pre-recorded track, reasoning that actors were better capable than singers of giving the facial and bodily expression that film demands, and also wanting, for intellectual and aesthetic reasons, the voice to be separate from the body.

 

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Syberberg regards Kundry as the center of the opera, and so chose for the part the outstanding German actress, Edith Clever. Her incarnation of Kundry as variously mother, seductress and penitent has been unanimously praised as a performance of hair-raising intensity.

 

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Parsifal himself is played by two people, first a boy (Michael Kutter) and then, after Kundry's kiss, by a girl (Karin Krick), a coup-de-theatre for which Syberberg gives no complete explanation, although he has said that it attempts to render Parsifal as a person with both masculine and feminine poles, which in the final act come together to create a paradisiacal man, an androgyne.

 

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It works extraordinarily well when we hear Goldberg's voice come from Karin Krick, her face radiantly pure.

 

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Syberberg considers Parsifal to be Wagner's testament, a vision of redemption emerging from his life and his work in music, and so, for Syberberg it is Wagner himself who is the subject in his staging of the opera, together with a century of Wagnerian thought, attitudes and reactions. Whilst the music floods our hearing, Syberberg feeds our eyes with as much as he can crystallize of what effect that music, and that music's very existence, has had on him.

 

 

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The studio set is dominated by a huge replica of Wagner's death mask.

 

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Becoming a mountain on which much of the action is staged.

 

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Being Klingsor's tower, the flowery meadow and finally parting in two to reveal (Syberberg's vision of) the Grail.

 

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The density of allusion in the film is enormous and too much to comprehend in a single viewing:

 

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Caspar David Friedrich, Ingres, Goya, Dürer, Titian, Caravaggio and Bramante all figure in the imagery.

 

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The allegorical statues of the Synagogue and Faith on Strasbourg Cathedral are evoked.

 

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Amfortas sits on Charlemagne's throne from the cathedral at Aachen.

 

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Titurel lies in the crypt of Saint-Denis.

 

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Scenes from various Bayreuth productions of Parsifal and the Ring appear.