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Parsifal, Live from the Met

Millions worldwide will have spent six hours in a cinema today watching the transmission of Parsifal from the Metropolitan Opera House, New York. [I have since seen Act I and the final sections of Acts II and III in Tokyo; the total length was down to five and a half hours, thanks to being able to skip the long intermissions.]

The production began promisingly: men dressed in suits advanced as the orchestra played the grail music and began to rid themselves of jackets, ties, watches as the Dresden Amen and faith motifs were sounded. They ended up seated in a closed, brightly lit circle, while women huddled in darkness on the other side of a stream. The circle suggested a Rotary Club, or Freemasons, or Scientologists, or AA, promising a novel, dechristianized take on the opera as a comment on contemporary quests for spirituality. The various ritual gestures throughout Act I were neither Christian nor Buddhist, again suggesting a modern cult.

There is a draggy section after Amfortas's exit for his bath in which Gurnemanz offers catechesis to his listeners, followed by a sermon on the wickedness of killing swans to the bumptious Parsifal. One hoped for some resistance from the latter, but no such luck; he turns out to be a real forest idiot, putty in his mentor's hands. [Rene Pape was boring, as Michael Tanner notes in his Spectator review, but is the fault not chiefly Wagner's? Why could he not write more for Parsifal and Kundry, and put a stop to Gurenmanz's garrulity?]

Though it is now broad midday the sky is filled by a huge dark planet -- a solar eclipse of some kind? -- worthy of Lars von Trier. During the transformation music all gaze on obscure shapes in the sky. Amfortas's agony is the vocal and dramatic highlight of the act, and was magnificently sung and acted by Peter Mattei.  [But a less agonized Amfortas might be more attractive.] Blood was much on display and one thought inevitably that he could be crying out for someone to find a cure for AIDS. In the grail ritual he dips his two fingers in the Blood and the businessmen-knights spread the sacred droplets from their fingers to each other's mouths. Only the words of the libretto forced a Christian reading of the scene. The invisible choirs, including "ces voix d'enfants chantant dans la coupole" seemed to be miraculous voices borne on the wind, as there was no cupola. The scene was somewhat intrusively dominated by Gurnemanz and Parsifal -- the former scrutinizing the latter to see if he "understands". What is he supposed to understand? Again the scene could be read naturalistically -- he is supposed to grasp and empathize with the depth of Amfortas' pain, or perhaps acquire an insight into the First Noble Truth of Buddhism.

Act II was ghastly! All the characters had to wade in a pond of menstrual blood. The flower maidens sang without sweetness or charm, their dresses dripping. Offstage, during the second interval, they looked quite displeased as theyhastened off to shower. The Kundry-Parsifal duet, rather boring in early stretches [listen to Karajan's great recording to see how much was lost], reached its climax with the kiss on a blood-stained bed, suggesting that Parsifal has lost his spiritual virginity? [Kundry's diction was hopeless, Parsifal's splendid; though I find Kaufmann's voice rather hard; there are warmer inflections in Jame Morris, for example.] At the moment of the kiss [prolonged and consensual, though Kundry has taken unfair advantage but adopting a maternal approach which shifts into the erotic key] Parsifal ains insight into Amfortas's suffering and becomes "knowing through compassion". His yell, which George Moore scoffed at, was dramatically convincing here. Perhaps he grows up too fast, but in any case he now sings with impressive authority. The scenario of rejecting the Temptress is of course corny and it wallows in manichean phobia of sex and women. Is it Wagner's retraction of the pagan loves of Tristan, Siegmund and Siegfried? Parsifal stops the lance-brandishing Klingsor with a "sign" but it is not the sign of the Cross, just his raised hand. Absurdly, the flower maidens also brandish lances.

Act III. Conducter Daniele Gatti, excellent throughout [no, the speeds were awfully slow, and he had not the ability of Knappertsbusch to make the slowness raptly contemplative; I heard his Meistersinger in Salzburg and he was booed], played the prelude eloquently. Then there was the lugubrious scene of the now grey-haired Parsifal's return and the terminally silenced Kundry washing his feet and being baptized. The Good Friday music had a grandiose rising planet scene, but again midday was marked by an ominous eclipse. The fantastic chorus introducing the final grail scene (crashing into new harmonic realms)and the entire scene are set against a background of swirling dark clouds. [When Amfortas was carried in, looking like the dead Christ, the scene was quite grandiose, bringing to mindgreat medieval paintings of the pieta or deposition.] Kundry's role is upgraded, as it is she who comes forward bearing the grail, during Amfortas's rather dull music, and then elevates it (in place of Amfortas). Parsifal then plunges the lance into the cup while Kundry looks up at him in adoring ecstasy; this sexual overshadows the healing of Amfortas's wound. Her subsequent death (prescribed by Wagner) is a sort of Liebestod after all. [Intensely 'Christian' as well, however. Kaufmann seems totally wrapped up in the role of Parsifal, which he interprets in straightforwardly Christian terms, as his interval interview showed; his lips moved in silent prayer in this act; he acts brotherly love toward Kundry touchingly.]

François Girard's production, for all its impressive effects, does not produce a coherent vision of the opera and does not succeed in making it of real contemporary relevance. The boos he received may have come from those who wanted a more conventional approach; but more likely they expressed dissatisfaction at the confusing nature of the spectacle. [Still, it does attempt to match the sublimity of the score, straining after this goal with memorable effect.]

Parsifal may not lend itself to coherent modernizing interpretations. It is what it is. One would like to treat it as a harmless fantasy, letting its yearning music speak for itself. But the work has a disturbing spiritual power that cannot be ironed out so easily. It plays on a Christian mythology already distorted and paganized in the medieval legend but still bearing potent symbolic overtones, and it dramatizes the challenging ideas of compassion and of fidelity to a mission. So perhaps any production is bound to be an ironic patchwork, letting sublimity and irony jostle each other. The present production is disappointing because it did not fulfil the ironic promise of its contemporary setting and fell into a Lars von Trier style grandiosity instead.

Anthony Tommasini writes: "For all its imaginative directorial strokes and seriousness, however, this “Parsifal” is a downer. Wagner’s suffering grail knights may fear they are losing touch with God. But in most stagings at least they are connected to nature, and its renewing cycles give them some hope." http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/18/arts/music/parsifal-at-the-metropolitan-opera.html?pagewanted=all  Why does he say the grail is lifted by the wizened Parsifal? (The program note in French cinemas said that Parsifal, struck by Amfortas's suffering, sets off to recapture the grail (sic; recte: lance) from Klingsor.  Jonas Kaufmann points out that Parsifal is precisely not struck by Amfortas and he supposes that he stumbles on Klingsor's castle by accident.

Well,  one commentator found a coherent ecological spiritual message: http://opera-cake.blogspot.fr/2012/03/inconvenient-parsifal-from-opera-de.html

Good comment here: "So it is in many ways a very moving production, with Peter Mattei’s agonized Amfortas and Jonas Kaufmann’s messianic Parsifal taking acting honors. Some of it feels familiar from Syberberg and Lehnhoff (particularly the post-apocalyptic atmosphere), but that's OK. It is, for the most part, enthralling to watch. But I have to say I have grave doubts as to the Meaning of it All. I think preserving a sense of mystery and wonder is crucial to Parsifal’s appeal. But this production does make several big gestures towards having a vision of the drama’s allegorical meaning, too. They aren’t plentiful, as a maximalist who has watched the Herheim Parsifal too many times I find it intellectually quite sparse. Since it doesn’t venture too much, I’m not inclined to cut the production a lot of slack for things that don’t make sense, and I think it has some big issues.

"The production’s thesis seems to be that the world--as exemplified by Monsalvat-- is out of joint, the men and women separated and the knights closed into themselves. By making them mix it up and giving Kundry a role in the Grail ceremony, Parsifal restores balance. But by choosing gender as the signifier of spiritual imbalance, Girard makes things very hard for himself. The production ignores the really crucial and pernicious portrayal of women in Act 2. Inside the wound or not, they're still women. (It’s a too infrequently noted hypocrisy of Parsifal that the opera argues that women are the source for the evil from which the knights have to be purified, and yet indulges the work’s audience in a prolonged scene of women singing together and besieging the male hero. Lord, make me chaste, but let me spend a long weekend at the Venusburg first.)

"Girard’s idea of the women’s exclusion from society as the source of the knights’ problems really appeals to me. But I’m afraid that if you stage Act 2 as a conventional male gaze sensual extravaganza, which he does, it doesn’t really convince. Parsifal is a confusing work, sure, but it has some central themes that are pretty clear: the knights have been tainted by sensual temptation. Redemption can only come from a pure fool (Parsifal), who first needs to learn compassion. He becomes a sexual ascetic after refusing Kundry’s seduction. So Girard’s idea of inverting this demands some serious intervention in the portrayal of seduction as the source of the knight’s problems as well as Parsifal’s awakening to asceticism, something that he does not do."

http://likelyimpossibilities.blogspot.fr/2013/02/parsifal-mets-knights-to-remember.html

Other reviews: http://theclassicalreview.com/2013/02/the-met-unfolds-a-spare-darkly-human-and-deeply-moving-parsifal/

http://parterre.com/2013/02/21/equal-rites/

http://www.bachtrack.com/review-met-opera-parsifal-girard-gatti-kaufmann

http://www.latinospost.com/articles/12350/20130217/metropolitan-opera-review-stars-align-deeply-moving.htm

http://mostlyopera.blogspot.fr/2012/03/preview-new-2013-met-parsifal.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/arts/music/a-look-at-the-new-parsifal-at-the-metropolitan-opera.html?_r=0

http://www.classicstoday.com/puzzling-bleak-parsifal-gorgeously-sung/

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-18/-parsifal-glows-in-new-met-show-with-star-tenor-review.html

http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/2013/02/17/3334578/striking-new-look-for-parsifal.html

http://arts.nationalpost.com/2013/02/18/concert-review-canadian-made-parsifal-makes-powerful-impression-at-met/

http://parterre.com/2013/02/21/equal-rites/comment-page-1/#comments

http://www.examiner.com/review/parsifal-lots-of-fans-love-it-so-beware-what-you-say

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/9ff42d26-7cda-11e2-adb6-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2LqfQOxZG

http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/music/bloody_great_fyoVPG3tM8HdUqehQgv8eL

http://www.wqxr.org/#!/blogs/operavore/2013/feb/19/review-metropolitan-operas-entrancing-enigmatic-parsifal/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/26/peter-mattei-parsifal-the-opera-singer-draws-acclaim_n_2767828.html?utm_hp_ref=arts

http://operatattler.typepad.com/opera/2013/02/parsifal-met.html

http://opera.broadwayworld.com/article/BWW-Reviews-Redemption-for-the-Metropolitan-Operas-New-PARSIFAL-Is-in-the-Music-20130220

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wilborn-hampton/met-opera-a-modern-new-pa_b_2712248.html

http://www.nj.com/entertainment/music/index.ssf/2013/02/a_glorious_parsifal_at_the_met.html

http://auv.blogspot.fr/2013/02/a-short-post-on-parsifal.html

'Wozzeck' at Tokyo's New National Theater

  

 
Those who find Tokyo life insipid should check out the carnage and passion promoted nightly at the New National Theater in Hatsudai. Their 2009 presentation of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, co-produced with the Bavarian State Opera, is another milestone of this theater’s climb to greatness, after its successes with Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Strauss’s Salome and Elektra, and Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten.

Johann Christian Woyzeck was publicly beheaded in Leipzig in 1824 for the murder of his mistress, after his insanity defense – one of the first in legal history – had been twice rejected. Controversy about this rumbled on and moved a medical student of revolutionary leanings, Georg Büchner, to pen fragments of a drama just before his own death from typhus in 1837 at the age of 23. Neither the criminal nor the student could have foreseen their 20^th century fame.

 

Decades passed. Büchner’s damaged pages were retrieved, treated chemically, and deciphered. In 1913 his play was staged at last, with electrifying effect.  Berg, shaken by the Vienna première, went straight home to begin work on the music-drama that would occupy him until 1922 and that has held its own, ever since its first performance in Berlin in 1925, as a central work of musical Modernism. 

Director Andreas Kriegenburg has only recently turned to opera, and this is his first international venture in the medium. His staging has two poles: a mobile yellowish box, claustrophobic and grimy, is Wozzeck’s world; the dark pond beneath represents the outside world, a messy, splashy place where the homeless unemployed, shadowy figures in black, gobble up left-overs; some have given up and lie dead in the water.

The production centers firmly on Wozzeck as an individual, a man who wants to be a good husband and father, but is crushed by lack of money. In some productions the protagonist is psychotic from the start, but baritone Thomas Johannes Mayer scotches that stereotype by his imposing stature and stately bearing. He sounds quite sane and educated as he expounds his philosophy in the first scene. His spooky visions in the second scene clash with this, but one notes that they are expressed in correct quotations from the Bible.

 

He is harried by guilt at not being able to support his family properly. He is pushed into madness by the pillars of society – the obese Captain (Volker Vogel) and the mad-scientist Doctor (Tsumaya Hidekazu) – who gloat over his mistress’s amours, destroying his domestic refuge. These characters are portrayed as grotesque slugs, crawling out of a Kafka nightmare. We are seeing them through Wozzeck’s eyes. The Doctor wears a corset as he experiments on his guinea-pig Wozzeck, scolding him for wasting his urine sample (for ‘coughing’ in the original libretto that Berg had to bowdlerize). Such dreamlike figures hardly constitute a telling comment on social hypocrisy. The socio-political references in this production are cardboard images of oppression. The director foreswore the obvious ploy of making a connection with present problems.

 

Wozzeck’s home life is portrayed in naturalistic, down to earth terms, and his psycho-economic problems never swell into cosmic delirium, metaphysical alienation. Some will miss the cold, sardonic edge one expects in expressionist drama, the chill of the uncanny. Even the murder scene was played in a low-key, sadly resigned style, without tension and terror.

 

The boy (Nakajima Kenichiro), darts about like a squirrel, mobile and omnipresent. In the first scene he is busy playing with his monkey-doll, and jumps up onto his father with tremendous affection. He is a budding graffito artist, scrawling ‘Papa’ on the wall of the box-home, or, as things degenerate, ‘Whore’ to describe his mother. He swiftly traces a line all around the box as a protest against confining circumstance. He even joins in a public demonstration: as the faceless homeless demand work he boldly scrawls ‘Money!’ on the stage curtain. The affective disturbance in his little world is supposed to reflect the cruelty of society. Leaving childhood behind, he casts down his toy, and takes up his father’s knife, ready for the grim struggle. At the curtain-calls, Wozzeck, Marie and the boy appeared together as a model happy family, neat and smiling.

 

The last orchestral interlude, a threnody in D minor, the key of the Ninth Symphony, expresses compassion for suffering humanity, perhaps with reference to the War. Berg called it ‘the composer’s confession, an appeal to the audience, here meant to represent humanity itself.’ But this production keeps the limelight on Wozzeck’s dead body – he has joined the number of the vanquished – and on the boy, who sits on the body and flashes his torch into the eyes of the audience. This does not quite capture the Everyman dimension that Berg added to Büchner.

The Tokyo Philharmonia Orchestra are new to this demanding score, which must be particularly rewarding because the texture of the writing is so transparent that every note counts and can be clearly heard, and because it is full of interesting solo parts, such as the viola and bassoon cadenzas in the first scene. Hartmut Haenchen, the Dresden-born conductor, declared himself impressed by the proficiency of the players. He rose to the challenge of coordinating the orchestra, the on-stage military band and tango orchestra, the back-stage drums, and the singers who use four different kinds of vocal technique. He kept abreast with the mobility of Berg’s invention. Berg is ‘the master of the tiniest transitions’ (Adorno), and at every moment the music is turning in unexpected directions, always introducing something other, something new, while the tempo constantly shifts. To relax into routine is to lose the thread and court disaster.

 

This music fuses an outreach to popular culture with mastery of arcane musical structure, much as Mahler had done; indeed Haenchen likes to call Wozzeck ‘Mahler’s 11th Symphony!’ Every note of the score has its deep musical logic, yet subserves drama and characterization. The formal design is extremely rich – for instance there is a passacaglia on a twelve-note theme with 21 variations to characterize the Doctor. Yet the score is also awash with eloquent Wagnerian leitmotifs, and it mischievously quotes Beethoven, Schumann, Mahler and Strauss. It is not a consistently atonal work; there is even a passage in bread-and-butter C major, at the center of the opera, where Wozzeck hands Marie his wages, a fleeting vision of a normal, wholesome world.

 

The cool, formal aspect of the work, which retains a certain ironic distance from the dramatic action, was perhaps understressed in this performance. The first word of the libretto is ‘slowly,’ and one could have wished for a more contemplative lingering on the musical structure for its own sake as well as for its dramatic function, and for a sharper sense of dialectical tension between the mandarin and the demotic sides of the music. No previous opera demanded such a conjunction of the virtues of the concert hall with those of the opera house. The double challenge was creditably faced in a performance of which all who contributed to it can be proud.

 

 

op. 125

First we hear, scudding quietly on second violins and cellos, and sustained by mournful horns, the two notes of a bare fifth, hollowest of sounds; then the same notes falling sotto voce on violins, viola and contrabasses, as clarinet, oboe, flute join in; then amid a growing crescendo, at the fourteenth bar, the keynote D, heralding at the sixteenth in massive fortissimo the main theme, imperative and concentrated like the words ‘Let there be light!’ supervening on the empty waste. In the second movement the energies of creation dance and play. The third, an interchange of two ravishing melodies, moving from key to key in ever more rapturous variation, leads the hearer to a realm of inward bliss. As even after twenty minutes this music of heaven still lingers, and at last sinks reluctantly away, what is there left to say?

A stormy clamor introduces a passage in which the orchestra actually begins to speak – enacting a consultation in which the previous melodies are recalled and a new one introduced, to general acclaim. Simplest of tunes, and now perhaps the most famous in the world, the anthem of Europe, it immediately displays its huge capacity for development in two delicious variations followed by an exultant reprise by full orchestra. Restless again, the music is interrupted by a recurrence of the stormy flourish followed by – a human voice! Purists tear their hair! Is this the suicide of the classical symphony? Has the master sacrificed the rigors of form for the satisfaction of delivering a message to the world?

And what a message! The melody now bears the words: ‘All people will be brothers!’ ‘All creatures drink joy at the breasts of nature!’ ‘And the Cherubim stand before God, before God, before God!’ ‘Embarrassing idealistic naivety,’ groan the purists, ‘or worse, forced crowd enthusiasm of a fascist stamp!’ Worse is to come: a solemn and hieratic theme sets the words: ‘O ye millions, I embrace ye! This kiss to the whole world! Brothers, above the starry tent, there must dwell a loving Father!’ After the tumult of joy the music now slows to a mystical stasis.

Then comes the structural coup that redeems the integrity of the finale and caps the whole work: the joy melody and the second theme, with their respective words, are combined in a powerful fugal passage (bars 654-729). Everything comes together in glorious affirmation. After another mystical exhortation, we plunge into the final bacchanale, in the midst of which there is a pause for the four soloists to sing again, in tones that combine endless yearning with confident faith, that ‘all people, all people, all people will be brothers!’

Scorn not the Ninth Symphony, and honor Japan that has made this sublime work its favored Christmas music. At a time when violence, hatred and abuse seem to eclipse fraternity, the simple ideals of the Enlightenment, first entrusted to Europe and America, must and can win out. Sixty years ago Japanese and Americans, now the best of friends, hated each other’s guts and showed it in vicious slaughter. What we all wish this Christmas is that the warring camps of today will soon find their way to the joy of fraternity. Music and lofty words may prove nothing, but bloody deeds prove even less.

(Japan Mission Journal, Dec. 2004)