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.

This DVD broke my resin-caked heart. Hans Jurgen Syberberg holds a special place in that same sticky heart for directing the longest stoner flick every made, the massive nine-hour Hitler - Ein Film Aus Deutschland. You had to have a kitchen garbage bag chock full of weed to get through all of it, but it is sooo worth it. So I was over the moon when Syberberg had directed a movie of Wagner's Parcifal but not because of the double-dose of self importance one gets from watching both New German Cinema and opera (the more bored you are, the more important you become for sitting through it). No, I was looking forward to puppets and outrageous visuals staged and projected onto those trademark black backgrounds, with a big buttery snow globe to balance it out. Syberberg is obsessed with snow globes and the one in Parcifal is a beaut: a Shining like hedge maze, covered in snow, in the middle of which a giant silver tree with no leaves grows, a fitting symbol for the innocent child-knight's journey to self-discovery through incest. It's great to watch stoned; Rosebud meets kind bud. We also have Wagner's death mask forming the landscape, with the decapitated heads of 19th century German superstars (Marx, Goethe, Nietchze und alles) lined in a row against puppets plunging drills into huge bloody ears . Just makes you're lungs water thinking about it, huh? Well, forget it. The fatal flaw of Parcifal is the singing. Every time someone sings Syberberg parks his camera on them and waits till they finish. And since this is opera, they never finish. He will lay a close-up on you and let his foghorns yap until your t-shirt is covered in drool. Then, in the rare instances no one is singing , the screen takes off into the Syberbergian stuff of dreams. Then someone starts huffing and the whole things crashes to Earth. I don't even think Syberberg was able to get to everything he wanted to in this picture; Hell, there's only one Swastika. How can you have a Syberberg picture, especially one of an opera who's meaning was high-jacked by the Nazis, and have only one Swastika? It's like having a Cheech and Chong picture without some weirded out vehicle for them to drive around in for the whole movie. Even the sex change has nearly no impact. Instead of close-ups, the director would have done better by doing most of the songs as voice-overs, showing the scenes the singers sing about instead of the singer. Or Syberberg could have had his tab of acid and dropped it too, if he had projected film images of the singers over otherworldly scenes of wonder. But no, instead we have a big, sticky kind bud of a dope picture that is riddled with seeds the size of gorilla nuts, nuts called songs. Also, this DVD is merely a transfer of the VHS version that came out in the late Eighties. This means it's full screen and you have to deal with the Nazi -era translation of this opera, something which I'm not sure is done on purpose; it's ironic either way. This film does deserve a wide-screen treatment, though, as well as new subtitles. Mein Deutsche Grammatik Sheisshaus ist, but even twice- baked Tiskit could tell that what they were singing did match what was on screen, especially during the pop-up incest segments. The great visuals over the instrumentals rate a full nine leaves, the best you can get, but the singing parts are little but seeds and stems. So, let's average it out and call it Four Leaves: Worthwhile. Will get a small, pleasant hum from.

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)

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?