Monsalvat: the Parsifal home page |
Parsifal on stage
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Monsalvat: the Parsifal home page |
Parsifal on stage
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n his
first visit to Bayreuth in 1882, the Swiss producer Adolphe Appia
declared: If every aspect of the auditorium expresses Wagner's genius, everything the other
side of the footlights contradicts it
. This criticism was echoed by the Irish dramatist G.B. Shaw. Although Wagner was the greatest dramatist of the nineteenth
century, his naturalistic stagings came to be regarded as backward-looking. Yet there were some
who regarded the 1882 production of Parsifal as definitive (as Lucy Beckett, in her Cambridge Handbook, still does); the increasingly dilapidated
sets for that production were used, with little modification, until 1930.
hen Winifred
Wagner tried to introduce a new staging, Wagner's daughters Eva and Daniela circulated a
petition, which declared that the original sets on which the eyes of the Master had
reposed
possessed a timeless validity and must be preserved. This petition
received the signatures of, among others, Richard Strauss, Toscanini and Newman. As a final resort, the old guard appealed to Adolf Hitler for support. But this was a grave miscalculation: Winifred's
chosen stage designer was Alfred Roller, who was also greatly admired by the Führer, whose
own sketchbook from Vienna in 1903 contains a drawing of the second act of Roller's
Tristan. However, Roller's staging was, in essence, little different from the
original. In 1937 this staging was replaced by another, also stylistically conservative, by the
young Wieland Wagner. The only innovation in this staging was the use of a projected film
during the transformation scenes.
the
reopening of the Bayreuth Festival in 1951, Wieland Wagner shocked the Wagnerian world by
adopting, in his new staging of Parsifal, the minimalist ideas set out by Appia in his Basle staging of Die Walküre. Appia had seen that a naturalistic pictorial representation, no matter how
skilful, was unsuitable for Wagner's music. He preferred fully three- dimensional, semi-
representational sets and exploited the developing technology of stage lighting, just as
Richard Wagner surely would have done.
nder Appia's influence, Wieland turned the operas inside out, preferring at first
abstraction and later a pervasive psychological symbolism to bring out the (Jungian and
Freudian) mythic dimensions of the works. Ernest Newman wrote
in the Sunday Times: This was not only the best Parsifal I have ever seen
and heard but one of the three or four most moving spiritual experiences of my life.
n staging
Parsifal, the producer and designer are faced with challenges quite different from
those encountered in staging the Ring. In the latter, abstract concepts -
renunciation, inheritance of the world, etc. - are initially presented by characters,
situations and events, which give them dramatic precision and which anchor the motifs that
appear later as reminiscences; whereas in Wagner's last music-drama, the philosophical and
spiritual absolutes that are at the heart of the work are not resolved until the last act.
Wieland explored the symmetries and parallels in the work. For example, the parallels between
the situations of Amfortas and Kundry; the opposites of Titurel and Klingsor; and the naturally unchaste Flower
maidens contrasted with the unnaturally chaste Grail
Knights.
he questions
raised by this staging opened up many new possible views of the work which have been explored
by other producers and designers. In 1978, Harry Kupfer mounted a radically new staging in
Copenhagen, with designs by Peter Sykora, which emphasized the human rather than the symbolic
elements of the work. He made a new ending for the work, in which Amfortas dies, Parsifal leaves the
stage with Grail and Spear, followed by Kundry.
n Stuttgart,
Götz Friedrich directed the work with a strong focus on what he saw as the central issues,
with the Grail Knights deeply divided at the end of the work
(as they appear to be in the score). Gunther Uecker's designs were radical and highly symbolic:
Klingsor's castle was an Iron Maiden, a medieval instrument of
torture, with an American- musical chorus of Flower maidens. The sets
divided the stage into three levels, and Friedrich separated narration (on the forestage) from
dramatic action (on the main stage) and supernatural events (on the back stage).
n other opera
houses, unfortunately, there were less imaginative productions by producers with little or no
insight into the work. At Covent Garden, it was said by many that the Terry Hands production, with designs by Farrah, was significantly
improved when a stage hands strike caused it to be given on a bare stage. The failure of this
production was surpassed in inanity later at the same house, when Bill Bryden set the action as an end-of-term play in a boarding
school.
he most
radical production to date must be that of Robert Wilson at the Hamburg State Opera. In this
production, all of Richard Wagner's stage directions were discarded. The singers were required
to move slowly with stylised gestures, accompanied by an extremely complex lighting plot.
During the transformation music, a giant doughnut descended to mate with a pyramid. Nobody who
saw it had any idea what it was about, but some thought that it was unusually beautiful; which
is, very often, what a newcomer to the work experiences anyway.
we
enter a new millennium, in which there is much talk of new beginnings, it might be an
appropriate time to consider new possibilities for future productions of Wagner's last
music-drama. Of course, this is only part of the wider issue of how Wagner's music-dramas can
(or should) be presented on the modern stage. The momentum of New Bayreuth seems to have been
spent; although in the next few decades, no doubt there will be some new productions inspired
by those of Wieland Wagner; and there will also be some that react against the New Bayreuth
style. The neo-Brechtian interpretations of the Berlin producers still seem to be regarded as
models, although these too are becoming reduced to clichés.
oday it might
no longer be possible to present Parsifal as a religious mystery play; but the
connection between the work and religion (or more accurately, spirituality) remains strong,
however often producers may declare that they intend to dispense with all of the religious or
supernatural elements of the work (and in their place substitute banality). One aspect of
Parsifal that seems to have been little explored, except in the most superficial way,
is the influence of Indian literature; even though attention was drawn
to this aspect of Parsifal as early as 1891 (in an article by K. Heckel in the
Bayreuther Blätter). Not only Christian symbols, but also those of Buddhism, and
perhaps Hindu concepts too, were woven into this work. Whilst it might not be possible to
present the work as a coherently Buddhist drama, the possibility of approaching
Parsifal from a Buddhist viewpoint seems to be promising and it is surprising that
there has been no serious attempt at such a production to date ¹.
Then there is the intriguing possibility of a New Age production, with the Grail Temple as a
stone circle and a large crystal in place of Klingsor's mirror. Above all, in my view, the work
must be presented from an understanding of the text, an understanding that has been all too
rare in Parsifal productions of recent decades. There are so many riches in the poem
itself, so many subtleties to be made visible, that it is quite unnecessary for producers to
import alien concepts; they can leave their baggage (and especially decomposing rabbits) at the
door.
nother
dimension that might be explored in new productions is the spectacular. Wagner liked to be at
the leading edge of stagecraft, and however awkward his own productions might appear today, it
can be argued that to fulfil his intentions, productions of his works should be kept at that
leading edge. Transformation scenes in which trees move around the stage and become pillars of
the Grail temple have become a tiresome cliché. Projection onto the cyclorama (a technique
that Bayreuth used as early as 1876) or back-projection onto screens could be developed, given
sufficient imagination, to produce spectacular transformation scenes at a fraction of the cost
of moving pillars. Wagner was a pioneer in the used of electric lighting on stage (even in 1882
the Grail was electric); state-of-the-art lighting was a vital element of the New Bayreuth
style; and recent Bayreuth productions have used laser effects. Given that many recent
productions have partly or completely dispensed with a Grail, it would seem to be a good time
to reverse this trend with a magic Grail that will impress a modern audience as much as the
electric Grail of 1882 must have impressed the audience of that time. Kinder, schaff Neues!
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