A 45-minute train journey separates the city of Landshut from Munich, but their opera companies operate in different worlds. A semi-permanent tent in a windswept sports park is one of three venues to host the company of the Landestheater Niederbayern while their old Baroque theatre awaits long-term restoration. Nothing daunted, they have mounted a new staging of Wagner’s final opera and, frankly, I enjoyed this circus Parsifal on Holy Saturday a good deal more than the grim and monochrome tread of the production presented at the Bavarian State Opera on Easter Sunday.
Further comparison between the two shows would be invidious – not least because the Landestheater Niederbayern really do present a show, full of incident and intrigue. A set by Thomas Dörfler, and costumes by Ursula Beutler, evoke the closed world of the Grail community, reminiscent of the Dutch Reformed Church and The Handmaid’s Tale. That this particular community includes both sexes from the outset may have been a practical as well as ideological consideration on the part of the director (and company Intendant) Stefan Tilch, given the modest size of the resources at his disposal. The spatially distanced choral parts of the Grail scenes are all sung on stage, in one of several theatrically effective compromises which include sensitive microphone projection for both cast and 30-strong chorus.
Even so, the whip-wielding female overseers spring a surprise. So does Amfortas, tearing open his robe during his First-Act Grail scene to reveal… unblemished skin. Grail and Spear alike, it transpires, are illusions sustained by cultish dogma, just as Amfortas suffers not from a physical wound but from paralysing guilt for having failed to honour that dogma, all to be dispelled at length by the returning title hero: hey presto! There’s nothing there. Cue what Tilch in his programme note calls “a gigantic Happy End – enlightenment, purity and salvation all included.”
Purists and cynics may roll their eyes; or worse, when Klingsor picks up and menacingly strokes the statuette of a white pussycat. Famously there are no gags in Parsifal, but (I would say) the piece can take them, just as it can the dour upside-down drawings of Georg Baselitz in Munich and the “Abbey of St Parsifal” imagined by Floris Visser for a new, meta-staging at the Semperoper in Dresden. It would be wrong to say or surmise that Tilch has trivialised the piece; and the positive, humanistic force of his vision is carried by the sturdy confidence of his male leads. Some singing quieter than forte would have been welcome on Saturday, here and there, but this was not the time or place for subtlety. Especially compelling was Yamina Maamar as Kundry, some vocal wobble notwithstanding, for the mingled fire and vulnerability in her projection of the opera’s most complex role.
As the company’s music director, Basil H. Coleman leads a strong, propulsive reading, swifter still than Asher Fisch’s conducting at Erl two days earlier, over and done in less than three and a half hours. Here again there may be pragmatic factors at play, without the weight of numbers or deluxe solo voices to sustain slower tempi. However, only the Flowermaidens’ ballet chanté felt unduly hasty; especially when their solo lines were so lusciously floated. The show goes on at the company’s other homes, in Straubing and Passau, later in April and May; see it if you can – or if you dare.
