The story is well known but it is worth recovering. The clocks struck five in the morning as the devoted Wagner audience rose from their seats at the Liceu on New Year’s Eve 1913 to applaud the performance of Parsifal, the first to officially take place outside the Bayreuth lyric temple. Thirty years had passed since Wagner’s death, the stipulated time for the landing. And if in Germany it was already midnight, in Spain it was still 11 pm, a margin of time difference that allowed Barcelona to go down in the annals of the history of the genre.
That after hours that the high school lived after a marathon six-hour session of opera left a deep mark on Parsifal’s relationship with the Rambla theater. The Wagnerian embargo expired on January 1, 1914 and many theaters scheduled it for that day (Berlin, Prague, Madrid…). But the Liceu did not want to wait.
That feat at the gates of the great war was only surpassed in Barcelona anecdotes by the ridiculous confusion that, already in the Second World War, the leadership of Nazism displayed. Himmler took Wagner’s fable literally, that story based on the medieval epic poem by Von Eschenbach that deals with the Holy Grail and the innocent who is to possess it, a young man capable of redeeming the slave Kundry, destroying the evil sorcerer Klingsor and heal the wounded guardian of the sacred chalice, Amfortas. Well, the head of the SS appeared in Montserrat (mountain where the composer was inspired by hearsay to invent the Montsalvat de Parsifal with the custodians of the grail, in the north of Spain) demanding that they be given the chalice that conferred powers .
It is not a title that is represented too much -it is the most complex of the repertoire and there are 4 hours and 15 minutes of music plus its breaks-, but this co-production of the Liceu with the Zurich Opera signed by Claus Guth and which was released in 2011 well deserves to be answered. Of course, with the best voices. A colossal cast of Wagnerian specialists defends it at the Gran Teatre from May 25 to June 7: tenor Nikolai Schukoff in the role of the hero, the thunderous soprano that is Elena Pankratova, who will play Kundry, and three stars such as René Pape (the best Gurnemanz of the last 20 years), Matthias Goerne (Amfortas) and Evgeny Nikitin (Klingsor).
“It is a joy to cast. We would not find a better cast at this time, each one in their role. Because they are at the moment in their careers when their voices fit, for all of them. It is a dream to be able to listen to them,” says Josep Pons, musical director of the theater and responsible for this conduction. All the characters in the work experience a transformation, as this opera “represents the search for the best version of ourselves.”
“Parsifal is one of the most complex operas in the Wagnerian universe. A sacred scenic festival of a symbolic nature that pivots between the mystical concepts of redemption and compassion,” continues VÃctor GarcÃa de Gomar, artistic director of the Liceu, who recalls that it is a title that provokes reactions of all kinds: total admiration or rejection and opposition. “When religion becomes artificial, it is reserved for art to save the specter of religion itself,” said Wagner.
And in this, his last opera, the decomposition of atonality through chromaticism goes to major words, with more accentuated diminished chords, and with a lighter use of leitmotifs. Wagner no longer needs to do the entire quote. And, as always, he is ambiguous with the characters: they all have a morally good side and a vile side, which he also translates into the music.
Thus, Kundry has the highest notes, and no one like this Russian, born in Ekaterinburg and trained in piano and conducting before discovering her vocal gift at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, is capable of serving them. But she also goes down to the G note at some point. And also Parsifal changes when he is greeted as king. Or we should say military leader, because that is how the character ends in this production that takes the action to Germany between the wars and places the protagonists in a hospital for war mutilated, with traumas and hopelessness.
Nikolai Schukoff, who has been singing Parsifal since 2007, confesses that he would have loved to have the role vocally in his head 17 years ago as it is now. His role as a hero who transitions from ingenuity to the discovery of life is small compared to that of Pankratova, but it allows him to develop this vital transformation of the character through acting.
In the case of Pankratova, the soprano debuted the role in Bayreuth in 2016 and since then she has spent four summers in the Wagnerian lyric coliseum and has also performed it at the Amsterdam Opera, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, and at the Monnaie in Brussels, although his experience in Leipzig with a director who faced all Wagner’s operas in two weeks was anthological. There she was, next to René Pape…
“Kundry is Wagner’s most complex character. You can’t compare it to Isolde, which I also debuted in Munich and it’s very easy to explain. But Wagner has developed his language a lot in the last years of his life, when he writes the role of Kundry. Even Parsifal could be said to have three doctorates from the way he talks. So, yes, Kundry experiences great changes in her soul, which in this Liceu production are less visual but are there. She is a woman who travels to through the ages, you do not know where he may wake up or what has happened in the meantime. But he advances until he achieves peace of mind, with the baptism that Parsifal performs on him.”
This journey through the ages also has the sensation of being experienced by the orchestra, which in operas of such long duration has to take into account how to avoid dehydration. “You see the instrumentalists take advantage of a pause in their score to drink, although in the case of the podium it would not be bad to have a refreshment system like that of Formula 1, which has a tube connected,” Pons jokes.
“Managing fatigue is everyone’s job. Although I have verified that when Wagner sounds best is when you are tired. The most memorable Tristan with the Liceu Symphony was returning from Geneva with hardly any sleep -he continues-. We all dehydrated doing a Parsifal, and it is important what you eat and how you eat it in the two breaks, so that energetically it gets you going again. Energy management is important so as not to reach the third act without staying on your feet, because it is a work that uses a different instrumentation, it goes a lot to tutti. In the end, it is the most complicated opera in the repertoire, because cooking is difficult: it is never clear when you are in a recitative, in an aria or arioso. And every two bars the tempo changes” , he concludes.