When this stage production of Wagner’s Parsifal was premiered in 2011, which is now being reinstated at the Liceu, one of the composer’s great-granddaughters, Nike Wagner, confessed to this newspaper in the corridors of the theater that she was a little fed up with the fact that the German question was actively or passively present in the productions of his great-grandfather’s operas. “I would like to see a Parsifal that does not necessarily reflect German tradition and problems. There have to be other solutions, even at the Bayreuth festival itself,” she said at the time, the director of the Weimar festival.
Twelve years and some forms of woke fascism later, Claus Guth’s reading of Parsifal in this montage is more universal than ever. The innocent idiot has come unknowingly to redeem a society, to save the holy grail and its essences from the clutches of the vile, to heal a physical, moral and spiritual wound that Amfortas personifies in his womb, the guardian of the holy grail , wounded by the evil and power-hungry Klingsor. But unlike Wagner’s Parsifal, this young man ends up here finding a taste for being the new leader.
At the premiere of the revival, this Thursday, the public remained attentive throughout the five hours that the opera lasts, acknowledging the work of the artists at the end with nine minutes of applause. Beginning with the choir and the solo voices, who share the difficulty of the score. Applause for a more than correct Nikolai Schukoff in the leading role, for Elena Pankratova who plays the role of Kundry without apparent effort, for René Pape with no desire to show off in the skin of Gurnemanz, for Matthias Goerne who, as always, is vocally more expressive than expansive (Amfortas) and a rather hypnotic Evgeny Nikitin, giving life to the sorcerer Klingsor.
But it was the orchestra that received the warmest applause at the moment when Josep Pons went up on stage to say hello. And also when Claus Guth and his team appeared, the ‘ok’ of the public to the staging remained. The montage maintains a tension according to each of the three acts: the opening adagio presages little activity in that hospital for the mutilated and deranged from war that Guth has turned Wagner’s particular Monsalvat into. That place where, inspired by what he heard about the hermits of Montserrat, the composer places the guardians of the Holy Grail of medieval legend.
But this inaction is offset in the scherzo of the second act by the blissful presence of the flowers seducing Parsifal. And also because of the future of the third act, where the revolving stage provides the necessary dynamism so that the actors/singers can be suspended in that surreal Wagnerian tempo while they go through different rooms and progress towards the final outcome.
Does Parsifal appear with a swastika? Not at all. Not even the military jacket can be associated with the Nazi uniform. What is pursued is to alert against all fascisms, whose seed may be the fascination for the power of the most stupid. It is only the situation of the action in the period between the wars that leads one to think of Hitler and the rise of Nazism that would lead to the Second World War.
The five hours that the opera lasts are not trivial and pass like a breath if one starts from the proper attitude of abandonment. In fact, they are necessary to fully immerse yourself in an abstract story and forget about the rest of the day. Something that happened this Thursday in a premiere in which very few desertions were observed at the end of the second act, that critical moment in which there is a temptation not to wait for the half-hour break until the third and last begins.
In one of the theater’s boxes, the president of the Liceu Foundation, Salvador Alemany, and its director general, Valentà Oviedo, were accompanied by the German consul, Dirk Rotenberg, and the director of the Goethe Institute, Ronald Grätz. Santi Ibarra, Councilor of the Ciutat Vella District, with the former deputy Josep Maria Vallès, and also the auxiliary bishop of Barcelona, ​​Sergi Gordo, and the president of the Cercle del Liceu, Francisco Gaudier, could be seen nearby.
