Word: syberberg
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...polka, a sousedka, or "neighbors' dance," and a dashing furiant−while the Serenade for Strings is a five-movement study in country-squire elegance. Jordan, a Swiss conductor who came to general attention leading the score−and portraying Amfortas−in Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's 1982 film Parsifal, draws refined, elegant performances from the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra...
...come two radical settings of Wagner. German avant-garde Film Maker Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's 4½-hour Parsifal is a heavily symbolic interpretation that, among other extraordinary devices, uses the composer's own face as a set. French Theater Director Patrice Chéreau's complete The Ring of the Nibelung (starting Jan. 17 on PBS with a documentary and continuing a week later with Das Rheingold) is a brash, iconoclastic view that sets the four-opera cycle in the mid-19th century, when Wagner wrote it. The videotaped Bayreuth Ring succeeds triumphantly, while...
...Syberberg's problem is symbols: there are too many of them for even a work as complex as Parsifal to support comfortably. "I have tried to keep Wagner's work intact," says the director, "but at the same time to make a film about Wagner, about ourselves and about the future." That is at least one thing too many. As he did in his 7½-hour Our Hitler, a perplexing, impassioned examination of German culture, Syberberg employs symbols the way others use props; in fact he uses them as props. In Parsifal, some of the actual terrain...
...heaviest symbolism, however, is Freudian, understandable in an opera about a sacred fraternity of chaste knights who guard the Holy Grail against a lustful, profane world. Syberberg revels in the obvious sexual metaphors of the spear and the wound that will not heal; the wound, which is supposed to be in Amfortas' side, is a disembodied thing that lies ulcerating on a bed next to the suffering knight. Most startling of all is the changing of Parsifal from a man (Michael Kutter) into a woman (Karen Krick) at the moment he rejects the erotic advances of the temptress Kundry...
...years later; Chéreau's Ring seems less outrageous than adventurous, and it has influenced succeeding productions of Wagner at Bayreuth. Syberberg's daring Parsifal, on the other hand, is likely to become a curiosity. Truly cinematic opera remains a Grail-like goal, waiting for its own Parsifal to redeem the promise of artistic salvation...