Dienen! Dienen! Parsifal in HD

After weeks of excited waiting, I finally saw the Met broadcast of Parsifal last night. What an opera! I think the last time I was so affected by an opera, it was Fidelio, and we all know how that turned out. But in this case, it wasn't so much the music that affected me (although it was spectacular) as it was the sometimes shockingly human emotions that were put across by the singers.

If you've been following this blog for a while, you know that I am first and foremost a writer, not a critic. I did choir in school and had music lessons as a child, but I am not remotely a musician, just an enthusiastic amateur. What attracts me most to opera, after the music, is the story. It is hard for me to just listen to the music without having seen the opera in performance, first. Because I am very visual and very connected to the storyline, I have to really see an opera before I can decide if I like it or not. This comes from my need to understand the character, what drives him, what his surroundings are. I tend to approach opera as a novelist, first and foremost.

So this production blew me away. I went into it much like I have with all the other Wagner operas I've seen thus far: I read up on it in William Bergers's
awesome and hilarious Wagner book, and then came to it with an open mind. All of my Twitter friends have been posting about leitmotifs and poetry and past performances and all that, and I let it be. I decided to just show up and see what they had to offer. And I was blown away.

I think it goes without saying that there is something almost supernatural about Jonas Kaufmann's combined acting and singing ability. That man owned this opera. He went from arrogant and impressionable boy to maturing youth to humble, weary knight in a way that probably puts all the great Wagner tenors of the past to shame (fighting words, I know). I loved the unintentional hilarity of his watching the Grail service take place. There's Amfortas, weeping and wailing at his pain and his unworthiness as he is surrounded by the knights, and suddenly Parsifal pops up, looking over their shoulders as if to get a better view, before retreating from the knights' death-glares. The way the ceremony was staged made it feel less controversial to me (I am not a Catholic, so don't attend mass, but this was so far from a proper mass as to be something else entirely). And the music! All I can say was that I was completely verklempt during the first pause.

As I said on Twitter when I got home last night, I kind of want to marry Peter Mattei and have his little Swedish babies for what he did to that role. His was incredible. The singing, the acting, the pain-I have rarely seen anything quite like it, period. He absolutely killed me during his Act 3 aria. Rene Pape, too, is my hero. His Gurnemanz was magnificent.I am a sucker for tenderness, and the way he handled Act 3 was just...I'd say I have no words, but I actually have a lot of them.

Let me talk for a moment about Act 3. A ton has been said about Act 2 and the seduction, and Act 1 and the separation of the sexes in the wilderness, so I'm not going to touch that. Let me instead tell you what really touched me, in the end.

I am, I have to admit, a right old sap. I love to see characters go on a journey and get really beaten, and yet transcend their troubles to become their higher selves. In that sense, Parsifal was tailor-made for me. In Act 3, we see Gurnemanz praying before some open graves, then finding Kundry, lying asleep in a heap. He takes her hand and rubs it, trying to wake her, strokes her hair, even goes so far as to kiss her fingers (not, I think, something he would have done in Act 1). And then Parsifal enters, bent almost double, dragging himself along as though he barely has the strength to stand. He prostrates himself on the ground before the Spear, exhausted, and then Gurnemanz finally recognizes him as that "young fool" from so long ago. As someone who doesn't care for pomp and arrogance, I loved the way this scene was played. Parsifal is exhausted, hungry, upset that he wandered for so long, unable to find Amfortas, that everyone's been dying. He sinks down into Gurnemanz's arms like an exhausted child, half conscious, and that good knight just holds him up, not saying anything, while Kundry fetches water. As per the libretto, they bathe him and give him new clothes. As per the Girard production, Gurnemanz blesses Parsifal and helps him to dress with all the tenderness of a father for his long-lost son. And you see how grateful for it Parsifal is. They touch hands, shoulders, an old man and his long-hoped-for son, both tired and downtrodden, but sensing peace and hope in each other.

In this production, there was nothing but humility about Parsifal when he returned. He blessed Kundry and held her hand not with the loftiness of a knight of the Grail, but as a man who has learned to understand the horror she has been through. They are fellows at this moment, compatriots. It was totally appropriate for her to be the one to open the Grail cask and participate in the ceremony-I really don't think it could have been anyone else. And again we had Gurnemanz, he of the quiet strength, to hold her as she died with a dignity that has been denied to her for millenia.

That's what does it for me: quiet tenderness, absolution, the love the characters have for each other in spite of all that they have been through. Kaufmann, Pape and Dalayman were able to bring that across in spades. My inner softie was a howling mess by the time the curtain went down.

And yet, through it all, my inner Twitter-loving sasspot couldn't quite shut up. Well, at least not for the first two acts. She was smacked into silence by the softie for Act 3. So here are some of the brief, irreverent thoughts I had earlier on in the opera:

In Act 1, these didn't so much seem like the Knights of the Holy Grail as they did the Knights of the Holy Sea Anemone.

German audiences do not applaud at the end of Act 1. Even when the opera is a movie theater and as far away from Wagner's vision as it can possibly get. I'm pretty sure they were all cursing the New York audience as philistines.

My subtitles were in German, so I'm not sure I understood this correctly, but this exchange seemed to happen in Act 1:
Amfortas: "Where's Gawain?"
Squire: "Klingsor got him."
Amfortas: "Damn."

Katarina Dalayman's Kundry clearly went to the Helena Bonham Carter school of crazy. She reminded me of nothing so much as a less evil Bellatrix Lestrange.

German audiences LOVE their boys. Jonas Kaufmann got so many cheers and giggles during his interview, and everyone shrieked with glee when he turned to the camera to "say a few sentences in German", and proceeded to great all his family and friends and "my Uncle Carmello in Berlin". So much love for him. He was so cute.

Rene Pape standing behind Eric Owens in the dressing room area and moving to see if the camera was still there was so funny. I half expected him to move right...move left...wave. But he didn't. Alas. Also, Kaufmann strolling around behind Owens without a shirt on had to be a prank. Either that, or no one thought that interview location through properly.

Am I the only one who was reminded of that creepy movie The Ring during Act 2? The Flower Maidens were Samara and it was scary as hell.

And those are my (disjointed, rambling) thoughts. We can talk about it more in the comments, if you like.