ParsifalNew production

Something is rotten in the state of the Grail knights! Their king, Amfortas, has been wounded by their archenemy Klingsor and has lost the “Holy Spear” to the fiend. Amfortas is crushed by pain and guilt, with a wound that will not heal. The brotherhood of the Grail knights is at a loss about what to think or do. According to a prophecy, the only thing that will help the king is the compassion of an “innocent fool”, the only one who can bring the Holy Spear back to the Castle of the Grail. In the midst of this ailing world, the young Parsifal appears. He is apprehended and interrogated by the Grail knights who think they might find in him the “innocent fool” they are searching for. Trials and temptations ensue for Parsifal who overcomes them all. A few years later, he manages even to wrest the Holy Spear from Klingsor’s clutches. Amfortas may now die. Parsifal, saviour of the knighthood, takes Amfortas’ place as king. To the male brotherhood of the knights, Wagner opposes one single woman: Kundry. He describes her as a “wild female”, scorned – or secretly desired by the knights. Kundry’s only way to escape the oppression of male society is to seduce it: Having already seduced Amfortas and Klingsor, she now tempts Parsifal, who rejects her advances. But this initial rejection will make Kundry and Parsifal reach a state of chaste proximity, beyond corrupting seduction.
German director Michael Thalheimer sees the precarious condition of the Grail knighthood as neither hopeful nor hopeless. Beyond the “festival play for the consecration of the stage” as Wagner called Parsifal, the work carries all the symbols of decline. Thalheimer sees it as a farewell to the world. The world bids farewell to the Grail knighthood, the knights bid farewell to their lives and worldly works. Looking back on their past times and existences has marked the brotherhood, who must all live with the condition of being “wounded”. Wagner designed Parsifal for the Bayreuth Festival Theatre and composed it for its recessed and hooded orchestra pit. This feature was responsible for the astounding mix of sound between singers and orchestra at the premiere. There will be no hooded pit in Geneva but with Jonathan Nott as musical director at the head of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, expect to hear finally a unique mix of transparency and vitality as they unfold the masterpiece’s state of matter. Alongside Tanja Ariane Baumgartner, back as Kundry after her impressive Clytemnestra, the young German bass Tareq Nazmi as Gurnemanz and Daniel Johansson as Parsifal, a memorable Pierre Bezukhov in our War and Peace last season, along with some of the best Wagnerian voices of the moment, are all on deck for this spiritual voyage.