Bayreuth’s Parsifal — the staging is a train-wreck, the singing superb

Receive free Music updates

We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Music news every morning.

This is rubbish. Literally. Empty plastic bags, rusting batteries and discarded bottles float through the air. Well, not quite literally. If you take off your augmented reality glasses, most of the trash vanishes, though a sad plastic bag remains above the stage.

Bayreuth’s new Parsifal, trumpeted for its innovation, only uses virtual garbage in the third act, but it is pretty rubbishy throughout. Director Jay Scheib and his team have gone to immense lengths to provide some of the audience with augmented reality glasses, though in the end they could only furnish 330 pairs for an audience of almost 2,000.

The lucky (?) wearers can watch a glut of computer-generated 3D images swimming through space in front of the stage. Imagine watching a film of an opera through a fish tank and you have the basic idea. Now take a class of over-enthusiastic young computer geeks and ask them to generate images loosely inspired by Wagner’s Parsifal. Gather absolutely everything they make and throw it all into the tank with the fish, and you’re getting close to what we saw. Bayreuth has management. Why did nobody intervene?

Scheib’s biography does include some respectable opera credentials, but you can’t tell. This is one of the most dreary, least daring, most intellectually bankrupt Parsifals to hit German stages in years. None of the fundamental questions (who are these knights? What kind of society have they created? Who is Kundry? What is the Grail? What is redemption?) are addressed. Instead, there is a great deal of standing around in a set that could well have been generated by AI. Oh, and some vapid live (2D) video. To be fair, there are references to minerals, and the Grail is some kind of black crystal, which Parsifal hurls to the ground and shatters at the end, but there is no context for any of this.

The glasses are hot and heavy, and the images just keep on coming: from stars — or are they snowflakes? — at the beginning through birds, butterflies, bees, moths, a rather sweet fox, severed hands, tree branches, humanoid figures, skulls, snakes, fruit, vehicles, rifles, gouts of fire and hand grenades, to, perhaps worst of all, an entire flock of huge swans that squirt blood when hit by multiple arrows. It is relentless and silly, and after a while you start to feel carsick. It all runs nonstop, like a hellish screensaver, without musicality, dramaturgy, rhyme or reason.

But if you take the glasses off and just regard the stage and singers, you might die of boredom, since absolutely nothing happens. Take your pick.

Bayreuth has assembled a definitive cast for this train-wreck of a production. Andreas Schager, a last-minute ring-in for the title role, sings with breathtaking strength, refinement and rhetorical force; Derek Welton’s Amfortas looks fragile but sounds robust, wise, and authoritative; Georg Zeppenfeld’s Gurnemanz is spellbinding, every word shaped with love, his long narrations thrillingly told; Elīna Garanča’s Kundry sings with warmth, nuance, and intelligence; Jordan Shanahan makes an engaging Klingsor. The singing is uniformly superb.

That is also thanks to Pablo Heras-Casado’s careful conducting. He is the good shepherd, clearly on top of Bayreuth’s famously tricky acoustic challenges in his debut performance there, keeping everything together and balanced, never drowning out his singers. His is neither the most numinous nor the most exciting Parsifal ever, but it works, which is more than can be said for the staging. Scheib and his team were met with a storm of boos and some hysterical cheering at their curtain-calls; everyone else was received with rapture.

Bayreuth prides itself on being a “workshop” for new ideas. They need to keep workshopping this one.

★★★☆☆

To August 27, bayreuther-festspiele.de