The film Hans-Jürgen Syberberg (that’s how his name appears on imdb.com, though the DVD we were watching last night spelled his name “Hans Jurgen Syberberg” — no hyphen and no umlaut) made of Wagner’s opera Parsifal in the early 1980’s (the copyright date is 1982 but imdb.com lists it as 1983) is as enigmatic as one would guess from the standard sources’ inability to agree even on the date and the director’s name. Syberberg was one of the enfants terribles of the so-called “New German Cinema” in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, and he achieved international fame for a documentary he did in 1977 called Our Hitler: A Film from Germany. The most famous scene in this movie showed Hitler emerging from Richard Wagner’s tomb, as if he were a reincarnation of the famous and still controversial composer. There’s been a lot of nonsense about the supposed Wagner-Hitler connection written over the years, most of it cheerily ignoring the fact that Wagner died in 1883 and Hitler was born in 1888. The basic “logic,” if you can call it that, seems to go something like this: Wagner hated Jews, Hitler hated Jews, Hitler liked Wagner, therefore Wagner was responsible for all the horrors of Hitler’s regime, including World War II and the Holocaust. Parsifal was Wagner’s last opera, premiered at his theatre at Bayreuth in Bavaria in 1882 — a year before Wagner’s death (and, ironically, conducted by Hermann Levi, a Jewish conductor Wagner’s patron, King Ludwig II, insisted he use) — and it’s itself one of the most enigmatic pieces ever produced by a major composer, especially one who specialized in the most openly dramatic form of music there is, opera.
In a marvelous passage from his review of the 1933 Bayreuth revival of Parsifal, future EMI record producer Walter Legge wrote, “There is in the last works of nearly every great artist a strangely luminous quality, as if the creative mind had already seen the world beyond death and were conscious of things infinitely greater than the emotional experiences of this world.” Among the examples he cited were Shakespeare’s The Tempest (which in 1933 was still believed to have been Shakespeare’s last play, though the current edition of the Oxford Shakespeare includes a later one, The Two Noble Kinsmen, co-credited to Shakespeare and John Fletcher), Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Beethoven’s last string quartets, Brahms’ Four Serious Songs, and Wagner’s Parsifal — and Parsifal has at least one other thing in common with The Tempest: for works by people acclaimed as master dramatists, they’re pieces in which almost nothing actually happens. The big dramatic event in The Tempest — the tempest itself — happens midway through Act I, and Shakespeare seems totally uninterested in it except as a dramatic device to get his “outside” characters stranded on Prospero’s island. The big dramatic event in Parsifal actually happened in the backstory: a group of Crusaders recovered two key relics of the last days of Jesus, the chalice that held the wine in the Last Supper and the spear with which the Roman soldier Longinus pierced Christ’s side during the Via Dolorosa. They settled in Spain and built a castle called Montsalvat, where they set up a combination knightly camp and monastic order built on celibacy, vegetarianism and an elaborate ritual by which the chalice — which they also refer to as the Holy Grail even though there have been so many real-life objects associated with that term it’s easy to lose track of them (and that’s not to get into the French myth, well known now because Dan Brown used it in The Da Vinci Code, that the term “San Greal” — “Holy Grail” — was merely a misspelling of “Sang Real,” French for “Royal Blood,” referring in this context to the descendants of the children Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene supposedly had after they escaped the Crucifixion and settled in France) — is revealed (or “disclosed,” as the rather dorky titles in this edition — which include such bizarre typos as “forfity” for “fortify” and “thoo” for “thou” — have it), and a white dove flies down from heaven (or wherever) and perches on the side of it to indicate that the knights of Montsalvat are still in the good graces of God.
Only by the time the opera starts they aren’t anymore because Klingsor, who became a Grail-knight pledge but found he couldn’t handle the chastity bit, slashed off his dick and balls and attempted to convince Titurel, the founder of the order, that by doing this D.I.Y. castration he’d proven himself worthy. Of course Titurel saw through this nonsense immediately, so the self-emasculated bad guy set up a “Magic Castle” next door with phantom warriors, lusty Flower Maidens and his top seductress, Kundry — and with all of these he managed to lure Titurel’s son and heir, Amfortas, to his lair, where Kundry seduced him and Klingsor managed to get the spear of Longinus away from Amfortas, stabbed him with it and sent him back to Montsalvat with a wound that no medicine can heal or even relieve the pain of for long. The prophecy of Gurnemanz, who’s essentially the prime minister and historian of the Grail order (and gives us the backstory in a series of extended monologues that make him even more of a “crashing bore,” to use Anna Russell’s words, than Wotan in the Ring), is that only an innocent young man, a “perfect fool,” can successfully resist the temptations of Klingsor’s castle, get back the sacred spear and get Montsalvat back to normal again. The innocent man is Parsifal, who like so many of Wagner’s other heroes is an orphan — his father Gamuret was killed in battle before he was born and his mother, Herzeleide (the name means “heart’s sorrow” in German), sent him away while he was still a boy and, unbeknownst to him, died soon after. Wagner’s obsession with male protagonists who grow up not knowing who they really are and often don’t learn their own names until they are already adults — Siegmund, Siegfried, Tristan, Parsifal — has direct roots in his childhood: when he was born his parents of record, Carl Friedrich Wagner and Johanna Paetz Wagner, had a boarder named Ludwig Geyer living with them. Carl Friedrich Wagner died six months after Richard was born, and his mother Johanna later married Geyer. For the first nine years of his life Richard was known as “Richard Geyer” — a name he hated both because it sounded Jewish and “Geyer” is also the German word for “vulture” — until he insisted on taking the name Wagner. Wagner himself probably never knew which of the two men in his mother’s life was his biological father, and his biographers are still arguing about it.
Anyway, Parsifal comes to Montsalvat when one of the knights
there catches him shooting and killing a swan — and Gurnemanz stops the opera’s
plot, such as it is, dead in its tracks for about five minutes to give
Parsifal, who since his mom bailed on him has been making his living by
shooting small game with a bow and arrow and using them for food (in some ways
he starts out as a male version of Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games), an animal-rights lecture. (The real Wagner was an
animal-rights vegetarian about a century before it was cool.) Parsifal watches
the entire ceremony of the unveiling of the Grail, but when it’s over and
Gurnemanz asks him to comment on what he’s seen, he says nothing and Gurnemanz
calls him a goose and sends him on his way. The implication is that Parsifal
will have to wander throughout the world learning the hard way what he could
have known easily and quickly just by asking Gurnemanz what the ceremony was
about. In act two, Parsifal turns up at Klingsor’s castle — where Kundry, who
seems to shuttle back and forth between Montsalvat and Klingsor’s place, and
between devoted servant of the Grail knights and their reluctant despoiler
(like Lola in the musical Damn Yankees, she’s good at seduction but she’s also weary of it), and she tells
Parsifal his name — which he’s only heard once before (“Once in a dream I heard
my mother call me that,” he says) — and breaks the news that his mom is dead,
then moves in for the kill — only the moment she’s kissed him and he’s touched
her breast, he screams in agony, remembering Amfortas and his wound and himself
hurting in the same place. At the end of Act II, Klingsor throws the spear of
Longinus at Parsifal, only the spear magically hovers over him; he grabs it in
mid-air, and as he waves it Klingsor, the Flower Maidens and the entire castle
disappear. (This would have been a difficult effect for the 19th-century
stage but hardly an impossible one, given a theatre with the state-of-the-art
machinery Wagner’s had.) In Act III, which takes place on Good Friday, Parsifal
makes his way back to Montsalvat and finds that Amfortas has suffered so much
he no longer allows the Grail ceremony to take place, and as a result his aging
father Titurel has finally died and the whole community has sunk to a level of
self-pity and overall uselessness. Even Kundry has worked her way back there,
though she only gets two words in this act — when Gurnemanz comes across her
and asks why she’s come back, she says, “Diene, diene,” which means, “To serve,
to serve” — and at the end Parsifal saves the day when he realizes that the
only way Amfortas’s wound will ever be cured is if he touches it with the spear
that made the wound in the first place. Accordingly, he does so, Amfortas is
magically healed, Parsifal is hailed as the new rightful ruler of the order and
everybody who’s left presumably lives happily ever after except Kundry, who
falls dead for no particular reason. (This happened to a lot of Wagner’s female leads, including Elisabeth in Tannhäuser, Elsa in Lohengrin and Isolde; his male protagonists died of specific,
material causes but his women just expired on cue.)
Wagner dresses up this plot
with a lot of philosophical and spiritual depth; though the overall text of Parsifal is basically Christian, some of it reflects his
growing interest in Buddhism (though he didn’t actually work on it beyond a
basic outline, the next opera Wagner had planned was Die Sieger — “The Victors” — either a bio-opera of Buddha or a
story about European pilgrims who travel to India and learn the lessons of
Buddhism at its source), specifically the concept of reincarnation. At the
start of Act II we learn from Klingsor that Kundry has lived several lives
under different names, and she herself later tells Parsifal — in the closest
thing she gets to an aria, “Ich sah das Kind,” that in one of her incarnations
she was in Jerusalem when Jesus was crucified and she laughed at his sufferings
on the Cross. Wagner’s main literary source for Parsifal was a long, rambling but fascinating medieval German
epic poem by Wolfram von Eschenbach, a real-life knight who was also a Minnesinger (a medieval German troubadour) and who had
previously appeared as an on-stage character in Wagner’s Tannhäuser (as the nice, morally upright guy who’s Tannhäuser’s
rival for Elisabeth’s affections and who sings her the famous Song to the
Evening Star), but the knights in Wolfram’s Montsalvat ate meat and fish, had
girlfriends, got married, had sex and had children — as Nietzsche rather snottily
pointed out in The Case of Wagner
(Nietzsche’s break with Wagner had already started before Parsifal but that led Nietzsche to believe he’d been right to
do so; in one note he wrote that “Wagner is asking the same questions that I
do, but instead of my answers he’s giving the Christian answers”), if Parsifal
had to take a vow of chastity to rule Montsalvat, just how was his son
Lohengrin — the protagonist of a previous Wagner opera (based on another
author’s sequel to Wolfram’s poem) — conceived and born? Aside from the Wagner
connection, Wolfram’s Parsifal
(which is much more wide-ranging
dramatically than the opera) is fascinating and worth reading because Wolfram
was himself a traveling knight, and his poem is one of the few documents we
have from someone who was actually a medieval knight of what a knight’s life
was like.
Hans-Jürgen Syberberg took what was already a pretty
convoluted story with an ambiguous moral lesson — taken on face value it’s a
Christian parable of morality and the power of brotherhood, but critics
(including Wagner’s great-grandson Gottfried, who broke with the family and
wrote a singularly bitter memoir in which he said that the Ring and Parsifal should no longer be performed because they expressed anti-Semitic
messages that later inspired Hitler and the Nazis) have argued that with its
obsession with blood and moral purity, it’s really a racist work — and really
went to town on it. Instead of simply filming an opera performance he decided
to make the film as a movie, shooting to a pre-recorded soundtrack and mostly
using a different cast of actors than the people who actually sang on the
records. He cast three actors as
Parsifal, one (David Luther) to play him as a child in an elaborate prologue,
set to the opera’s opening prelude, which gives some of the backstory (though
in a confusing way that would probably not be helpful, or particularly
comprehensible, to someone who didn’t know it already) in an elaborate mix of
live actors, models and puppets. The two adult Parsifals are Michael Kutter,
who’s given an elaborately embroidered brown frock coat that looks like the
costumes Tom Hulce wore as Mozart in the Amadeus movie (actually made two years later) but otherwise
looks like a rather seedy rock star on the downgrade, complete with a mop of
curly hair; and Karin Krick. Yes, that’s a woman — and typically for modern
directors of opera on stage or
film, Syberberg doesn’t give us a clue as to why the sex change (especially
since Reiner Goldberg, a tenor who had his 15 minutes in the early 1980’s until
he blew his career by walking out of the gala performance of Weber’s Der
Freischütz that was supposed to reopen the
Semperoper in Dresden 40 years after it had been destroyed by Allied bombing in
World War II, though since the record was made at the dress rehearsal he got to
be on it, infuriating his on-stage replacement, Klaus König, sings Parsifal
throughout); it happens when Karin Krick walks up behind Michael Kutter in the
middle of the scene with Kundry (played on-screen by Edith Clever, voiced —
superbly — by Yvonne Minton) and takes over, and though Kutter reappears at the
end of the act it’s Krick who shows up at Montsalvat in Act III, with Kutter
reappearing again towards the end
and one bizarre shot in with both
are on screen synchronizing to the single voice of Reiner Goldberg on the
soundtrack. It’s not clear what that means, or why images of Richard Wagner at
various stages of his life — including a bizarre set that’s a several-times
life-size reproduction of Wagner’s death mask that opens to reveal the interior
of Montsalvat’s castle — keep showing up in this movie (including as part of a Sgt.
Pepper-like collection of heads in
Klingsor’s castle that also includes Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Nietzsche) to
the point where it almost starts to feel like a new version of Where’s
Waldo?: Where’s Wagner?
Syberberg doesn’t really take a position as to
whether Parsifal is a positive
tale about brotherhood and the power of love or a piece of racist propaganda
expressing Wagner’s hatreds of supposedly “inferior” races in general and Jews
in particular, and though he’s famous for his depiction of Germany’s connection
to the Nazis and the Nazis’ connection to Wagner (between Our Hitler and Parsifal his main project was a five-hour interview with Winifred Wagner, widow
of Wagner’s son Siegfried and the Wagner family member who regularly invited
Hitler to Bayreuth in the first place, thereby giving him cultural cachet and
respectability well before he took power; and in his book Gottfried Wagner said
that after the interview film with his grandmother, Syberberg turned against
his opposition to Nazism and became part of the Wagner-Hitler combine he was
trying to expose) there’s only one brief glimpse of a Nazi flag along with
other flags and standards in a back room at Montsalvat. Syberberg’s Parsifal was ballyhooed as a major intergenerational
collaboration between two artists of genius — a blurb on the DVD box quotes Post-Courier (of what city? We’re not told) music critic J. L. L.
Johnson as calling the film “one genius coming to grips with an older genius to
create a new work of art” — a sentiment I remember having about a quite
different film, Abel Gance’s 1936 A Great Love of Beethoven (which really did seem less a biopic of Beethoven
than one genius-level artist paying tribute to another) — which it isn’t. Some
of Syberberg’s ideas work vividly and amplify Wagner’s message (whatever it
was) in legitimate interpretive ways — like the decay that has already set in
at Montsalvat at the beginning (even though that meant he and his set designer,
Werner Achmann, had to work harder than usual to make it look even seedier for
Act III) and the fascinating treatment of Kundry, who comes on looking like an
Egon Schiele painting and actually looks younger in each succeeding act. Some of his ideas are just
silly, like the Transgender casting of one of the Parsifals, and some of them
seem to have some relevance to
the drama and how we have to see it in today’s world — like the multiple
Wagners — but don’t really come off that well.
I wouldn’t call Parsifal
a bad movie; for what works (or
doesn’t), overall it’s a quite compelling transformation of a major opera into
the world of film. It doesn’t work as well as Ingmar Bergman’s The
Magic Flute (but then Bergman — who, it
occurred to me, was one director who probably could have done justice to Parsifal — seized on The Magic Flute as a way to lighten up his filmmaking and came up
with a charming movie that cut back and forth between straightforward
dramatization of the story and depiction of how The Magic Flute would have been performed on stage when it was new).
It’s done respectfully to the music — unlike the slashing cuts that disfigured
Franco Zeffirelli’s films of Verdi’s La Traviata and Otello, Syberberg’s Parsifal presents
the score complete except for the excision of the Act III Prelude (probably
because Syberberg didn’t want to have his movie come to a dead stop for another
puppet show or something to fill up the visual gap of a long instrumental passage).
He wasn’t necessarily helped by his conductor, Armin Jordan, who recorded the
soundtrack in Monte Carlo in 1981 (with a boys’ chorus imported from Prague —
which fascinated Charles because the Cold War was still going on then) and who,
quite frankly, plodded through music that could have used a lot more oomph. Parsifal is an odd work and a difficult one to stage because
the first and last acts are virtually plotless — it’s really the closest Wagner
ever came to writing an oratorio — while the second act has some of the old
dramatic fire. Or at least it should,
and it does in the truly great performances — like James Levine’s Met
broadcasts in 1979 with Jon Vickers as Parsifal and in 1995 with Plácido
Domingo — in which he turns the duel of wits involving Parsifal, Kundry and
Klingsor into tough, fast-moving drama to offset the static nature of the first
and last acts. The Charfreitagszauber (“Good Friday Spell”) in the last act, in which Gurnemanz and Parsifal
sing a duet of praise for the miracle that has brought him back as Montsalvat’s
redeemer on that holy day, should be an irresistible blast of energy that
changes the mood of the piece from darkness to light. That’s what you can hear
in the 1927 rendition from Bayreuth, conducted by Wagner’s son Siegfried and
taken down by Columbia Records’ engineers in sound surprisingly rich, deep and
transparent for the time, with Fritz Wolff as Parsifal and probably the best
singer ever to play Gurnemanz, Alexander Kipnis. In Jordan’s version, it’s just
more depressing mopery despite the excellent singing of Robert Lloyd, who
(along with Aage Haugland as Klingsor) is one of the few people in this film
who got both to sing their part and
to act it on-screen.
Some of Syberberg’s more eccentric casting and costuming decisions
don’t help, either; Titurel (Martin Sperr, voiced by Hans Tschammer) actually
looks younger than his “son”
Amfortas, and is made to look like the Ghost of Christmas Present in the 1951
Alastair Sim version of A Christmas Carol. Klingsor actually strongly resembles Wagner’s Wotan, another
protagonist who cut out part of his body (his eye) hoping it would bring him
enlightenment, and who’s shown in an awful lot of poses sitting in a throne,
holding his spear regally in front of him — the kind of influence-seeking
between Wagner’s operas that actually began with Wagner himself: before he
wrote the texts for the Ring he
wrote an essay called Die Wibelungen: World History as Told in Saga that contains a section called “The Transformation
of the Ring into the Grail” — so critics like Stewart Robb who call Parsifal “the fifth and final act of the Ring” actually have a point. (Robb’s analysis is that the
Ring is about the failure of a
violence-prone hero, Siegfried, to redeem the world, and that it takes a nonviolent
one like Parsifal, armed not with a magic sword but a sacred spear he dare not
use in battle, to accomplish the task.) Indeed, at one point Wagner planned an
even weirder connection between Parsifal and another of his works; he briefly considered writing a scene into Tristan
und Isolde in which Parsifal, on his
pilgrimage through the world, would encounter the delirious Tristan on his
deathbed in Kareol, Brittany, and the experience would teach him … well, something. But the odd connection Syberberg makes between
Wotan, who for all the scummy things he’s willing to do to get and keep power
as king of the gods is basically a sympathetic and even tragic figure; and
Klingsor, who’s out-and-out evil (I suspect Wagner intended us to see him as a
sort of latter-day Satan, cast out of Montsalvat the way Satan was from
heaven), is one of those gimmicks that seems thought-provoking enough but
doesn’t really mean anything.
And one odd thing about Syberberg’s direction is that he
avoids staging scenes that Wagner clearly intended that were difficult to do on
stage but would be absurdly easy in films. The Transformation Scene — the part
in Act I in which Parsifal and Gurnemanz arrive at the Grail ceremony from the
outside of Montsalvat without actually having to move (“Here space and time are
one,” Gurnemanz explains to Parsifal in words that some especially ardent
Wagner fans have used to suggest he anticipated Einstein’s theory of
relativity) — is done with a few projected images passing behind Gurnemanz and
Parsifal as they walk pretty normally around the Wagner’s death-head set. (In
1882 at Bayreuth, Wagner had Gurnemanz and Parsifal walk on a treadmill while a
long backdrop painting on rollers unrolled behind them. It took the stagehands
longer than anticipated to roll the backdrop from one point to the other, and
so Wagner’s assistant, future composer Engelbert Humperdinck, marked a
seven-bar repeat in the score just to keep the music going until the scene
change was complete — which gave rise to the oft-reported rumor that
Humperdinck actually composed seven bars of Parsifal.) Syberberg’s staging of the end of Act II — instead
of throwing the spear at Parsifal, Klingsor simply collapses, and his castle
remains intact (and we don’t see Parsifal pick up the spear, either, though
presumably he does because he has it in Act III, along with a standard with a
cross on the end of it) — was so confusing that at the end of it Charles asked
me, “What just happened?,” and I answered him with an account of the end of the
act as Wagner wrote it.
In Act III both Parsifals (pre- and post-op) show up,
the boy Parsifal with the spear and the girl Parsifal with the cross-headed
standard (or was it the other way around?), and the Parsifal with the spear
doesn’t get it anywhere near
Amfortas — and for a film which had treated (if that’s indeed the word) us to
some pretty raw shots of Amfortas’ open wound, Syberberg ignored the effect,
easy to do on film, of having Parsifal touch Amfortas’ wound with the spear
point and thus get it to close up and heal at long last. There are quite a few
interesting touches — including a part of the set of Klingsor’s castle that’s a
cross but at the base of it is a round rock formation that looks like a scrotum
(so it represents both the cross and Klingsor’s severed dick) — and such
typical examples of movie inflation as having 16 flower maidens instead of
Wagner’s six, and three squires (apprentice knights) at Montsalvat where Wagner
was satisfied with two. But overall Parsifal makes its effect from the grandeur of Wagner’s
music, the generally capable performances of the singers (particularly Lloyd
and Haugland on-camera and Minton off-camera — about Goldberg the less said the
better; like so many tenors who get cast in Wagner’s operas these days, he
makes it through the role and he doesn’t embarrass himself too badly, but
Melchior, Vickers or Domingo he is not) and a production that may nibble on the edges of outrageousness but
doesn’t go over the top the way, say, the current Bayreuth Lohengrin (which recasts the opera as a B. F. Skinner
experiment in behaviorism and accordingly makes the chorus members into rats,
complete with rat suits) does. Despite the épater-les-bourgeois aspects of Syberberg’s direction (I think there’s
been enough of this sort of thing in the last four decades that les
bourgeois, at least the ones that still go
to operas, are pretty un-épater-able
anymore) Parsifal makes enough of
an effect that after it was over, Charles said, “Now I know what makes white people want to be Christians!”
