The drums of change had long been sounding in Bayreuth. The old bastion of Wagnerian essences woke up yesterday covered in dark clouds to the bewilderment of the pilgrims at the Festspielhaus. In the early afternoon, a violent downpour the red carpet through which the authorities paraded (the former German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen) but without getting to water the traditional fanfare with which it was announced, under umbrellas and from the main balcony, the beginning of a new production of Parsifal.
Such was the importance of the ceremony that he officiated yesterday Pablo Heras-Married (Granada, 1977), who became the first Spanish director in history to open the festival. And with Parsifal, Wagner’s last score. the same with which Knappertsbusch refounded the Green Hill Theater in 1951 to bring it closer to the public, free it from its ties and traditionalist conventions and recover the concept of workshopa laboratory for reflection and experimentation on Total work of art (total work of art) that structures the entire operatic corpus of Wagner.
the ghost of Pierre Boulez, of whom the maestro from Granada has always considered himself a pupil, walked around the orchestra’s music stands. And so, in front of stolen extravagant of other directors, Heras-Casado applied some timesagile, to the point that their version of the prelude barely lasted 12 minutes (compared to Karajan’s 14). His reading of the score was clear and transparent, at times brilliant, full of nuances, with well-marked dynamics and attention to the singers’ phrasing.
He had for the occasion a luxury cast headed by the solvent tenor Andrew Schager. . Especially lucid was the intervention of Georg Zeppenfeld (Gurnemanz), Derek Welton (Amfortas) and they didn’t disappoint either Tobias Kehrer and Jordan Shanahan. But the stellar performance fell to the mezzo Elina Garancain the role of Kundry, who received most of the applause.
The worst part was taken by stage director Jay Scheid with a montage between minimalism kitsch and hallucinogenic psychedelia which, lacking ingenuity in its avant-garde attempt to bring meaning to the festival with augmented reality glasses, abounded in unnecessary outbursts of comedylike the scene of the bloody swan that flies over the seats, the close-ups of the wound on Amfortas’s side (as irrelevant as they are annoying) or the anticlimactic scene in which Parsifal snatches the Holy Lance from Klingsor, which provoked some laughter and the predictable boos. Everything was reduced to the two dimensions of a Parsifal as dazzling musically as disappointing scenically.