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Went to Parsifal last night... it was fucking great (four rows back from the stage... wow, this time I could not only see their faces, I could see their mouths move).
I've never seen Parsifal before, and other than the basic outline of the story I had no idea what to expect. Musically, it was excellent- a LOT of massed choruses (which you don't get in the Ring), thematically- bit of a weird one.
Wagner-haters often seem to use Parsifal as being the nastiest of his operas. I don't get that, really. An anti-Semite he may have been, but there's nothing in Klingsor (or Kundry, for that matter) to suggest Jewishness, really. Klingsor WAS fundamentally evil, which is why he couldn't join the Grail Knights, which does, admittedly, go against the whole redemptive message of the story- but unless you take it as a given that evil=Jewish, it doesn't work when read as an anti-Semitic text. There are none of the traditional stereotypes invoked, and redemption for all is the message. Klingsor's basically your run-of-the-mill bad guy (except Darth Vader never castrated himself to gain wisdom).
But then, the Grail Knights are all basically wankers until Parsifal turns up (in fact, they're wankers WHEN he turns up, and only sort it out when he's fucked off and come back)- and they're equally as stupid as he, the "pure fool" is, given that it hasn't occurred to any of them that Kundry, being the only female outside of Klingsor's castle, is the same woman who led Amfortas to his ruin. I mean, who else did they think it could have been?
It's also interesting that the Nazis pretty much banned Parsifal through non-performance, while loving his other stuff, because its message of pacifism and redemption didn't sit well with them.
Sir John Tomlinson was fucking excellent, but the thing I learned about getting the expensive seats (these fuckers were the best part of two hundred quid each!) was that the interval conversation is a lot funnier, and a lot more facepalmworthy.
Interval one-
"Well, the staging's all wrong. Parsifal looks like a WORKMAN!!!"
Interval two-
"There was definitely some 'equal opportunities employment' going on with the Flowermaidens". (There were about 25 flowermaidens on stage. TWO of them weren't white. My personal guess as to why they were in the front row, having heard them all sing, is that they were employed BECAUSE THEY HAD THE BEST VOICES, and were therefore the best equipped to take the two leading voice roles among that paricular chorus. But maybe I'm just mad. Incidentally, they didn't comment on the fact that Willard White was singing one of the main roles... ah, perhaps it was because he was the bad guy).
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