Parsifal

updated January 1st, 2006

Parsifal is one of my two favorite Wagner operas or music dramas, to be more accurate, (Meistersinger is the other.) though it's hard to imagine it as the "top of anyone's pops". The libretto, by the composer as usual, is a muddle of religion, paganism, eroticism, and possibly even homo-eroticism, and its length may make it seem to the audience like hearing paint dry.

Wagner, being a famous anti-Semite, (Klingsor may be one of his surrogate Jewish villains.) naturally entrusted the premiere to an unconverted (not for want of RW's trying!) Hermann Levi, who was his favorite conductor! (Go figure!) Kundry, a most mixed-up-gal and another likely Jewish surrogate, is both villainous or benevolent, depending on the scene.

Considering that many video versions of Parsifal seem on the stodgy side, this film of the opera is, in comparison, a breath of fresh air. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, the director, has brought considerable imagination to it but it's hard to know why he made some of his choices. For example: the notorious dual Parsifals (of each gender!), the puppets, the death-mask-of-Wagner set and various dolls and symbols such as the Nazi swastika in one of the traveling scenes. (If I remember, the "real" Engelbert Humperdinck wrote the actual music to pad out the scene changes.) Though Wagner himself died much too early to be an actual Nazi, many of his descendants (As well as his second wife Cosima.) were at least fellow-travelers, including their grandson Wolfgang Wagner who still runs the Bayreuth Festival at an advanced age. In fact, Wolfgang's son Gottfried Wagner, in complete opposition to his father, has tried to come to terms honestly with his great-grandfather.

Syberberg, too, seems politically ambiguous from what I've read. In 1977, he made a well-known film on Hitler, "Hitler: ein Film aus Deutschland" (Sometimes called "Our Hitler" in English.). Since it lasts all of 8 hours and hasn't been widely distributed, most people have not seen it (including myself.).

Armin Jordan, the conductor of the audio CD on which this film is based, plays Amfortas (sung by Wolfgang Schöne) Edith Clever (Yvonne Minton) plays Kundry, Michael Kutter and Karin Krick play the dual Parsifals (Both sung by Reiner Goldberg.!) and Robert Lloyd and Aage Haugland both play and sing Gurnemanz and Klingsor.

Though the opera takes place over a long period of time and all (except Kundry?) have been described as having aged considerably between Acts 2 and 3, no one looks a day older by the end of the opera. (The magic of the Grail? In this opera the Grail is the cup from which Jesus drank at the Last Supper and not Mary Magdalene as in more recent times, an idea I find preposterous!).

The conducting and singing are all quite serviceable and the DVD seems to have improved the sound, if not the picture, to a great extent. (Yes, I agree that "Kna's" approach is superior, even on the second, stereo, version but he is probably superior to all recorded versions on the whole.)

Not a Parsifal for all Wagnerites but I think it works quite well as a filmed opera.

It must be assumed that those who praised this film ("the greatest filmed opera ever," didn't I read somewhere?) either don't care for opera, don't care for Wagner, or don't care about anything except their desire to appear Cultured. Either as a representation of Wagner's swan-song, or as a movie, this strikes me as an unmitigated disaster, with a leaden reading of the score matched to a tricksy, lugubrious realisation of the text.

It's questionable that people with ideas as to what an opera (or, for that matter, a play, especially one by Shakespeare) is "about" should be allowed anywhere near a theatre or film studio; Syberberg, very fashionably, but without the smallest justification from Wagner's text, decided that Parsifal is "about" bisexual integration, so that the title character, in the latter stages, transmutes into a kind of beatnik babe, though one who continues to sing high tenor -- few if any of the actors in the film are the singers, and we get a double dose of Armin Jordan, the conductor, who is seen as the face (but not heard as the voice) of Amfortas, and also appears monstrously in double exposure as a kind of Batonzilla or Conductor Who Ate Monsalvat during the playing of the Good Friday music -- in which, by the way, the transcendant loveliness of nature is represented by a scattering of shopworn and flaccid crocuses stuck in ill-laid turf, an expedient which baffles me. In the theatre we sometimes have to piece out such imperfections with our thoughts, but I can't think why Syberberg couldn't splice in, for Parsifal and Gurnemanz, mountain pasture as lush as was provided for Julie Andrews in Sound of Music...

The sound is hard to endure, the high voices and the trumpets in particular possessing an aural glare that adds another sort of fatigue to our impatience with the uninspired conducting and paralytic unfolding of the ritual. Someone in another review mentioned the 1951 Bayreuth recording, and Knappertsbusch, though his tempi are often very slow, had what Jordan altogether lacks, a sense of pulse, a feeling for the ebb and flow of the music -- and, after half a century, the orchestral sound in that set, in modern pressings, is still superior to this film.

Today (1994), the "Recommendations" associated with Parsifal was: "If you like this title, we also recommend... Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)". Well, if you liked "Indiana Jones", you may not necessarily enjoy this movie.

A rather laborious staging. All those supposedly clever references about nazism, sexual ambivalence and all that are heavily pounded upon, although they do not present the slightest interest.

Still, the libretto's poetry is intense and beautiful, and the music is probably superb (the soundtrack of the Brussels cinematheque copy is in tatters)

While lovers of Parsifal may be considered a minority, those of us who like Syberberg's film might be rarer still!

Of the title character Wagner wrote to Mathilde Wesendonk:

"Parsifal must carry the interest of a major character if he is not arrive at the end as a deus ex machine . . . (his) development must be brought back to the foreground and for this I have no option, no broad scheme such as Wolfram could command; I must so compress it all into three main situations of drastic substance that the profound, ramifying meaning is presented clearly and distinctly."

With "drastic" and "distinctly" in mind, Syberberg's use of both male and female actors as Parsifal seems to me a brilliantly cinematic means of achieving the result Wagner was after.

Every era believes itself to be a superior civilization to those prior to it and, if for no other reason than having distance and evolution on its side, the assumption has some credence. In this regard, Wagner saw himself as being somewhat benevolent in his forgiveness of Wolfram whom he admired (obviously) but viewed as a product "of a barbaric and utterly confused age." Nonetheless - with irony unintended - Wagner ridicules Wolfram, calling him on his irresolute nature in the poem, his ideals wavering between the purely pagan and those of a strong Christian nature (as though either of these are mutually exclusive - as I always say, Jesus and Santa Claus keep each other in business).

This irony actually hits with full force since Wagner himself substituted Wolfram's Grail with the chalice which Joseph of Arimethea caught the blood of the crucified Jesus, thus altering the Grail Hall ceremony of Wolfram's "barbaric" paganism into a ritual unmistakably and obviously (right down to its text) Christian. (This, by the way, served to further drive the stake between Wagner and Nietsche's once very strong friendship.)

I like Syberberg's use of Third Reich imagery in the Act I transformation music. Initially it horrified me (to the point of my eyes popping out of my head and my flesh getting all clammy-cold). Like Wagner changing Wolfram to suit his dramatic needs without changing the actual shape of the tale's intent, Syberberg's arresting imagery here - in a matter of only minutes - pulls together a history into a quick, timely shock of recognition that hits squarely and which burns its imagery forever into the mind.

I agree with some critics that fetishization is not too strong a term to describe what Syberberg does in his film. Certainly Amfortas' own endless proclamations of his guilt and unworthiness can be recognized in all of us to varying degrees - Wagner's (and Syberberg's art merely expanding this. Here (I'm not sure why) I often find myself thinking of Penelope; wearing her mournful chastity for Odysseus for twenty years, and that noble mourning eventually takes on other qualities; although still admirable also smacks of arrogance: self-induced martyrdom. Even so, it does not fundamentally diminish the character's integrity or original intent. Rather it complicates the person, adding endless facets - as well as a blatant human face - to that which may outwardly appear simple - but makes us aware there is far, far more.

I love this movie, but certainly can understand those who find it difficult (if not impossible) to warm up to it. Give it another chance! It may just grab you.

p.

Admittedly, Parsifal is not an opera that can appeal to everyone, although it is a favourite of mine, Knappertsbusch, 1951, in particular. Syberberg's entire approach is so static. Whenever the music suddenly begins to swell ... Syberberg keeps the cast moving at the same pace. The takes on Amfortas and Klingsor are endless. Whatever happened to film editing? The result is physically exhausting to watch. The viewer is never spiritually transported. Your impulse is to rush home and play a recording again to confirm that Wagner got it right, Syberberg got it wrong. And that set decoration with those "clever" reminders of Wagner's anti-Semitism -- will there ever be a viewer of this film with no prior knowledge of Wagner?