Bayreuth I - Parsifal

Enfim, chegam os primeiros ecos de Bayreuth!
A reprise de Parsifal (a produção de Herheim, estreada em 2008) foi um sucesso, como segue:

«(...) the first revival of the Norwegian director Stefan Herheim's production of Parsifal. Its first two acts are among the most beautiful and complex things that I have ever seen on a stage, and I can scarcely describe their import.

Herheim and his conceptual adviser Alexander Meier-Dörzenbach and designers Heike Scheele, Gesine Völlm and Ulrich Niepel take up Gurnemanz's remark about the Grail Hall being a place where time melts into space. Both individual identities and the past and present are constantly mingling and transforming in a ravishing display of stage magic.

The basic setting is simultaneously Wagner's house Wahnfried and a reproduction of Bayreuth's original set for the Grail Hall in 1882. Wagner's tomb lies downstage: it's a place to which people retreat and build themselves fantasies. A large bed also dominates: here Parsifal is born and his mother Herzeleide dies, here seductions take place and dreams are dreamt.

What further distinguishes Herheim's direction is its exquisitely sensitive musicality. The endlessly shifting and meticulously choreographed imagery flows in and out of the river of Wagner's score, as it progresses from the Bismarck era to Adenauer's reconstruction, through two world wars and the Weimar Republic, showing idealism turning to militarism and religious belief to political fanaticism.

Underneath it all is the question of the many things Parsifal has meant in the context of a troubled century of German history and the current obsession with coming to terms with the past.

Act 3 comes as an anti-climax, with dutiful references to the reopening of Bayreuth in 1951, and the clichés of Parsifal in a long white gown and a mirror reflecting the audience. Nor could I detect much reference to the mission of racial purification on which the Grail Order is established. But this is a production of such deeply layered textures that it can't be assimilated in one sitting.

Daniele Gatti conducted a smoothly lyrical reading, somewhat short of agonised intensity. The orchestra and chorus are, as ever, simply magnificent, and the excellent cast led by Christopher Ventris (Parsifal), Mihoko Fujimura (Kundry), Detlef Roth (Amfortas) and Kwangchoul Youn (Gurnemanz) sing and act with the total commitment that Wagner always strove for. I think he would have been enthralled by Herheim's production, too.»