So protean are the operas of Richard Wagner that they mirror not merely their own time and place – Germany of the Romantic era – but their time and place of performance. In Hitler’s Germany, they embodied creeds of national and racial supremacy. In fin-de-siecle America, they excited melioristic fervor. During this trans-Atlantic heyday of Wagnerism, peaking in the 1880s and 1890s, the enthralled Wagnerites of New York City were not patriots or anti-Semites, decadents or proto-modernists; they preached or practiced uplift. Parsifal, accordingly, acquired supreme status in the Wagner canon. It registered as a religious drama invoking Christian iconography. Its obsession with race – with purity of blood – passed unnoticed.
Two recent Parsifal manifestations sharply focus the subsequent American history of this valedictory opus – not a grand opera or music drama, but a “sacred festival play” which summarizes and complicates Wagner’s artistic legacy in equal measure. The first is the appearance, on four CDs, of a legendary Metropolitan Opera Parsifal broadcast: the Good Friday matinee of April 15, 1938. The other is a new Parsifal production at the San Francisco Opera. The 1938 Met broadcast was previously only available in wretched sound; the new restoration, by Ward Marston (who specializes in scrubbing old recordings), may be the Wagner event of the year. It documents in full the role of Parsifal as sung by the supreme Wagner tenor of his generation: Lauritz Melchior. It also happens, not so incidentally, to include the participation of no fewer than five Jewish artists. If the Met Parsifal documents wartime intensity and displacement, the San Francisco Parsifal (October 25 to November 13) equally betokens today. Its obtrusive emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusivity mangles the opera’s central sermon: that only innocence breeds true compassion.
The Met’s Wagner lineage is long and august. Four successive Wagner conductors of high consequence presided: Anton Seidl (who arrived in 1885 as Wagner’s onetime protégé and surrogate son), Gustav Mahler (who quit the Vienna Opera for New York), Arturo Toscanini (who pushed Mahler aside in 1908 and stayed through 1915), and Artur Bodanzky (who died one year after the 1938 Parsifal now restored). If the company’s stagings were often indifferent, its international casts were at all times stellar. Considered musically, the Met could credibly be called the world’s leading Wagner house for fully half a century. It is a claim difficult to absorb because Bodanzky is today little remembered – and because the enveloping intensity of engagement driving Bodanzky’s Wagner broadcasts quickly became a thing of the past. If recalled at all, he is notorious for brisk tempos and bulky abridgements (undertaken in consideration of an audience that mainly spoke no German).
But Bodanzky’s 1938 Parsifal is neither fast nor trimmed . The Prelude – this opera’s keynote, emanating from existential darkness to predict a vast trajectory of quest and redemption – is exceptionally slow. Its sustained gravitas is humbling. The entirety of the first act, lasting 107 minutes, is so raptly focused that the curtain falls in silence: there are no applause. Even more remarkable is act three, a reading of awesome weight and breadth, in which Wagner’s “Good Friday Spell” transfigures a mythic forest on Easter Sunday morning. Parsifal is here a holy fool returned from wandering the world. He brings with him the Spear that once wounded Christ on the cross. Empowered by compassion, he redeems the brotherhood of knights who safeguard a second holy relic: the Grail Cup from which Christ drank at the Last Supper.
As the protagonist in this drama, Melchior is sui generis, his tenor fresh and true, heroic and intimate, a bearer of clarion proclamations and whispered intimacies, a purveyor of words and thoughts. The swelling refulgence of his final invitation — “öffnet den Shrein!” — is itself a vocal miracle. He is partnered by Emanuel List as Gurnemanz, Friedrich Schorr as Amfortas, and Arnold Gabor as Kingsor. That all three, and also Bodanzky, were Jews born abroad is not irrelevant. Three of the roles they here enact are studies in displacement by the composer who most complexly understood the outsider: Klingsor, who has castrated himself to cancel erotic desire; Amfortas, whose bleeding wound Klingsor inflicted when he stole the Holy Speer; Parsifal, who knows nothing of his history, not even his name. Most remarkably, the opera’s sole female participant, Kundry, alternates between polar extremes of estrangement: when not deferentially tending the knights, she becomes a whore beholden to Klingsor’s power mania. Willa Cather, a devoted Wagnerite, unforgettably called Kundry “a summary of the history of womankind. [Wagner] sees in her an instrument of temptation, of salvation, and of service; but always an instrument, a thing driven and employed. . . . She cannot possibly be at peace with herself. . . . A driven creature, [she is] made for purposes eternally contradictory.” The inspiration for this characterization was the soprano Olive Fremstad, the Callas of her day, and a personal acquaintance of Cather’s. In the 1938 Met performance, the role of Kundry is lost on Kirsten Flagstad, who better knows Brunnhilde and Isolde.
In 1938, Wagner at the Met dominated the repertoire. No orchestra abroad possessed a more potent Wagner lineage. Absorbing the robust exaltation of the playing, one is amazed by the sheer expenditure of energy sustaining these four- and five-hour dramas. It would be simplistic merely to credit Bodanzky and his predecessors with powers of inspiration they doubtless possessed, or to cite the galvanizing singers with whom the players interact (in Parsifal, the effortless precision with which everyone breathes together, even in passages of great deliberation, constitutes a master class in Wagner interpretation). Simply put: the works are known and loved. They are felt.
And Parsifal maintained a special place. Jeffery McMillan, in the copious booklet inserted in Marston’s Parsifal CD box, recounts a four-decade history of Good Friday Parsifal matinees at the Met beginning in 1907. Following the practice at Wagner’s Bayreuth Festival, applause and curtain calls were forbidden following the first and third acts. In a recent blog post reviewing the Marston Parsifal, Conrad L. Osborne – an unsurpassed chronicler of operatic performance in New York City beginning in the 1950s – writes of his own experience of “those Good Friday [Parsifal] matinees, when the tradition was still in full force.”
“It was reverent and church-like, with the attention and obedient patience of the true believers setting (indeed, enforcing) the tone for everyone, even the skeptical and bewildered—exactly as at a service. . . . That was a uniquely intense experience, magnified in Act 3 by the awareness that Good Friday reigned both inside and outside the theatre. Mostly inside, though, and the intensity was followed by a matchingly celebrative sense of relief and release upon discharge into the relatively fresh air and late-afternoon light of West 40th Street, with its oblivious semi-holiday passersby and lazy automotive traffic.”
The subsequent fate of Wagner at the Met is unwittingly documented, in the 1938 Parsifal broadcast, by a further Jewish participant arrived from abroad: the twenty-six-year-old Erich Leinsdorf. Bodanzky, increasingly infirm, relinquished his baton to Leinsdorf for act two, the shortest and most operatic of Parsifal’s three acts. In this cruel juxtaposition, Leinsdorf is no Bodanzky. The orchestra’s impassioned weight of utterance is lifted. The singers are sometimes rushed. The elemental groundswell is absent. When upon Bodanzky’s death in 1939 Edward Johnson, running the house, appointed Leinsdorf in his place, both Melchior and Flagstad threatened to quit. But Leinsdorf and Johnson prevailed. Ever after, the house’s Wagner tradition lapsed and thinned. Beginning in the 1980s, Speight Jenkins’ Seattle Opera eclipsed the Met as America’s premiere Wagner venue. More recently, the Met’s current Parsifal production, new in 2013, was briefly redemptive. Its salvation was not the cast or director, but a master conductor – Daniele Gatti. Remounted five years later under the baton of Yannick Nezet-Seguin, the production failed to ignite.
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The San Francisco Opera was founded in 1923 – forty years after the Met. It enjoyed a Wagnerian heyday in the 1970s under Kurt Herbert Adler, an Austrian/American conductor and impresario who expanded the season to as many as 16 operas. For Wagner, Adler assembled the biggest names abroad, beginning with Birgit Nilsson. The orchestra was mediocre and at times under-rehearsed. In compensation, Adler landed a major conductor from East Germany: Otmar Suitner. The company was for many the city’s cultural crown jewel.
These days, the San Francisco Opera seems a shrunken remnant. The present season includes only six operas. Meanwhile, across the street, a San Francisco Symphony music director of high prestige, Esa-Pekka Salonen, in 2024 abruptly quit the orchestra when its board failed to back artistic initiatives he regarded as vital. The symphony’s current repertoire, reversing course, is startlingly provincial. The opera, in comparison, is by no means without ambition. Its new Parsifal comes on the heels of new Wagner productions – Lohengrin and Tristan und Isolde — the two seasons previous. The conductor of all three is the company’s music director since 2021: Eun Sun Kim. A Wagner Ring cycle is projected. In short: San Francisco is intent on taking Seattle’s relinquished place as a West Coast Wagner mecca.
Their Parsifal is self-evidently a labor of love. Kim’s interpretation is fluent and assiduously prepared. The orchestra of 77 players, while smallish for a 3,000-seat house, is superior to the Wagner orchestra Adler assembled. The chorus is sound. Of the principal singers, the Kundry – Tanja Ariane Baumgartner – is overmatched vocally and dramatically (most Kundrys are). Otherwise, the cast is shrewdly chosen. A pair of veteran Wagnerians – Kwangchui Youn and Falk Struckmann – sing Gurnemanz and Klingsor. Brandon Jovanovich’s tenor, more plangent than heroic, commands sufficient heft to clinch Parsifal’s climactic outbursts. Brian Mulligan is a lyric Amfortas. Though bigger voices – such as Melchior, List, Schorr, and Flagstad – could potentially have accommodated a reading of greater breadth and weight, the instruments at hand get the job done.
That these singers participate as believers is a credit to the director, Matthew Ozawa. But he concludes with a fatal faux pas. Wagner here furnishes an enraptured ending perfectly mated with sonic radiance: “A beam of light: the Grail glows at its brightest. . . . Kundry slowly sinks lifeless to the ground in front of Parsifal, her eyes uplifted to him. Amfortas and Gurnemanz kneel in homage to Parsifal, who waves the Grail in blessing over the worshipful brotherhood of knights.” Ozawa not only cancels Kundry’s death – she partners Parsifal’s possession of the cup. The result resembles a prosaic marriage tableau.
A greater miscalculation is the engagement of a prominent choreographer, Rena Butler, to add dancers. When in 2019 the Met brought a new production of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess from London to New York, someone noticed that a Black cast had been entrusted to a white director and white conductor. And so a Black choreographer, Camile A. Brown, was added to the show along with her company of African-American dancers. Their presence proved wholly superfluous and mildly obtrusive. In Parsifal, Butler’s dancers are wholly obtrusive. The first, introduced in act one, impersonates Parsifal’s mother Herzeleide. When in act two Wagner strategically leaves Parsifal and Kundry alone on stage, the addition of Herzeleide as a mimed presence vitiates the opera’s pivotal confrontation. Klingsor’s Flower Maidens, who have just been banished from the premises, in Butler’s rendering include men as well as women. And she repeatedly foregrounds a trio of red-clad dancers, two women and a man. When Klingsor hurls the Spear at Parsifal, it is they who guide its trajectory. When Amfortas raises the cup to end act one, the dancers interpose their gyrations. In the program book, Butler explains that she has drawn inspiration from “the restrained, poetic gestures of Noh, the visceral, soul-searching impulses of Butoh,” and the “ritual gestures found in Christianity . . . When these traditions intersect, they create an eclectic and abstract movement vocabulary that seeks to bridge the human and the divine. . . . The choreography invites audiences to experience Parsifal as a collective ritual — immersed in wonder, reverence, and the possibility of transcendence.” I’m not sure Wagner requires any help in this department. Butler also has a supplemental agenda: genderless choreography. I cannot, however, think of an opera more intent on exploring gender disparities than Parsifal, with its celibate Knights, castrated villain, and Ur-feminine protagonist/antagonist “summarizing womankind.” So extrinsic are Butler’s dancers that their removal would leave no holes. It is only the corrupting ideological moment at hand that makes them seem essential.
Though elderly, San Francisco’s Parsifal audience is robust and rapt, including (according to the company) a substantial proportion of newcomers. And subscriptions are up. Jovanovich, in the program book, testifies that singing Parsifal makes him feel “a better person.” I am sure many in the house felt similarly.
Wagner endures.
RELATED BLOGS:
Celebrating Artur Bodanzky ‘s Wagner broadcasts: click here.
The San Francisco Symphony loses Esa-Pekka Salonen: click here and here.
Daniele Gatti conducts a magnificent “Parsifal” at the Met (2013): click here for my Times Literary Supplement review.
Yannick Nezet-Seguin takes over the Met “Parsifal” (2018): click here.
A superb Seattle Opera “Parsifal” (2003): click here (scroll down for my Times Literary Supplement review).
A lot of food for thought here. However, I have two issues with it.
First, in graf 5, line 8, I hope that the “Holy Speer” you mention is not Albert Speer but rather a simple misspelling.
More puzzling and, to me, saddening, Joe, is that you would dismiss the choreography and dancers of Camille A. Brown in the relatively recent production of the Met’s “Porgy and Bess” (which I did see) as existing because “someone noticed that a Black cast had been entrusted to a white director and white conductor.” Do you have evidence of a “someone” you can name who “noticed” this and then went the distance to employ Brown for racial reasons entirely? Brown, of course, happens to be one of the outstanding choreographers on Broadway of the past several years. A Bessie Award winner, she is also a winner of multiple Princess Grace Awards and is a four-time Tony nominee. If, rather, you simply intended to level a casual insult–and, even there, one that has no aesthetic relevance to criticism, positive or negative, of Rena Butler’s choreography for the new San Francisco Opera production of “Parsifal–because Rena Butler is also African American, then I can say, as someone who follows your absorbing writings on music, that this is beneath your own personal standard and you can do much better.