Word: wagnerism
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...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...
...moment he rejects the erotic advances of the temptress Kundry (Edith Clever). This apparently signifies Parsifal's transformation from a callow youth to a hero, as Krick's grim, Joan of Arc visage emphasizes. Yet the device, like so many others in the film, is arbitrary. Wagner's opera is merely a pretext for the director, a frame on which to hang a murky, convoluted and, finally, not very original cultural thesis. The performance is led with surprising authority and eloquence by the little-known Swiss conductor Armin Jordan and features splendid singing by Tenor Reiner Goldberg...
...Ring is more sophisticated and more imaginative. In selecting Chéreau, Bayreuth Festival Director Wolfgang Wagner, the composer's grandson, gambled that the French enfant terrible would inject bold ideas into the family opera enterprise. He was right. Chéreau began by setting the legend during the social upheaval of the Industrial Revolution. His Rhine maidens are a trio of prostitutes frolicking by a hydroelectric dam, and his Wotan is decked out as a rich capitalist. In 1976 audiences were outraged, but by the end of the run in 1980, when the production was filmed, the Ring...
...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...