Parsifal by Götz Friedrich (review)

gestures. Even the minor characters, notably the servants, interact with the most subtle awareness of their class. Bullied and ridiculed by their mercurial employees, they bustle around stage, packing and unpacking luggage, running errands, barely finding time to attend to their own affairs. These servant-characters are not caricatures of bumpkins but human beings caught in a social system that they cannot change. Rarely does one experience a revival in the American theatre where the historicity of a classic is so intelligently confronted. Wright's attention to class distinctions and the contradictory modes of decorum in Goldoni's play is keenly felt in the shaping of his mise en scene. At no point does one feel that he treats the Trilogy as a "period piece": there is always a sense of social and historical inquiry in his production. One is convinced that he has deeply contemplated what Goldoni described as his two perennial "sources of mediatation"-the "World" and "Theatre." PARSIFAL Directed by Gotz Friedrich Bayreuth Festival Glenn Loney Richard Wagner's "Stage Dedication Festival" opera, Parsifal, is 100 years old. Premiered in Bayreuth in 1882, the year of Wagner's death, the quasi-religious work was never to be performed anywhere else but in the shrine Wagner had built for his works, masterpieces of Music-Theatre. Before long, other opera houses illegally produced Parsifal, Wagner's version of the quest of the Grail knight Percival, making it physically-if not intellectually -accessible to thousands of opera addicts. Wagner's widow, Cosima, preserved the original staging for years. Only in the Nazi era did it get a new look. After the war, Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner each gave it new, probing interpretations and visualizations. On its centenary, as with the 1976 centenary of the Ring, so controversially celebrated by French director Patrice Ch6reau, the innovative former East German regisseur, Gdtz Friedrich, trained by Walter Felsenstein at the Komische Oper, was asked by Wolfgang Wagner to rethink this strongly symbolic epiphanic final work of his grandfather. Drawing on Marxian dialectic and Hegelian themes, Friedrich obliged with a futuristic vision of this legend that bored no one but excited vigorous boos from ardent Wagnerians . The bulky Parsifal program carried a long essay by Hans Kung, exploring the possible Christian-and Buddhist-content of the fable. Another essayist revived the issue of Wagner's anti-semitism. With such turbulent discussion regarding the meaning of the finished opera, not to mention Wagner's partly unrealized intentions, it's clear this is not an opera to be regarded as idle entertainment. 77 Friedrich had his designer, Andreas Reinhardt, create a stage milieu of an internally arcaded building-without floors-lying on its side, with the roof upstage. This was to emphasize the skewing of time and space and the varied way one looks at what he or she thinks is reality. This structure, so like one of those Italian futurist monuments of the 1930s, did project a timelessness . This was important to Friedrich's vision of the story, which takes place in the medieval past, in the present, and in the future, after the big bomb drops, leaving a blasted landscape of burned trees and empty arches, with Parsifal as the redeemer-but not the Saviour-to bring spiritual ease to the seductress Kundry and to the Grail knights, GUrnemanz and Amfortas . Some modern touches, such as Titurel singing from his sarcophagus over closed-circuit TV and Flower Maidens who looked like fugitives from a 1923 tea-dance at the Plaza Hotel, seemed self-defeating. Klingsor worked his evil magic from a control panel that was worthy of Star Trek. Such topical gimmicks weren't helpful in illuminating the mystery that is Parsifa/. Hans-JUrgen Syberberg, the avant-garde filmmaker who gave the world unique and rather kitschy visions of Wagner, King Ludwig 11, and UnserHitler , also honored the centenary, opening his four-and-a-half-hour-long Parsifal film in Bayreuth on the morning of Friedrich's afternoon stage premiere of the same work. Filmed on a sound-stage crowded with symbolic props, the Syberberg cinema version of the opera came across like Our Hitler -with music-since the dominant visual motif of the...