Wagner - Parsifal

Wagner - Parsifal
by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg

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Movie Reviews of Wagner - Parsifal

Movie Review: Syberberg's Parsifal
Summary: 5 Stars

Director Hans Syberberg chose a surreal presentation of "Parsifal" for his interpretation of the opera. He filmed it completely on a sound-stage and based the craggy, rocky set upon the composer's death mask. Wagner's skull splits open to reveal the interior of the castle at Montsalvat and Klingsor's castle; his upper lip is Gurnemanz's herb garden; his eye socket is the sacred lake. Syberberg also plays around with the appearance of the characters: Parsifal changes sex in mid-aria, Gurnemanz is an ageless young man, Kundry has naked hairy breasts in the first act. The set is littered with artifacts from history. The overture opens with a destroyed miniature reproduction of Montsalvat as it appeared in the first performance at Bayreuth. Parsifal approaches Klingsor's castle and passes by Soviet-style monuments and gigantic broken stone phalluses from a Greek temple. The chair that appears in various scenes is Charlemagne's throne from the cathedral at Aachen. Some of the elements of the set seem to be taken from Hieronymous Bosch. Syberberg seems to have scattered all these bits and pieces throughout the film with no overall interpretive purpose and left the audience to sort out the meanings.

But perhaps Syberberg intended to overthrow Wagner's unsavory themes - the anti-Semitism and the misogyny - and allow the beauty of the music to triumph by making the sub-meanings of the drama reflect this beauty less contradictorily This seems to hinge upon the changing of the boy Parsifal into the girl Parsifal. The frustrated heterosexual encounter in the second act forms a fulcrum upon which Syberberg balances a homoerotic relation between the boy Parsifal and Gurnemanz in the first act and between Kundry and the girl Parsifal in the third. Parsifal changes sex at the moment he experiences and understands the same pain and longing that crippled Amfortas. Apparently, Syberberg is making a Platonic assertion that sexual desire is an obstacle to true spiritual love, and that this love cannot be experienced between the sexes. This is also to some degree part of Christian theology, and what has been called "a black Mass on stage" the director may have attempted to reconvert into a true Mass.

Except for Gurnemanz and Klingsor, Syberberg used non-singing actors for all the roles. The trouble with this is that lip-sync seems to be non-existent, and it takes some time to become accustomed to it. Also, the recording is unevenly mixed. On the plus side, the acting is very good. Amfortas looks like he's really suffering, and Edith Clever is an angry and desperate Kundry. This movie is purposely full of cognitive dissonances, but the one that stands out is the powerful tenor coming out of the mouths of both Parsifals. The conductor moves the music along more briskly than usual, and this is quite refreshing. During the overture, Syberberg uses marionettes, among other things, to relate the story that precedes the first act. Like any great work of art, "Parsifal" can bear many different and contradictory interpretations; Syberberg's is the most fascinating I've seen.

Summary of Wagner - Parsifal

Amfortas: Armin Jordan (sung by Wolfgang Schöne)
Titurel: Martin Sperr (sung by Hans Tschammer)
Gurnemanz: Robert Lloyd
Parsifal 1: Michael Kutter
Parsifal 2: Karen Krick (sung by Reiner Goldberg)
Klingsor: Aage Haugland
Kundry: Edith Clever (sung by Yvonne Minton)

"Syberberg's Parsifal" is exactly that: it is not to be approached as a video presentation of an opera but as a full-scale film in its own right. The director's concern with the claims of the romantic and "irrational" in Germany's cultural heritage, demonized as an aftermath of the Third Reich, is here at its apex. An astonishingly intricate profusion of imagery saturates the film--as props, cluttering objects, costumes, part of the set, or visuals projected onto the background--with the resonance of a long, disturbing dream. Striking visuals from the opera's own symbolic world are set alongside a veritable parade of iconography from Europe's cultural history, while the action of the opera is seen to take place within and around an enormous replica of Wagner's death mask as backdrop. Conceptually the intention is to counter Wagner's "narcotic" spell with Brechtian distance or with a Walter Benjamin-like slant on the artifacts of culture.

For all of the radicalism of his imagery, Syberberg hews surprisingly close to more traditional acting styles here, drawing on a "presentational" approach of gesture, the stylization of early film, and intimate reaction shots. The music was actually recorded separately as a soundtrack, to which the actors (mostly a separate cast) lip-synch their performances. Conductor Armin Jordan--a sensitive but never self-indulgent Wagnerian--also actually performs the role of Amfortas, and the distinguished actress Edith Clever is a special asset for her mesmerizing, expressive Kundry, making the role into the opera's psychological epicenter. At the point of the resisted kiss in Act II, in a Jungian split, Parsifal becomes portrayed by a woman (still mouthing the mellifluous tenor exclamations of Reiner Goldberg). Syberberg wallows in contradictory currents and obscure symbolism that sometimes reinforces what he seems to want to take apart. Yet he has also succeeded in locating the work somewhere in a unique space between fetishized ritual and purely aesthetic experience. The DVD transfer is somewhat grainy in resolution, while the soundtrack has a noticeable persistent hiss. Jordin's relatively fleet pacing allows for much texture and offers a fine enough performance, though not a top choice on musical terms alone. --Thomas May