ESTC Projectos - PARSIFAL

PARSIFAL ESTC Projectos Leituras Lumnicas http://www.guardian.co.
uk/music/2011/feb/10/parsifal-wagner-english-national-opera
Parsifal: Wagner's 'Buddhist piece'

Parsifal has been seen as the most antisemitic and ideologically suspect of any of Wagner's works, but that's not how Nikolaus Lehnhoff's ENO production treats it
The holy grail of opera ... the ENO's 1999 production of Parsifal returns to London. Photograph: Bill Rafferty
Opera is the most risky art form. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times sets, singing, orchestra, acting, lighting, stage direction and conducting have come together to create an ideal fusion. But when it happens, it's like winning the lottery, or falling in love. I had never seen Wagner's last and strangest opera, Parsifal, until 1999. But experiencing the piece in Nikolaus Lehnhoff's production at English National Opera that year was one of those magical occurrences. Now Lehnhoff's production is coming back to English National Opera for its final performances, having travelled the world in the intervening years. There's an outstanding cast, including John Tomlinson singing Gurnemanz, and a brilliant Wagnerian conductor, Mark Wigglesworth. I can't wait to see it again. Parsifal isn't really an opera, but what Wagner called a "stage-festival consecration play". The aura of religiosity that hangs over that description fits it well. Parsifal's journey from swan-killing holy fool in the first act to king of the holy grail at the end of the third act centres on the overtly Christian imagery of the knights of the grail. There's a moment where the only woman in the opera, Kundry the single most complex character Wagner ever created washes Parsifal's feet, echoing Mary Magdalene, and the villain of the piece is a castrated sorcerer who stole the spear that wounded Jesus's side. At the end of the opera, as the brotherhood of the grail is renewed, the final words sung by the choirs of knights are "redemption to the redeemer". For late 19th-century anti-Wagnerites, Parsifal was a sell-out to the reactionary ideology of the church by the composer who was supposed to be the evolutionary hero of a new world
PARSIFAL ESTC Projectos Leituras Lumnicas

order. More recently, Parsifal has been seen as the most explicitly antisemitic and ideologically suspect of any of Wagner's works, with its cultish obsession with pure blood, its rejection of sensuality and femininity, and its final tableau of a perfect, closed society. But that's not the way Lehnhoff's production treats it, and it's not the way Tomlinson sees it. He reckons Parsifal is really about the opposite of an idealised perfection. "From the start of the opera, everything has gone wrong for the knights. My very first entrance is one of deep anxiety. Gurnemanz knows that there are all these agonies to come, and that Amfortas will yet again be asked to reveal the grail." Amfortas, leader of the knights, was stabbed by the sorcerer Klingsor with the holy spear, and has a wound that can never heal. The life-giving grail prolongs his pain, since he cannot die so long as he keeps observing its rituals. It's an existential catch-22. Lehnhoff's production emphasises this rottenness and disease from the start. The opera plays out on a blasted, post-apocalyptic and timeless landscape. "A huge meteorite has hit the castle of the grail," Lehnhoff says, "and the walls have been attacked. The brotherhood is sinking into decay, and they keep observing these meaningless rituals that no longer have any real function." The knights are a religious cult that has atrophied into decadence. But his ending, which differs from Wagner's, allows a sense of hope: "It's a light at the end of the tunnel for humanity: a new way without any religious ideologies, which have not led us anywhere. We all know the greatest crimes have been committed in the name of God. There must be a new way." But if you've never heard Parsifal before, Wagner's music will be the most powerful shock. The score has a unique glow, an orchestral radiance that bathes your senses. The music is the sounding image of the opera's central theme. "Parsifal is about compassion," Wigglesworth says. "It's his Buddhist piece, really. It's saying that compassion is the means by which you find peace. It's an incredibly life-affirming piece. I would hate people to think that it's a serious, heavy religious work. It's long, yes, but it's really about rejuvenation nothing more philosophical than that." Parsifal has eight performances at English National Opera between 16 February and 12 March. Details: eno.org
PARSIFAL ESTC Projectos Leituras Lumnicas http://likelyimpossibilities.blogspot.com/2011/08/parsifal-in-bayreuth.html
MONDAY, AUGUST 08, 2011
Parsifal in Bayreuth
That this production is the last performance I will be writing about in this European year is more or less accidental--I saw Die Frau ohne Schatten afterward but was obliged to file quickly on that one--but it is fitting, because Im not sure if anything could top this. Wagner, Parsifal. Bayreuther Festspiele, 7/28/2011. Production by Stefan Herheim (revival), conducted by Daniele Gatti with Simon ONeill (Parsifal), Susan Maclean (Kundry), Kwangchul Youn (Gurnemanz), Detlef Roth (Amfortas), Thomas Jesatko (Klingsor) The current Parsifal in Bayreuth, directed by Stefan Herheim and conducted by Daniele Gatti, premiered in 2008 and has since become the festivals most acclaimed production (and one of its tougher tickets). Parsifal in Bayrueth has a special meaning like few other musical works--the theater and the opera were designed for each other and for decades this theater was the only place the Bhnenweihfestspielcould be seen. Herheims production is geared towards Bayreuth, too. Along with telling the story of Parsifal, Herheim traces the history of the operas reception and its place in Bayreuth in particular, including the issues that confront the festival today (this is a festival that considers its legacy sufficiently important that a brief production history is printed not in the program book but the paper casting pamphlet). Additionally, the production's complexity enables the many Bayreuth regulars to see something new each year.
It's a beautiful production of many striking and haunting images and seamless stagecraft. As in other Herheim productions, we shift cinematically through time and space (so to speak). There is no ready key to the profusion of images and narrative; their well of associations and interconnections, keyed more to the music than the libretto, multiplies and gradually comes into focus. And everything moves with the music in a natural, truly Gesamtkunstwerk way. Its difficult to summarize or describe, because described literally the production would sound chaotic and scattered. And it is. Its in your head where everything comes together. Not instantly, either--I felt quite confused up to Act 3, but then everything that came before somehow began to make sense, and in the next few days it was still changing shape. I guess Im saying that summarizing what happened onstage in my usual fashion is very different from describing my experience. But the thematic material itself does demand description, because its fascinating and brilliant. There are several plot threads. Simultaneously, we watch the story of Parsifal, sometimes seen quite literally, along with the reception history of Parsifal the work in the context of the Bayreuth Festival (from its premiere to sometime in the 1950s), and the path of German history itself from Bavarias entrance into the unified Germany through both world wars. All go through interconnected journeys of discovery, seduction, maturation and an ambiguous kind of redemption (or more accurately Erlsung). Parsifal and Parisfal grow through history. The main set replicates the backyard of Wagners Bayreuth house Wahnfried. The prompters box is transformed into Wagner and Cosimas grave, the center of the stage is taken up by a (functional) fountain, the house is in the back. Here is the set (the bed, site of birth, death, sleep and seduction, is where the fountain will appear) and below a picture I took myself of the house:
In the staged Vorspiel, we see Parsifals mother Herzeleide in a bed in the center of the stage. This red-haired woman resembles the militant figure of Germania in the painting hanging above the fireplace (where the mirror is in the picture above),Friedrich-August von Kaulbachs Deutschland--1914.:
This gives you an idea of the kind of cultural references that go through this whole production. The women are all variations on the Germania figure, with Herzeleide and Kundry (considering their relationships to Parsifal, rather disturbingly) morphing into each other. In the prelude, Parsifal builds a small wall on Wagners grave. This is the theme that will dominate Act 1: repression and shelter. Parsifal is sheltered by Herzeleide, Parsifal is sheltered in Bayreuth by Cosima. There is even an allusion to the works anti-Semitic elements when Kundry in the form of a maid threatens to steal Herzeleides baby. (That's in the transformation scene, in which we see Parsifal born. Im sorry. I warned you that this summary would probably not make any sense. And I feel kind of dishonest writing this because it's only the tip of the iceberg.)
At the end of Act 1, the boy Parsifal wakes in his bed and his guardian Gurnemanz and asks if he understands (at this point I would have agreed with him: no). Was this all a dream? The dreamlike quality is further emphasized by the giant black wings worn by most of the characters (but not the Christ-like Amfortas, who also carries
echos of Wagners insane patron Ludwig II). They also prefigure the swan and (German) eagle that will dominate the work. The adult Parsifal shoots the boy Parsifal with his bow (a [Bavarian] swan crest simultaneously falls from the proscenium), ending his childhood and beginning his journey into the world. The Grail temple is a replica of the one from the operas premiere (see photo at top of this post), the dead boy Parsifal, symbol of sheltered, traumatized innocence, momentarily plays the part of the Grail. The knights are a collection of ordinary people, both men and women.
In Act 2, Germany and Parsifal have gone out into the world, and started a jolly tragic war. The scene is a World War 1 hospital (one also thinks of The Magic Mountain or of Freud), and Klingsor is a cabaret transvestite, an outcast of a decidedly fin-de-sicle/Weimar sort. The flower maidens are both nurses to comfort the dying war victims and a succession of showgirls. Parsifal is seduced by them and finally by a Marlene Dietrich-like tuxedoed Kundry, who envelops him in her wings. Then comes the biggest coup de thtre of the production. Amid a crowd of suitcasecarrying refugees, Parsifal realizes he must purify the world and heal Amfortas, and enormous swastika flags unfurl and the hospital/castle collapses around him in a giant crash. A boy (the young Parsifal again?) appears in a brown uniform, surrounded by SS officers and bearing Amortass spear (the Nazis Wunderwaffe?). Parsifal points the spear at Wagners grave.
Act 3 opens with my favorite theater-in-theater effect, showing a miniature version of the Festspielhaus proscenium behind the main one (above). But this is a wonderful use of this device, because this is a deconstructive staging, and the history of Parsifalis bound up with the history of this theater itself. Wahnfried has now collapsed, the Wagner regime, German nation and Grail order are in ruins. Parsifal arrives in a heavy medieval outfit like a refugee from a traditional production, but is transformed into a red-haired Germania figure identical to Kundry. The staging, which up to this point had been tremendously busy, suddenly is almost drained of all activity. The work has stopped signifying anything outside itself; we seem to be inside a giant Wieland Wagner tribute scene. With the return of the spear, the Wahnfried fountain begins to bubble, an attempt to wash away the past. Parsifal, Kundry, and Gurnemanz sing This is finished off with another tribute: the Wirtschaftswunder in the form of a procession of workers in front of the stage (a reference to Gtz Friedrichs 1972 Bayreuth Tannhuser).
As we move to the last scene, in a nod towards Syberbergs Parsifal film, Titurels
motive prompts a giant projection of Wagners death mask. He is still haunting the festival, but it, like the boy Parsifal in the prelude, is soon blocked by a wall. And we see a 1951 proclamation from then-Festspiel leaders Wolfgang and Wieland Wagner, requesting that audience members refrain from political discussion in the Festspielhaus. But politics, obviously, remain. In the last scene, we are in the West German Bonn Bundestag. The wings are gone by now, but the giant mirror reflects the West German eagle in the floor. Amfortas speaks at a podium where the Grail once stood. But Parsifals arrival is ambiguous. The giant reflected eagle, first turning red, is washed of its blood by the appearance of the grail, as water from the fountain washes over it and is seen in the reflection. But, the mirror finally shows the audience and, rather shockingly, the normally concealed conductor and orchestra. The magic veil of the temple of Bayreuth has been lifted. This isnt a mythic, holy object, its something we create and participate in, and also have the power to renew. Or is it just something that weve made, our own neuroses? Musically, the highlight was as expected the Klang of the orchestra, beautifully played and clear and balanced, and never overpowering the singers despite being by any measure pretty loud. Daniele Gatti took slow tempos judging by numbers (around 4 hours 10 minutes, I think Metzmacher in Vienna back in April was around 3:45), but it never felt slow. This was in part because there was so much going on onstage, but the pacing was excellent and variety in color and phrasing fantastic.
The cast was, for the most part, good. Simon ONeill (above) as Parsifal was the weakest link. He has a fine upper range, with powerful and clear high notes, but his lower range has an unfortunate tinny and nasal tinge, and his singing was neither very musical nor idiomatic in its treatment of the text. His acting did not detract from the production but nor did it help--yes, Parsifal is largely a passive character, so this was OK, but it was not ideal. Susan Macleans Kundry was not beautifully sung either, but this is Kundry were talking about. It isnt bel canto, its more important that she have scary intensity and shriek well, and for that Maclean was great, with spontaneous and clear singing and hair-raising moments of Crazy. Her Marlene Dietrich impression is really very good, so it seemed a shame she almost seemed to adopt a Dietrich tinge to her voice at that point as well.
While ONeill and Maclean were new this year, the rest of the main cast remained from the premiere. Kwangchul Youn was a resonant and warm-toned Gurnemanz, but lacked something in gravitas and personality. Detlef Roth has a small voice for Amfortas, but in the favorable Bayreuth acoustic could still be heard, and offered a wonderful singer-actor type integrated performance with extremely physical acting. Thomas Jesatko was a Klingsor also more memorable for acting than singing, but likewise excellent. The chorus, flower maidens, and acting of the supernumeraries (particularly the unnamed Act 1 boy) were all great.
PREVIOUSLY REVIEWED Herheim's Yevgeny Onegin in Amsterdam Katharina Wagner'sMeistersinger in Bayreuth Nikolaus Lehnhoff'sParsifal in London Christine Mielitz'sParsifal in Vienna Despite the above being mostly about Herheims vision, this is a great production because it is such a Gesamtkunstwerk, a model not of artistic megalomania but of collaboration. And how wonderful to see everyone working together to create something so intellectually challenging, beautiful, and unique!
Per-Erik Skramstad at Wagneropera.net has a good essay about this production with a compilation of reviews from the premiere year. The best way to get a taste of this production without going to Bayreuth is in these videos, first a longish story from German TV and then two short intros from dramaturg Alexander Meier-Drzenbach. Theyre only in German, sorry:
PARSIFAL ESTC Projectos Leituras Lumnicas http://likelyimpossibilities.blogspot.com/2011/03/enos-parsifal-knights-of-living-dead.html
THURSDAY, MARCH 03, 2011
The ENO's Parsifal: Knights of the living dead
Regietheater is by definition non-canonical but Nikolaus Lehnhoffs well-travelled 1999 staging of Parsifal is one of the few productions that can be said to have achieved iconic status. Last Sunday I caught its current revival at the English National Opera. Its still worth seeing. The cast is almost universally fantastic, and the orchestra and conducting are good too. There was only one hitch, and that was that it is in English. (Maybe this wouldn't be a big deal for you, but it turns out that I hateWagner in English, or at least I cant stand this translation.) Wagner, Parsifal, English National Opera, 2/27/2011. Production by Nikolaus Lehnhoff, conducted by Mark Wigglesworth with Stuart Skelton (Parsifal), John Tomlinson (Gurnemanz), Jane Dutton (Kundry), Iain Patterson (Amfortas), Tom Fox (Klingsor). English translation by Richard Stokes. As well as in London, this production has been seen in Baden-Baden, San Francisco, Barcelona, and Chicago, supposedly making it the most-seen Parsifal production ever. This is supposedly its last appearance in London. It is also on DVD (from Baden-Baden). This was my first time seeing it and I can understand its popularity. While it looks a little dated today, it mixes a clear basic idea with a collection of more elusive (and allusive) images that illuminate this challenging work without oversimplifying it. Its good, and I can handle some ambiguity in Parsifal, but yeah, it beats me as to what Lehnhoff is saying some of the time.
The setting is your basic post-apocalyptic wasteland, of the indoors sort. The knights of the Grail are already encased in their own cement tomb, a decaying order (whose first appearance alludes to the terracotta army of ancient China. The Grail is a beam of blinding light, an empty signifier of a religious cult of devotion without purpose. Parsifal enters through a meteor hole in the fortress; he and Kundry, the only outsiders in the first act, are both wild creatures dressed in reddish brown, contrasting with the grayish white robes of the knights. Amfortas is almost a mummy already, and we actually see Titurel this time around, looking like a zombie. Act 2 is basically the same set, which is a problem. Klingsor, looking like a Japanese warrior, hovers in the sensitive area of a giant pelvic x-ray (castration, we get it, OK). Kundry gets a succession of ruffly and colorful costumes whose shedding may suggest a butterfly, but whose first shell was obviously a giant vagina (perhaps this interpretation is a sign of Anna Nicoles lingering influence on my mind). The staging of the seduction is a little on the routine side, and the buttoned-up flower maidens are more like nuns behaving badly than seductresses (albeit with, um, balls on their heads). Act 3 is the most enigmatic. The knights have disintegrated into a disorderly mess, all now dressed in rags, and the curved train tracks and mass grave suggest a famous image of Auschwitz. But Im not sure exactly what Lehnhoff is getting at here. The lack of a scenic transformation with the Karfreitagszauber and Parsifals departure from the group at the very end of the opera dont quite add up. Amfortas dies, Kundry leaves with Parsifal and a few of the knights, and the rest seem to hail Gurnemanz as their leader and start worshipping the spear instead. This group doesnt seem to be saved at all, but Parsifal's retreat confuses me.
This is an addition to my growing collection of Christian God-free Wagner productions (see also this one and this one), but a non-Christian Parsifal is rather a larger challenge than aTannhuser or Lohengrin. As someone with limited interest in religion in general I thought it worked surprisingly well. However, this does add complexity to the reading of the libretto, and Im afraid that this was already dealt a severe blow by the English singing text. The dense network of allusions and rhythms of Parsifal are impossible to translate. Beyond this, this translation simply suffers from many problems of tone, sounding too often like low doggerel (and I believe it contains many more rhymes than the German). For example, and I may be paraphrasing in word order: Du siehst, mein Sohn, zum Raum wird hier die Zeit. You see here, my son Time and space are one
It's close to literal, but still presents problems of meaning--the Verwandlung from time tospace is made into an equivalence--as well as adding a rhyme where one is really not called for. I cant say I find A single weapon serves a satisfactory translation of Nur eine Waffe taugt, either. The emphasis is right, but taugen is so much more noble than the utilitarian serve. (It also creates a connection with
Kundrys Dienen, dienen, translated here as to serve, to serve, which is something different.) The obvious solution is to forget about it and do it in German, if you ask me. The enunciation of words was done with a conscious correctness that was not always musical, but I could always understand it. Unfortunately. Im sorry that the translation interfered with my enjoyment of the music so much, and hope this isn't true for everyone else. Because the musical performance was really good! The orchestra sounded thoroughly excellent and well-rehearsed if a smidgen less than world-class in sound. Mark Wigglesworth proved an able conductor with beautiful balance and coloring, though I sometimes missed the larger sweep of the score. It didnt do anything so crass as drag or rush but it didnt quite hover in timelessness either.
Stuart Skelton is a fantastic Parsifal, with a large, forceful, yet still beautiful and clear Heldentenor. I missed a certain fragility at first, but it is lovely to hear a role like this sung with such security and passion the whole way through, and acted with both navet and dignity. John Tomlinsons august Gurnemanz got the largest share of the applause, and his wisdom and authority pays great dividends despite some severe wobbles in Act 3. Iain Paterson threw himself into Amfortass tortures with mostly touching and occasionally awkward results, and sang with nobility and Textdeutlichkeit. (OK, screw it, Im going to throw in as much German here as possible to make up for the lack of it onstage.) Jane Dutton was the biggest disappointment as Kundry, with blowsy,scharf tone. Tom Fox sounded at times recht ausgesungen. Chorus and small roles all solid. More than worth seeing. Especially if you have a greater tolerance for Wagner auf Englisch than I. Photos copyright Richard Hubert Smith.
PARSIFAL ESTC Projectos Leituras Lumnicas http://www.wagneroperas.com/index1882parsifal1.html
Parsifal is Wagner's last work. The opera premiered at Bayreuth on July 26, 1882 under the direction of conductor Hermann Levi. It was performed sixteen times that first year. It was the most carefully prepared premire of an opera in history. The 23 soloists and alternates, the 107 orchestra players, and the 135 members of the chorus had been given the score a year before. Euopean musical royalty all made the pilgramage to hear Wagner's new work. Franz Liszt, Camille Saint-Sans, Anton Bruckner and Lo Delibes were all present. The original sketches for the sets and costumes were designed by German-Russian painter Paul von Joukowsky, who based his design for Act One on the Cathedral of Siena, and for Klingsor's Magic Garden, in Act Two, on the gardens of the Palazzo Rufolo in Ravello. After Wagner's death, this production adquired mythic proportions. Although the sets had become increasingly dilapidated and dangerous to the performers, conservative Wagnerians were unwilling to replace them because this was the very scenery that the Master had observed with his own eyes. The sets were finally replaced at the 1934 Festival. The production had been performed 205 times in 27 Festivals.
The cast of the first performance of Parsifal

July 26, 1882 Hermann Levi (conductor) Amfortas - Theodor Reichmann Titurel - Augist Kindermann Gurnemanz - Emil Scaria Parsifal - Hermann Winkelmann Klingsor - Karl Hill Kundry - Amalie Materna
Sketch of the Grail Shrine for the 1882 Production
At the end of World War II Germany was in ruins. Over two-thirds of Bayreuth had been destroyed, and hordes of refugees from the East were streaming into the small town. By some miracle, the Festspielhaus was one of the few public buildings not destroyed by the bombing. The American occupying forces began using it for religious services as well as for shows to entertain the troops. By 1946, it was fairly clear that the Wagner Festival should be revived, but how? The whole enterprise was bankrupt, the theater was in need of repair, and the majority of the costumes and sets had been destroyed, or were in storage in a salt mine, beyond reach, in the Russian zone. Wagner's operas, filled with the spirit of German nationalism, had been turned into weapons of propaganda by the Third Reich. Hitler had been a personal friend of the Wagner family, and he had attended the Festival many times. In the postwar years, the Allied denazification laws had categorized Wagner's daughter-in-law and heir to the festival, Winifred, as a "major Nazi offender." In order for the Festival to be resurrected into a new era, Winifred turned the theater and the Festival's assets to her sons, Wieland and Wolfgang. The brothers agreed on a division of labor according to their strengths: Wolfgang was responsible for the financial side, and Wieland for the artistic.
Wieland's 1937 staging of Act I
Wieland's 1951 staging of Act I
Wieland announced that the Festival would open in 1951 with a performance of Parsifal. To assure that the Festival would start with a firm hand and on a high artistic level, he selected Hans Knappertsbusch and Herbert von Karajan to conduct the newly formed orchestra. At the recommendation of Karajan, Wieland appointed Wilhelm Pitz to the post of chorus master. The best singers available were chosen, for the leading roles. They included Astrid Varnay, Hermann Uhde, Wolfgang Windgassen, Ludwig Weber and Canadian Bass-baritone George London. Now, one last task needed to be accomplished and one question lingered in Wieland's mind: what would these operas look like? How could he design a production of Parsifal that would free it from all past associations with Nazi German nationalism and the incriminating links to the nightmare that the country had lived through? What he came up with stunned audiences. July 30, 1951, the first performance of Parsifal and the re-opening of the Festival, marked the beginning of a new style which would later earn the title of "New Bayreuth."
Above: Hans Knappertsbusch led the 1951 performances of Parsifal. The stage designs and theories of designer Adolphe Appia influenced Wieland Wagner's design for this production. Right: A photograph of the 1951 production of Parsifal featuring Wieland's stark design for the first scene of Act One. What Wieland Wagner accomplished was a revolution and a revelation. His stage design completely shattered preconceived artistic notions and over one hundred years of traditional staging orthodoxy. After this groundbreaking production, Wagner's works would never again be presented in the same manner. His brilliant concept completely did away with Wagner's stage directions and scenic

suggestions, and instead presented Parsifal as a stark, symbolic piece with costumes that reminded audiences more of Hellenic Greece than Teutonic medieval myth. The sets paid homage to the early twentieth century scenic experiments of visionary designer Adolphe Appia. As a result of this bold achievement, the unfortunate series of events that had linked Wagner's work to the Third Reich were completely destroyed. The 1951 Parsifal would become one of the most important opera productions in the twentieth century . As the first production of "New Bayreuth," as the style came to be known, this Parsifal originated many of the stylistic trademarks that would come to define Wieland's work. There was the inventive and effective use of light and darkness, the stark simplification of costumes, the reduction of setting to a minimalist level, the transformation of the characters into symbolic manifestations of themselves, and finally, and perhaps most important of all for 1951, the "denazification" of the operas by removing anything "German" in the visual plane of the work. First Performance: July 30, 1951 -- Hans Knappertsbusch (conductor) Cast Amfortas -- George London Titurel -- Arnold van Mill Gurnemanz -- Ludwig Weber Parsifal -- Wolfgang Windgassen Klingsor -- Hermann Uhde Kundry -- Martha Mdl
NAUSEA
by ALEX ROSS A new Parsifal at Bayreuth. Issue of 2004-08-09 and 16 "A ray of light: the Grail is fully radiant. A dove floats down from the dome above. These are Richard Wagners stage directions for the maximally transcendent final moments of Parsifal, his last opera. Christoph Schlingensiefs production at the Bayreuth Festival last week gave us instead two dead rabbits, their rotting bodies intertwined, their images projected on a screen above the stage. We then saw a spedup film of one rabbit decomposing, its body frothing as the maggots did their work. Ive seen a lot of stupid, repulsive, irritating, befuddling, and boring things on opera stages over the years, but Schlingensiefs dead-rabbit climax was something new: for the first time, I left a theatre feeling, like, ready to hurl. The trouble with this sort of provocation is that if you criticize it, even with an involuntary emetic reflex, you end up playing a role that the instigator has written for you. You are cast as the reactionary, the sentimentalist, the sort of person who requires a kitschy white dove, as if white doves and rotting rabbits were the only options. You are suspected of harboring Fascist tendencies. When Endrik Wottrich, the tenor who sang Parsifal, disavowed Schlingensiefs attempt to transplant the action to Namibia, the director accused him of having uttered racist slurs. No matter that the staging was full of hackneyed darkest Africa imagery, with several singers done up in inky blackface; the provocateur will always have the upper hand against the provoked. If my enemies shout boo at the premire, then all is in order, Schlingensief told Stern. Indeed, when the curtain fell, the audience responded with the loudest, lustiest boos Ive heard outside of Yankee Stadium. Less than a third of the audience applauded when Schlingensief took his bow. In other words, a triumph. A curious charade played out in the press afterward: everyone denied that anything untoward had happened. The bigwigs who had walked down the red carpet at the gala Parsifal premire said nothing negative when a reporter from the Nordbayerischer Kurier canvassed their opinions. Edmund Stoiber, the Minister-President of Bavaria, claimed that the production had suited him because it presented an entirely new point of view. Jos Manuel Barroso, the President of the European Commission, found it only logical that Parsifal had been transplanted from Germany to Africa. (The opera is set in Spain, but never mind.) Who, then, had made all that noise? Perhaps ordinary
opera lovers who had paid for their tickets? When I read the reviews two days later, I was amazed to discover that there hadnt been any scandal at allonly a few boos, perhaps. A new reality was agreed upon that had little to do with what had happened in the theatre. Its all politics, of course. Because German opera houses are heavily supported by state and local governments, the audiences opinion is relatively immaterial; productions are bought and sold in a marketplace of intellectual publicity. Whenever I attend this kind of opera-esque event, I feel as though I were being called upon to judge some intricate sport I dont understand, like synchronized swimming. Still, opera it nominally remained, and, as opera, it was god-awful. Schlingensief is what the Germans call an Aktionsknstler, or action artist, meaning that his theatre pieces take the form not of conventional performances but of happenings, demonstrations, media pranks, talk shows, even B movies. He is the head of something called the Church of Fear, one of whose slogans is Dont expect too much from the end of the world! He is notorious for taunting politicians; in 1997, he was arrested for displaying signs that said, Kill Helmut Kohl. In 2002, he targeted Jrgen Mllemann, of the Free Democratic Party, who had allegedly made anti-Semitic slurs. Schlingensief staged mock neo-Nazi rallies with banners modelled on the F.D.P. colors. Kill Mllemann, he reportedly said. A year later, Mllemann committed suicide by cutting loose his parachute while skydiving. To be sure, the politician had bigger problems to deal with than Schlingensiefs antics: he had recently been accused of alarming financial irregularities. But the coincidence was striking. The decision to unleash this scary clown on Bayreuth came as a result of ongoing debates over the future of the festival, which, since 1967, has been solely in the hands of Wolfgang Wagner, the composers eighty-four-year-old grandson. Pundits had urged Wolfgang to bring in new directors and to appoint a more daring successor. In response, he asked Lars von Trier to direct the Ring in 2006an assignment von Trier has now declinedand also hired Schlingensief, who had never directed opera before, and who once said of Wagner, I hate his music and his lyrics. Nonetheless, Schlingensief wasnt necessarily an absurd choice; after all, Wagner himself had once been a left-wing firebrand with anarchist leanings. Schlingensiefs projects in the months before the premirestaging race-car rallies with Wagner blasting from loudspeakers, for exampleled me to expect something gaudy and raucous, perhaps with a thuggish Fascist swagger. (This artist obviously gets off on striking Nazi poses, even as he condemns
others for doing so.) However dubious its sources, Brechtian grandstanding can be galvanic in the right theatrical hands. But Schlingensief never got a grip on Parsifal. He started off with the adolescent conviction that the opera was all about death. He took trips to Namibia and came back laden with sub-Saharan folklore. He imagined witch-doctor scenarios in which the Holy Grail takes the form of totemic objects and creatures. Enter the rabbit: a live one is seen onstage during the Act I procession of the Grail Knights, and globes emblazoned with Joseph Beuys rabbit figures hang over the magic castle in Act II. There are dim stirrings of a good idea hereWagners drama as an earthy rite rather than an Aryan ceremony. Done far more simply, it might have attained a surreal beauty. But Schlingensief botched the transformation. When Kundry, in Act III, was costumed as a big black mamma, the audience burst into giggles. Was the intrepid African explorer commenting on stereotypes or was he recycling them? Certainly, he had not de-sacralized the opera, as some critics said. He just put new mumbo-jumbo in the place of Wagners. In this respect, his version resembled the secularized Parsifal that Hitler commissioned in 1934, to the distress of many old Wagnerians. Despite jaw-dropping lapses of taste throughout, the general impression was of dull chaos. Schlingensief made heavy use of a rotating stage, which became a lazy Susan conveying assorted artworld and pop-culture artifacts, including Andy Warhol soup cans, David Lynch freaks, graffiti and placards, muscleboys, Flintstones and Lord of the Rings costumes. It was difficult to see it all amid the obscure lighting, although I wouldnt blame the lighting designer for this, since the blocking was too random for spotlights to track any one figure. The entire thing was like a nightmarish avant-garde counterpart to one of Franco Zeffirellis overstuffed Met productions, except that no one knew what they were supposed to be doing. The ineptitude of the direction was obvious in the final scene, when Amfortas had to fight his way out from under a curtain that landed on his head. On some other plane of existence, singers were singing and an orchestra was playing. The only singer who gave a memorable, fleshed-out performance was John Wegner, as Klingsor; for once, the evil magician was sung and not rasped. But Im not inclined to condemn the other singersAlexander Marco-Buhrmester, as Amfortas; Robert Holl, as Gurnemanz; Michelle De Young, as Kundry; and Kwangchul Youn, as Titurelgiven the harsh working conditions. Some kind of medal should be given to Wottrich, who dared to criticize the director and then endured his hypocritical anti-Fascist posturing.
Pierre Boulez returned to Bayreuth for the first time since 1980, when he last conducted Patrice Chreaus classic production of the Ring. He led a beautifully controlled performance that managed to cut nearly an hour off the usual running time without ever sounding rushed. Particularly strong was the Act III Prelude, which pulsed weirdly, like a flickering bulb. It would have perfectly evoked the torpor overcoming Wagners knights, if there had been any knights. In another context, Boulezs interpretation might have seemed too refined and becalmed, but in conjunction with Schlingensiefs busy nullity the music was a ray in the darkness, a Grail glowing out of sight. What a change the following evening, when Christian Thielemann led a revival of Tannhuser. Maybe the Parsifal nightmare left me starved for nourishment, but this was the strongest Wagner performance Id heard in years. Philippe Arlauds production, which had its premire in 2002, is a serviceable, vibrantly colored affair, placed in a vaguely Eurasian medieval setting. It sometimes dangled, but never fell, over the edge of kitsch. The great thing about the set design was what it did for the sound: its main oval room became a huge, resonating chamber. In the Pilgrims Scene of Act III, the Bayreuth Festival Chorus entered from an unseen chasm in the back and then disappeared into an unseen chasm in the front. Wagner called his sunken orchestra pit the mystic abyss; in this production there were three abysses, and the sound took on a hallucinatory, sculptured richness as it soared up from one pit or another. The second great thing about this Tannhuser was the lead singer, the young American tenor Stephen Gould. He has a powerful, flexible, beautiful voice, and, wonder of wonders, he is a charismatic actor. He sounded just as vivid at the end of the opera as he did at the beginning, which is a sign that he has the stamina for the biggest Wagner roles. The third great thing was Thielemann, who sounds more happily inspired every time I hear him. Shaking off Teutonic heaviness, he now favors shimmering textures, dancing rhythms, and endless singing lines. The storm of applause for the conductor, for the singers, and for the incomparable Bayreuth chorus seemed not only an affirmation of what had just been heard but a protest against the previous night. Bayreuth returned to sanity, at least for a moment. When Thielemann conducts the 2006 Ring, with Gould as Siegfried, Ill be there, even if the management decides to replace Lars von Trier with Paris Hilton. Please, Herr Wagner: this is a joke, not a suggestion.
PARSIFAL ESTC Projectos Leituras Lumnicas July 27, 2004
A Hullabaloo for an Opening at Bayreuth

By JEREMY EICHLER
BAYREUTH, Germany, July 26 With a steady stream of A-list national celebrities, roving television crews and crowds of excited onlookers packed several rows deep, the Bayreuth Festival opened its 93rd season here on Sunday afternoon. Dedicated exclusively to Wagner's operas, the festival has long attracted German high society and devoted Wagnerian pilgrims, but this year's opening was especially charged thanks to the premiere of a highly anticipated production of "Parsifal" by Christoph Schlingensief, a provocative and controversial German director who had never before worked in opera. The suspense had been building for months, with the press supplying abundant reports of a clash between Mr. Schlingensief and the festival director, Wolfgang Wagner, the composer's grandson, who only last month was dealt a significant blow when Lars von Trier resigned as director of a new "Ring" Cycle scheduled for 2006. Making matters worse, the tenor singing Parsifal bitterly denounced the new production only days before the premiere. As the day finally approached, all the hype could be boiled down to this question: Would Mr. Schlingensief's "Parsifal" be a fake intellectual exercise in bad taste that denigrated Wagner's loftiest and most religious opera, or would it provide the bold new life and freshness that the festival (and its director) needed perhaps now more than ever? In the end the event could not live up to its lofty setup: this "Parsifal" neither shocked nor soared. Mr. Schlingensief delivered a production that was visually anarchic and thematically cryptic but at times intriguing and certainly tame by German stage standards. When Mr. Schlingensief and his production team emerged to take their bows, there were dueling choruses of boos and bravos, but the two sides seemed fairly evenly matched. Both opinions were voiced with such vociferousness that there seemed little doubt about how much had been at stake, or for that matter, how seriously Bayreuthers take their opera. Even if it did not provide the promised scandal, this "Parsifal" was certainly unlike any seen before at this festival. The knights of the
Grail, whose leader, Amfortas, has been mortally wounded and must be saved by the holy fool Parsifal, have abandoned Wagner's mythological Middle Ages in favor of a deconstructed and symbolstrewn landscape that supposedly combined elements of Nepal and Namibia. In practice, the stage was a chaotic jumble of urban ruble, ancient Asian and African religious symbols and high-concept directorial statements such as a "Cemetery of Art" that shows up in the third act, with famous paintings set out as tombstones. Wagner's characters also had a new multicultural look. The knights of the Grail, a disturbingly pure-blooded group in Wagner's original, were transformed into a motley crew of races and creeds more interested in pagan rituals than Christian religious rites, and the seductive maidens of the evil sorcerer Klingsor were bedecked in various combinations of feathers and tribal body paints. It all added up to an overwhelming visual picture, but Mr. Schlingensief did not stop there, layering on still more visuals with an almost constant stream of shifting filmic images projected onto scrims and onto the stage itself. The relationship of the images to the musicaldramatic moment was, shall we say, indirect: seals cavorting on the beach while Gurnemanz lamented the fate of the order of the Grail; a giant decomposing rabbit during the work's sublime conclusion. In fairness to Mr. Schlingensief, this was not as arbitrary as it may sound. The film, according to an explanatory note, was his attempt to embrace viewers with a contemporary visual language speaking most readily to them, in keeping with Wagner's theories of opera as an allencompassing total work of art. The African and Asian cultural artifacts were attempts to find religious and mythological imagery still resonant in a secular age. But the giant rabbit, well, that's still anyone's guess. Any one of these ideas might have proved fertile ground, but Mr. Schlingensief's "Parsifal" ultimately undermined itself through overinclusion, a crowding of signs and symbols that did little to illuminate the truths of this dark, complex and arrestingly beautiful work. Instead "Parsifal" became a wash of visuals, a semiotic guessing game that too often worked against the grain of the opera's dramatic structure. For example the central transformative moment of the opera, Kundry's kiss that awakens Parsifal to his destiny as savior, was literally and
figuratively overshadowed by all the postmodern debris. By any reckoning this should have been a crowning dramatic event, but it made barely a ripple in Mr. Schlingensief's world. By contrast the most compelling moments were the simplest, when the stage would stop spinning, when for a few brief moments lights and colors formed an arresting picture, and the image would merge with Wagner's music, and the two would stand together in striking relief. This was also thanks to Pierre Boulez, who won a well-deserved outpouring of audience gratitude for his remarkable conducting. His tempos were generally brisk, his ear for the Wagnerian color palette immensely refined. The music had pliancy, transparency, balance and a surprising lack of the modernist asceticism he sometimes brings to 19th-century music. For their part the singers were quite strong, if occasionally dwarfed by all the sets and concepts. Robert Holl was a sturdy and resonant Gurnemanz, John Wegner made a vocally splendid and suitably sinister Klingsor, and Michelle de Young sang the tortured role of Kundry with a generous tone, though the dramatic power of her character was hamstrung by the production itself. The tenor Endrik Wottrich was a pure-voiced (if skeptical) Parsifal, and Alexander Marco-Buhrmester was duly anguished and effective as Amfortas. It will be interesting to see how Mr. Schlingensief develops as an opera director, which may depend on whether he can focus his provocative visions with more discipline. As for Mr. Wagner, he may have scored a victory simply by engaging such a controversial figure, riding the wave of publicity it generated, and having the whole ordeal end perhaps in befuddlement but not in defeat.
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Parsifal, English National Opera, 16 February 2011

The Coliseum
(Images: Richard Hubert Smith) (sung in English) Amfortas Iain Paterson Titurel Andrew Greenan Gurnemanz Sir John Tomlinson Klingsor Tom Fox Parsifal Stuart Skelton Kundry Jane Dutton First Knight Adrian Dwyer Second Knight Robert Winslade Anderson First Squire Julia Sporsn Second Squire Stephanie Marshall Third Squire Christopher Turner Fourth Squire Michael Bracegirdle Voice from Above Amy Kerenza Sedgwick First Group of Flowermaidens Sarah-Jane Davies, Julia Sporsn, Helena Dix Second Group of Flowermaidens Meeta Ravel, Sarah Jane Brandon, Stephanie Marshall Nikolaus Lehnhoff (director) Dan Dooner (associate director) Raimund Bauer (designer) Andrea Schmidt-Futterer (costumes) Duane Schuler (lighting) Denni Sayers (choreography) Orchestra of the English National Opera

Chorus of the English National Opera and additional chorus (chorus master: Martin Merry) Mark Wigglesworth (conductor)
This production retains a special place in my heart: its first outing in 1999 was my first Parsifal in the theatre. Saving up my student pennies, I made the journey not once but twice from Cambridge to London, was mightily impressed the first time and a little irritated the second. Even though I began to harbour doubts about some aspects of Nikolaus Lehnhoffs production, above all its ending, it remains preferable to many I have seen in the meantime. Stefan Herheims astounding Bayreuth version stands in a class of its own. Leaving that aside, however, Lehnhoff is immeasurably superior to, say, the pitiful, incoherent offering from, say, Klaus Michael Grber for Covent Garden why on earth did the Royal Opera revive a universally derided non-production? or Bernd Eichingers confused effortfor the Berlin State Opera, let alone glimpses of Tony Palmers codmedivalism for the Mariinsky. Lehnhoffs conception, powerfully aided by Raimund Bauers stage designs, stands very much in the shadow of the Holocaust, taking as a further, generally productive cue the Waste Lands heap of broken images. Apposite both to Wagners drama in itself and to how we may now feel compelled to consider it, we encounter in the first act a community clearly in need of rejuvenation; by the time of the third act, much has turned to rubble and stone, it not being clear until the end whether there should remain any hope at all, even under Parsifal, of that rejuvenation. The second act seems less sure of itself, its abiding images being the bizarre costumes Andrea SchmidtFutterer allots to Klingsor (weirdly space-age) and Kundry (a strange chrysalis, out of and into which she awkwardly squeezes herself). But compared to the horrors of Grbers Covent Garden production, we perhaps should not concern ourselves unduly with that. What the whole lacked, I thought, was more incisive direction on stage, doubtless a consequence of Lehnhoffs absence through illness: there was more than the occasional hint of a routine revival, a great pity given the ideas presented.
The broken railway line present during the whole of the third act is a powerful broken image, presumably intended to refer to Auschwitz. But what is being said there? That the variety of revival offered by the communitys new leader leads to racial rather than Schopenhauerian annihilation? That would be wrong-headed in the extreme, but a point of view at least, yet it seems undercut by the joy with which Kundry she does not die and Parsifal begin their journey along the line. The implication seems to be that they are wandering off to initiate a sexual relationship: bewildering, and arguably offensive, in the productions context. The production, understandably, appears to waver between a quasi-

Adornian attempt to rescue Wagner and a desire to condemn him. Part of the reason, I suspect, why this conundrum presents itself is the productions absolute refusal to engage with the works complex relationship towards Christianity. (I should direct anyone interested in my thoughts on the latter to an article in The Wagner Journal, 3/3, pp.29-59.) Simply to ignore the issue seems to me an unduly easy way out. And yes, that includes the deflating absence of any substitute for the second-act Sign of the Cross; text and music cry out for something, whatever it might be.
Mark Wigglesworths conducting was for the most part something to savour. Parsifal is by any standards a tough proposition, but the structure was largely in place, most impressively of all in the first act, which opened with a beautifully slow yet sustained prelude. The third act occasionally dragged: not a matter of tempo as such, but of faltering line; however, I should not wish to exaggerate. The scores dialectic between horizontal and vertical demands was more surely navigated than I have often heard. Moreover, the ENO orchestra gave perhaps the finest performance I have ever heard from it; I have certainly never heard it finer. Strings had weight, sweetness, and silkiness, as required, whilst the rounded tone of the brass, sepulchral and never brash, proved exemplary.
Allowances had to be made for some of the vocal portrayals and for almost all of Richard Stokess English translation. The latter is doubtless an horrendously difficult task to

undertake, but some of the inaccuracies why change a gander to a duckling, making nonsense of the relationship to a goose? and banalities could surely have been improved upon. Choral singing was generally very good. Jane Duttons Kundry was sadly below par; one could only regret the absence, owing to artistic differences, of the originally advertised Irne Theorin. Sir John Tomlinsons voice is becoming increasingly threadbare at the top, but there was no denying the overall majesty of his Gurnemanz, however impoverished the great narrations may have been by the act of translation. Iain Paterson had a slightly shaky start as Amfortas, but recovered well, soon erasing unfortunate memories of his bizarre miscasting by ENO as Don Giovanni; here, instead, we had a typically detailed response to text and music, and a credible dramatic assumption, for the most part finely acted on stage. Tom Fox and Andrew Greenan made their respective marks without blemish as Klingsor and Titurel, both rising vocally above the handicap of their strange costumes. Stuart Skelton displayed a fine Heldentenor in the title role, very much in the baritonal, Bayreuth tradition. As with many of the best exponents of the role, he left one initially a little disappointed, an apparent disappointment rectified by the appreciation of dramatic strategy: the first act Parsifal should sound somewhat vacant, in order to allow for the extraordinary development the character undergoes. (Even extraordinary is to put it mildly.) The voice lacks nothing in power; if anything, the thought occurred that it might have benefited from a larger space.
Indeed, I still wonder whether a theatre other than the Bayreuth Festspielhaus is a suitable venue for staging Parsifal at all: not out of misplaced Bayreuth Idealist piety, but rather because other, non-theatrical spaces, from Siena Cathedral to the Tate Modern Turbine Hall, might prove much more appropriate. A work that has so far transcended the narrow horizons of the Italianate opera house or, in the case of the Coliseum, the music hall! jars somewhat in such a setting. Whether one considers that jarring productive may be a matter of taste, however, and the problem, such as it is, is not ENOs alone; far from it.
Posted by Mark Berry at 12:51 PM
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PARSIFAL: A PERSONAL EXPERIENCE AT THE WAGNER FESTSPIELE BAYREUTH, 2005

JOURNAL ENTRY: 24 August 2005, Mittwack 0330 Bayerischer Hof, Bayreuth, Germany. By David W. Cline, M.D., OPERA REVIEW. I have had a most extraordinary day! From 4:00 p.m. to 10:15 p.m. I attended the Wagner Festspielle presentation of "Parsifal" conducted by Pierre Boulez (his last performance at Bayreuth - he is 80 years old), and directed by Christoph Schlingenslief. Amfortas was Alexander MarcoBuhrmester, Titurel - Kwangchul Youn, Gurnemanz - Robert Holl, Parsifal - Alfons Eberz, Klingsor John Wegner, and Kundry - Michelle DeYoung. It was the most extraordinary production impacting the most profound meaning, the most moving of the four times I have seen Parsifal and, the best opera experience of my life. The audience also approved because, although there was booing, especially for the production by Christoph Schlingensief, those approving out-shouted, out-clapped, and out-stomped their feet on the wooden floor for 30 minutes after the music stopped with too many curtain calls to count. I shall tell you about this extraordinary experience.
Picture from Schlingensiefs production of Parsifal (Image: Bayreuth)
It started on Tuesday, August 23rd with a European buffet breakfast at Hotel Bayerischer Hof with two soft boiled eggs served in an egg cup, ham, potatoes, wonderful German dark nut bread, croissant with marmalade preserve and delicious hot coffee. Then a swift walk to the Grun Hugel (Green Hill) to the Festspiel Haus Restaurant for an excellent symposium graciously sponsored by the New York Wagner Society and moderated by Verena Kossodo. Jeffrey Bullard, a classicist and dean at Mary Baldwin College, Staunton, Virginia, discussed the opera Parsifal. At the end of his presentation he made a poignant remark regarding the current production which began last year and is very controversial. At the end of the opera we see maggots eating a dead rabbit (which appeared alive throughout the opera) on a video screen, and Klingsor, when banished by Parsifal in Act II, goes into the universe strapped to a rocket. At the end of his remarks Professor Bullard said, "Don't try to figure out what's going on, but just let your experience speak to you. This production is "performance art" like "The Gates" presented in Central Park, New York City by Christo and Jean-Claud in February 2005." So what spoke? The prologue begins and is all lovely. This is the first time I have heard the Bayreuth sound starting with the Grail Theme __________(insert); it mellowed me. The first scene with Gurnemanz awakening the pages is in a set with a lot of staging; multiple buildings, towers, high chain-link fences with razor wire on top, all on a rotating stage. In the back is a screen on which is projected various images; disco lights, movies of bacteria moving around, an anteater sucking up ants, a beautiful woman with clear satisfaction slowly sucking the tip of an index finger of a large hand. A rabbit in the form of a stuffed toy stage prop in various sizes appears off and on throughout the drama. The next to final scene is of a single human form walking off in the distance toward the lighted doorway at the end of a tunnel. But, I get ahead of myself. To say the least, there was a lot transpiring on this stage which many say distracted from the music. Besides the usual cast of characters there were doubles, and even triples, of certain characters. Parsifal had a least three doubles, and he himself would morph into an angel, a sinner, a seducer, a seducee, a contrite little boy, an angry aggressor, and a Christ figure with menstrual blood from the communion served at the end of the first act, wiped on his white gown. For Kundry, there were at least 5 or 6 doubles; the young seductive teenager naked from the waist down who gets laid by Parsifal in a shack in the second act, a young black woman with large buttocks and an Afro hairdo who washes Parsifal's feet, a large, fat, brown Asian woman who looks like Buddha is wheeled in legs astride. In a pagan primitive ritual she minstrates vociferously while the grail knights dip their fingers into her menstrual blood and then imprint it on Parsifal's white gown (her perineum faces toward the back of the stage, done moribundly, but not offensively). Then Klingsor, a black man, walks up a ladder (with his back to the ladder) and becomes a white devil, and then a poor suffering son -of- a- bitch.
My first effort was to try to keep up with everything going on. However, this was impossible! How did I cope? I went to sleep midway through the First Act. When I aroused myself I tried again to take it all in. I couldn't. Then, I became frustrated and asked myself, "Are we having fun now?" "No", I responded. "How did I get myself into this unsavory mess? I'm never coming back here again, I am done with Wagner!" Then I got a headache, and then I felt damn mad! As I squirmed in my seat, I remembered Jeff Bullard's directive, "not, what does this mean, but what is your reaction?" I definitely was having a reaction! Then my training in psychodynamic psychiatry came to the fore. I was having a counter transference reaction to my patient who in this case was the opera production of Christoph Schlingensief. What I beheld pushed by buttons. I prefer, and try hard to see the human experience as noble, gallant efforts to do good, that people are by in large, good and make honorable efforts at behaving properly. Once more, I could never imagine the holy of holy communion be displayed as the communicants dipping their hands in vaginal menstrual blood then raising their hands on high and parading to Parsifal, now depicted as a Christ figure, and imprinting their hands on his snow white gown while the glorious music of the communion scene as the end of Act I comes forth! Shocking! But then my free association came in the words of the institution of Holy Communion of the Last Supper, "This is My body and My blood given to you, do this in remembrance of me." Then came an amusing association - it was from the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical "South Pacific" in the person of Bloody Mary. The association was to the song the sailors sing "Bloody Mary is the Girl I Love!" Oh my God! Shocking! Is this "love" a deeper, primitive, tribal manifestation of both affection and redemption? Is this "communion" a gross, hideous primal means by which we restore, rejuvenate and recreate ourselves into a higher calling? My answer was "maybe."
But what struck me was the horrible pathetic state of mankind. I hadn't realized that we were so deprived! Schlingensief was confronting me with the hideous, derived, god awful aspects of the human experience. So by the end of the first act the anger and headache was gone; I felt sad and wanted to cry. I didn't then, but I did later in the third act when the redemption scene took place. Amfortas washed Kundry's feet, Kundry washed Amfortas' feet, Parsifal washed Kundry's feet, and she his. Then all three joined hands which were tied together with a red ribbon by somebody's double (I don't know whose) and the three paraded around slowly in a circle of muted delight and I cried, sobbed as quietly as I could, for the gruesome, horrible, pathetic, wholesome, beauty of the redemption there before my weeping eyes. More associations, this time from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem "The Song of Hiawatha." In the introduction he bids us "listen to this Indian legend, to this song of Hiawatha!" reminding us that we are related through our humanity. "Ye whose hearts are fresh and simple, Who have faith in God and Nature, Who believe, that in all ages, Every human heart is human, That in every savage bosom, There are longings, yearnings, strivings, For the good they comprehend not, That the feeble hands and helpless, Groping blindly in the darkness, Touch God's right hand in the darkness And are lifted up and strengthened; Listen to this simple story, To the song of Hiawatha." And finally, from the Whippenpoof: "We are poor little lambs who have lost our way, We are poor little sheep who have gone astray, Gentlemen long go off on a spree, damned from here to Eternity, God have Mercy on such as we, baa, baa, baa."

"Redemption to the redeemer" is the final line that the opera chorus sings. Yes indeed, each of the central characters of this opera has been redeemed through their forgiveness/redemption of another. "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." I have experienced a new level of "Gesamtkunstwerk." David W. Cline, M.D., DavidWCline@comcast.net
PARSIFAL ESTC Projectos Leituras Lumnicas http://www.goethe.de/kue/the/tst/en2228885.htm

hristoph Schlingensief and Richard Wagner The Will to the Total Work of Art
When Helmut Kohl had become obsolete as a bogeyman and Gerhard Schrder burst forth as too boring to arouse real excitement, a figure stepped onto centre stage in the work of Christoph Schlingensief to whom he addressed himself primarily not with aggression but with sympathy: Richard Wagner. At first everyone believed that the composer, who had been haunting Schlingensiefs films and plays for many years, was only another anti-figure like Adolf Hitler or Guido Westerwelle Schlingensief - personae that served Schlingensief as illustrations for his campaign against cant and mendaciousness. The acoustic irradiation of a colony of seals with music from Siegfried in 2000 in Namibia la the famous scene fromApocalypse Now was just such an action in which Wagner was cited as the soundtrack for evil. Schlingensiefs big Wagner performances at the site of the German massacre of the Herero in Namibia Richard Wagner (African Twin Towers, 2005) and at the graveyard for soldiers of the Second World War in Neuhardenberg (Odins Parsipark, 2005) also appear to use Wagner as elevator music to hell. But in fact Schlingensiefs interest in Wagner has decrypted itself as love and that not only in his production of 2004 Parzival in Bayreuth. The will to the total work of art We are brothers in the flesh. He was exactly as driven as I am, Schlingensief once said of his relation to the composer whom he very much reveres. In another place he has waxed enthusiastic about Wagners authentic chaos, for his life was also a jumble as much of a jumble as Schlingensiefs own life among the big theatres, foreign countries, pressing themes and his actual home in Berlins Prenzlauer Berg. And it is just this associative power, this rather megalomaniac will to the total work of art, which does not always obey rational logic but rather an absolute personal sensibility, that unites Wagner and Schlingensief as artists: Wagner interests me as a man possessed!. 'The African Twintowers' Schlingensiefs second production of a Wagner opera even drove these obsessive demands on himself, which are the motor of his creativity, into climatic excess. In the Brazilian city of Manaus, in the fiery oven of the Amazon region, stands the famous opera house to which Werner Herzogs film starring Klaus Kinski, Fitzcarraldo, already rendered homage. Here Schlingensief staged the Flying Dutchman. The premier on April 22 was preceded two days before by an open-air procession, likewise staged by Schlingensief, celebrating the opening of the festival, which led from the opera house, through the city, to the harbour. During his famous transformation of the Hamburg Schauspielhaus into a `district mission` (Stadtteilmission) in 1997, he already demanded the faade of the theatre be pulled down so as to open up art to life. Ten years older and somewhat more composed in his treatment of total solutions, Schlingensief now contents himself with hauling the grand art of opera out of its isolation in the temple of art and popularising it by using the local means of the tropical Carnival. Parzival 2004 in Bayreuth
'Flying Dutchman'

Most observers, ranging from Angela Merkel to the German features pages, experienced Schlingensiefs opera debut at Bayreuth with Parzival as a storm tide of images, in which many props and even more films rotated on the revolving stage. But the audience noticed that something new had emerged in Schlingensiefs work. If hitherto Schlingensief had used persons and themes only in order to rock their alleged certainty through irony, cynicism, provocation and exaggeration, he now took Wagner and his work quite seriously. He attempted, in his volatile and very moralistic way, to interpret the opera as an existential experience. 'Parsifal' Schlingensief Wagner Beuys Yet notwithstanding all the enthusiasm and veneration for Wagner, Schlingensiefs relation to the composer remains ambivalent. The drastic use of music in Schlingensiefs many indoor and outdoor performances alludes of course to the atmospheric proximity of the Wagner family and of Wagners art to fascist self-dramatisation. Schlingensief deploys the monumental effects with great accuracy. But where he attempts a serious rapprochement with the artistic substance of Wagners compositions, he actually introduces, as a means of contrast, the symbols and methods of another great artist whom he reveres: 'Odins Parsipark' Joseph Beuys. In his Parzival, for example, Schlingensief presents the Grail as a decomposing hare, a direct allusion to Beuys symbolic animal for the Incarnation. And Schlingensief also needs the concept of artistic freedom propagated by the man with the felt hat to counterbalance the firmly established grandiose frame of Wagners mythic works. Between these two great political mystics, ChristophSchlingensief, a metaphysically homeless metaphysician, has successfully sought his own world. Now also in Manaus. Christoph Schlingensiefs staging of the Flying Dutchman is a co-production of the Goethe-Institut and the Ministry of Culture of the Federal State of the Amazon. It is sponsored by the German Federal Cultural Foundation (Kulturstiftung des Bundes) and was premiered on April 22 at the legendary Teatro Amazonas as part of the XI. Festival Amazonas de pera. There was a second performance on April 25. The Festival was opened on April 20 with an open-air procession under the direction of ChristophSchlingensief.
PARSIFAL ESTC Projectos Leituras Lumnicas http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,597544,00.html 12/19/2008
Director Christoph Schlingensief Faces Mortality

'I Have No Desire to Go to Heaven'
Leading German stage director and filmmaker Christoph Schlingensief talks about his lung cancer, how he copes with the prospect of death, criticism of his art and the curse of always wanting to put people in a good mood.
SPIEGEL: Mr. Schlingensief, in your most recent dramatic works, "A Church of Fear of the Stranger in Me" and "The Interim State of Things," you transformed the fight against your cancer into extravagant, extremely well-received celebrations of art. What is your current health status? Schlingensief: My status is that I have about 10 new, pea-sized metastases in one of my lungs, which are still there after my operation. It doesn't look good. These metastases appeared very quickly, and no one expected them. The doctors are also baffled. In the other lung, the cancer took three or four years. I was just in the process of getting back into life. The hospital had already given me the all clear, but then they took a closer look at the Xrays and asked me to come back. SPIEGEL: You seemed almost euphoric when, in September, you appeared in "Church of Fear" at the Ruhr Triennale in Duisburg after your surgery and chemotherapy. How hard did you take the latest news? Schlingensief: This disease is really depressing! In the weeks before I got the news, my girlfriend Aino and I had been walking around and were approaching work with new strength. We thought that we could enjoy life again for two or three years, if not more. And now? We refuse to enjoy each day as if it were the last day, according to that idiotic clich some doctors use. Eating used to be such a celebration for me, but now I've lost my appetite. I'm not even interested in red wine. I did like the schnapps I recently drank in the cafeteria at the Maxim Gorki Theater with the director Armin Petras. SPIEGEL: Does it provide you with some consolation that this year, after 25 years of controversy, you are suddenly reaping more praise than ever before from audiences and critics? Schlingensief: I see a lot of things as if I were behind a pane of bulletproof glass, and I'm amazed. The great thing about "Church of Fear" was that I could look at my work without any doubts. This work was completely pure and sad, but it was also absurd and funny. A year ago, shortly before my cancer was discovered, we went to Nepal. We shot a film there and visited a children's hospital, and this is what I wrote in the guest book: "May our circling thoughts finally come to rest." That sentence really hit home three days later, when I saw the first X-ray image. In fact, I do have the feeling that in "Church of Fear," thoughts have

finally come to a resting point that everyone understands. Having to die but wanting to live - that's the subject. SPIEGEL: Is it really true that you are plagued by doubts about your art? Schlingensief: Isn't that part of it? Many people are just now discovering that my works have always been melancholy or contemplative. But I am not an agent of suffering, like many in the theater who are convinced that they are ill. Nevertheless, I have struggled with problems that now seem stupid to me. It bothered me when something didn't appeal to people, this struggle over criticism. My defenses went up immediately whenever I had a negative review. In the worst of cases, the critics were dragged onto the stage. SPIEGEL: It usually looked like fun. Schlingensief: It was certainly liberating. There is nothing better than hurling big issues at a mesmerized, laughing audience. I always liked that about (Joseph) Beuys, that he never stubbornly presented his theories. In my films, I was always astonished to see why people were no longer laughing. In "Tunguska," for example, I portrayed two avant-garde filmmakers who traveled to the North Pole to torture the Eskimos there with their works. That was my way of getting even with my teacher, Werner Nekes, and the German avantgarde film. At the same time, it was a declaration of love. SPIEGEL: In retrospect, what would you do differently? Schlingensief: Perhaps my work was too encoded or too cowardly. My dramatic advisor, Carl Hegemann, once accused me, after my first play at the Volksbhne Theater, "100 Years of the CDU," of not having confessed properly. That was when I realized that accountability is also a necessary part of theater, and that it's something that I often miss. I was recently in my parents' apartment in Oberhausen, and I noticed that it's very dark there. The walls are yellowish and the floors are worn. I had never noticed this before. I always played the white giant there, to make the apartment bright. I played around, and I told stories about how I had been in Vienna or Bayreuth, or that I had an offer from Manaus. Just imagine, that's where I'm going, I would tell them. I brought some life into the place in the process, helping my father, who gradually lost his vision over a 10-year period and never came to terms with it, escape from his depression for a little while and putting my mother in a good mood. But I don't want to do that anymore when I visit my mother these days. My father is dead now. What I encapsulated there was a lack of self-love. In many ways, I didn't like myself. SPIEGEL: And this also applied to your work? Schlingensief: We just pretend that rejection motivates us, and that it only makes us stronger. When I was 16, I showed a film to an editor at WDR, and he said something that devastated me: "You will never be able to love anyone. It's very clear in the film. You're not interested in the characters. They're just cardboard figures for you." There I was, in the middle of puberty, and I wept. Of course, I always had a tough time with relationships. Later on, I made the film "Egomania-Island Without Hope" with Tilda Swinton, with whom I was together at the time. When I proudly showed her the film, she was horrified. She thought it was so horribly incomprehensible and full of hate. She just wept.

SPIEGEL: And your self-confidence wasn't immediately restored by the fact that your work was periodically received with enthusiastic praise? Schlingensief: That didn't work, even though it was always 50-50 with me. I suffered greatly from the fact that I couldn't get my parents to understand that what I do is good. All they got was that it didn't make sense to neighbors and relatives, who were afraid of being criticized just for being associated with me. My father wept at the Berlin Film Festival when he saw "Menu Total." It didn't help that my sister said that she thought the film was, as she said, impressive. My father took it so far that he would only show my mother the landscape scenes in "Egomania." He had made himself notes on exactly where to fast-forward to in the videos, and he allowed my mother to believe that I shoot documentaries about German landscapes. SPIEGEL: You recently pointed out that the cancer in your lungs probably began growing when you staged "Parsifal" in Bayreuth. Do you seriously believe that there is a connection? Schlingensief: Everyone who has cancer asks himself questions like that. Some brood over whether they smoked too many cigarettes or drank too much red wine. I ask myself whether I felt too much of an affiliation with death in my art. The level of emotion with which I staged that "Parsifal," Wagner's farewell work, in 2004, and the fact that I broke up with my girlfriend at the time and experienced some of my darker sides, that contradicted my will to live and produced an unbearable feeling of revulsion. I believe that every person has an innate stability that falters as a result of such acts of self-hate. SPIEGEL: Are you now able to like yourself better? Schlingensief: Not just myself, but others too. For instance, I've decided to praise people more often. I'm delighted by the warmth I feel coming from so many friends, as well as artists, from Margit Carstensen and Ren Pollesch, from Matthias Lilienthal and from Peter Zadek, who sent me an enormous, hilarious book of pornographic drawings when I was in the hospital. But it's nonsense to say that people with cancer see the world in a totally different way. We imagine that this is the case, we are weak, and our surroundings react differently to us. Nevertheless, I'm far enough along to be able to say that the most normal things are the nicest things. I enjoy just lying there with my girlfriend, perhaps looking at the gray wall of a high-rise building, without dark clouds and without asking myself the question: How much longer will we be lying here? I've lost one lung already. I can no longer run, I get out of breath, my feet feel like they're made of lead, and yet I'm doing really well. I'm taken better care of than any child in Nepal, who wouldn't stand a chance in my situation. I've had some wonderful moments and a lot of joy. Part 2: 'I Still Have Some Battles Left to Fight' SPIEGEL: Now you're putting us in a good mood. Schlingensief: Let's put it this way: I'm trying. I'm probably weeping deep inside. Basically, every person with cancer has the chance to find his own way. If someone wants to keep playing the same record until the end, that's fine. Or he wants to do Qigong or yoga, that's okay too. The worst thing is when you don't get it, despite all the treatment and advice, when you constantly think to yourself: If I had just gotten around to doing this or that. It would be a good thing if people with cancer could be pulled out of their despair, out of this

crisis of confidence. Hospitals ought to provide us with a helper to discuss the fear and explain to us the mechanisms of fighting fear. Instead, we get caught up in these Internet forums, which only make us sicker. I'm fortunate to have a doctor who sees me as a person, who speaks openly and gently with me and doesn't employ the American approach and say: "Let me tell it to you like it is. You're finished!" SPIEGEL: Have you ever been seriously ill before? Schlingensief: Yes, once, when I was 18, in my last year of high school. I had eaten fish sandwiches at a local fair and ended up in bed at home with stomach pain. I was treated for fish poisoning, but my appendix had actually ruptured. By the time I was taken to the hospital two days later, I was unconscious. They spent seven hours removing pus from my stomach. After the operation, I was in intensive care for six weeks, then in a regular ward, with an intestinal obstruction. I saw people being wheeled out of the operating room, and I also saw a few people dying. That was very tough. SPIEGEL: Does your artistic obsession with sickness and death stem from that time? Schlingensief: I can't exactly say. My father was a pharmacist, and I had my fill of listening to sick people. I never really believed in complete health. SPIEGEL: Do you feel that you really have to get down to work now? Schlingensief: I don't fool myself into believing that work is keeping me alive. It's nice to think that you're needed, but it's much more important for me to have found a girlfriend, Aino, who fights for me and gets me out of bed when all I can do is sigh. Aino is such a godsend that the thought of losing her makes me want to cry. I have no desire to go to heaven, and I have no desire to play the harp and sing and make music and sit around on a cloud somewhere! SPIEGEL: How is your cancer being treated? Schlingensief: I'm taking pills, for now. They don't know yet whether the drugs enter the lungs and stop or shrink the metastases. I thought of killing myself at first. I didn't want to turn yellow and green and blue, and die after the fifth or sixth round of chemotherapy. But I've decided that suicide is out of the question. I will remain a Christian no matter what, even though I reject the Catholic Church in its current form, which is a ludicrous, infernal machine on earth. The only thing I don't want to experience is pain. But I have some very good people who will help in that respect, to dull the pain. Jesus was also stabbed in the side to shorten his suffering, and he lost blood and water as a result. That was assisted suicide! But tell that to someone in the Catholic Church! SPIEGEL: Is this also a subject of your new theater project in Vienna? Schlingensief: Yes. It's about illness, of course, about the rotating universe in which we remain, even when we are gone. And it's about Africa and the opening of a festival hall that I want to build there, so that artists from Europe can spend some time there and rip off the Africans officially and not secretly, as they have done in the past. Those are the set pieces. Elfriede Jelinek gave me the text, and a composer is currently writing the score for the singers. The premier will be at the Burgtheater on March 20. I can't sing or compose music,

so I have to rely on other people. It's something I have learned recently. This method of directing from afar is an old dream of mine: You build a train in which you will no longer be a passenger one day, and then others take over and continue driving the train, exploring unknown places. SPIEGEL: You have announced that when your time comes, you want to go to Africa to die. Why there? Schlingensief: Not because I feel particularly tied to it or anything like that. I do feel, since the first time I was there almost 30 years ago, that I could find peace there. It's a spiritual thing. But I can't die that quickly. I have a long way to go before closing the book. I'm not at peace with myself, and I'm not about to give up yet. I still have some battles left to fight! SPIEGEL: Mr. Schlingensief, thank you for this interview. Interview conducted by Anke Drr and Wolfgang Hbel Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
PARSIFAL ESTC Projectos Leituras Lumnicas http://www.schlingensief.com/schlingensief_eng.php
CHRISTOPH SCHLINGENSIEF - BIOGRAPHY

A portrait on Christoph Schlingensief. By Till Briegleb. Christoph Schlingensief's most loyal friend was the suspicion of cynicism. Even his first wild phase as a film director was accompanied by heated reactions. Feature films like "100 Jahre Adolf Hitler" (i.e. "100 Years of Adolf Hitler") in 1988, "Das deutsche Kettensgenmassaker" (i.e. "The German Chainsaw Massacre") in 1990 and "Terror 2000" in 1992 took elements such as the Gladbeck hostage crisis, asylum seeker murders, neo-Nazi activities, or German reunification and combined them with splatter and trash aesthetics, obscenities and hysteria. This was criticized by overly serious intellectuals and sensationalist media, often in equal measure, as being over-the-top, disgraceful and cynical. In 1993, Berlin anarchists went as far as using butyric acid to destroy copies of his film "Terror 2000" in the Sputnik cinema in the city's Kreuzberg district because they felt that this grotesque German political tale with its ridiculously exaggerated scenes of sex and violence was "mindless, racist and sexist propaganda". The "Passion Impossible" Hamburg railway mission which he staged at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in 1997 and for which he invited junkies, homeless people, prostitutes and other marginalized inhabitants of the city's railway station district to spend a week in his mission in an abandoned police station, was also rejected by a number of the theatre's actors who claimed that he was merely exploiting the underprivileged for the sake of his own vanity. Similar accusations were directed at Schlingensief's work with disabled people at the Berliner Volksbhne, where he has staged plays, projects and actions since 1993, at his production of "Hamlet" with neo-Nazis who had allegedly opted out of their extremist groups in Zurich, and at his production of "Parsifal" at the Bayreuth Festival in 2004. Even his last project, Remdoogo, the "Festspielhaus for Africa", an opera village that has been realized in Burkina Faso since January 2010 by the architect Francis Kr according toSchlingensief's vision, is regarded by many observers as being a whim of cultural imperialism and an egomaniacal misunderstanding, despite (or perhaps precisely because of) the broad support it enjoys from politicians and the media. These opinions are no doubt the inevitable side effects of the style of irritation full of conviction and often provocative that Christoph Schlingensiefconsistently relied on like precious few other artists and directors. His angry actions were targeted first and foremost at displays of selfsufficiency, and combined experimental art with opera, video and performances, spoken theatre and subculture, lectures and talk shows in opulent and very frequent tours de force. The phony triumphal messages of everyday life, the numerous masks of contentment and the exhibitionism displayed by the mass media incited him to search for the pain and hurt they conceal. He objected with equal impertinence to political machinations and private instances of double standards: no matter whether it was Kohl, Schrder, Merkel or his own audience, any conscience easing and the all too simple logic of problem and solution were in Schlingensief's eyes an indication of mummified thinking and thus, time and time again, prompted him to employ outrageous means to shock his audiences into greater self-awareness.
Family picture: Christoph, Anni and Hermann Josef, 1968 at Drachenfels.
With an amazing lack of trepidation, Schlingensief consistently overstepped the boundaries of decency, good taste and the safe terrain of the comprehensible. Actions such as his Big Brother camp for asylum seekers in Vienna, his arrest at the Documenta 1997 for bearing a banner emblazoned with the words "Kill Helmut Kohl", his abuse of the Wagner family after his work in Bayreuth in his following productions, and his founding of the "Chance 2000" party for the German federal elections, which celebrated democracy as a circus of failure, were fearless breaks with taboos whose impact was all the greater not least as a result of the negative reactions they provoked. Nonetheless, the question of whether he was driven by cynicism or morals one which can be answered fairly easily upon somewhat more thorough study of his political and human causes always generated sufficient media attention to ensure that Christoph Schlingensief ultimately became a national cultural icon. Although he always placed himself and his subjective aggressiveness at the forefront of his works, his focus became a more specifically personal one when he was diagnosed with cancer in early 2008. Ever since, he has with great openness and belligerence made death, his fear and the relative power of dying the central theme of his productions. Extravagant theatre performances like his "Church of Fear" (2008), "Mea Culpa" (2009) and "Via Intolleranza II" (2010) were complex compositions that combined his despair at having to die, mockery of the inevitable, grief and absurd festivity, questions about the transitory nature of life and a search for possible spiritual answers with his will to carry on living nonetheless in the case of "Via Intolleranza II" with the participation of numerous artists from Africa, the place he yearned to be, or more accurately from Burkina Faso, the country of his opera village vision. Schlingensief's seemingly blas confidence that he would always be able to tackle new genres was ultimately remarkably free from dilettantism and an overestimation of his own abilities. After all, Christoph Schlingensief was the only German director to develop a universal language of art for himself that he was able to apply not only to theatre and opera, literature, film, installation and performance, but also to his own portrayal in the media. His website (www.schlingensief.com) is without doubt the most comprehensive and professional platform of any individual artist in Germany, his television appearances, which he mastered with cheekiness, poetry and warmth, were extremely popular yet Schlingensief, as a public figure, still managed to avoid being pigeon-holed by the media.

The great integrity with which he remained attentive, political, contradictory and yet so likeable, despite being one of the greatest popular stars of German culture, meant that he truly deserved his fame, and the many honours that were bestowed on him towards the end corrupted his beliefs in no way whatsoever. The only thing that was cynical about the entire business was the illness that cost him his life on 21 August 2010. Yet that too was part of his lifelong struggle for honesty and sincerity through art. By Till Briegleb, Goethe Institut, August 2010
PARSIFAL ESTC Projectos Leituras Lumnicas http://www.schlingensief.com/projekt_eng.php?id=t044
THE LAST LOVERS

Christoph Schlingensief with "Parsifal" bids farewell to Bayreuth (this year) and absolutely wants to come back. By Frederik Hanssen (Der Tagesspiegel, August 3rd, 2007) This time, too, a battle in the house is not to be stayed. The booers scream till their chords are sore, the fans clap emphatically, people are standing up everywhere in order to be able to see better the the production teams'sentrance. Christof Schlingensief waves from the stage - and many wave back. In it's fourth year, his "Parsifal" has not become a classic like Patrice Chereau's 1980 "Ring of the Century" which had met the opposition of many an angry conservative Wagnerianer. But the production has almost become a cult, because it has evolved from the desolate vision of the first year to a moving theatre evening . Because Schlingensief wirth a holy solemnity wins over the hearts of the audience. It is of course true what a sour Spaniard cries out at the end of the second act: "loco!" This is a crazy director - and for that reason the right person for the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth. And for "Parsifal", the time and space encompassing world embrace. Schlingensiefg throws overboard the whole of Christian iconography - an yet he couldn't have interpreted the piece more religiously, or mythically, or more all encompassingly. The baroque trompe-l'oeil technique from light designer Voxi Brenklau that avoids all possibility of rational comprehension, is a true celebration. All has to do with things at an end.
Picture from Schlingensiefs Parsifal stagings 2007 (Image: Bayreuth)
Death is always puzzling, he has a thousand faces -that is exactly what Meika Dresenkamp's video relate. Much is only to be made out fleetingly, because ornaments proliferate, films and photoprojections cover each other up. The multicultural mix of the grail society is barely visible behind a screen/scrim. And so there emerges a magic garden of modern nightmares as they may have been dreamed in refugee camps or favelas (?). "The images will remain", as Scenery Designers Daniel Angermayr and Thomas George have painted in the manner of Jonathan Meese

on one of the boarded floors. How true. In the upcoming three years the Bayreuth Festival will have to make up for a deficit of 1.6 million euros. The government subventions have not been for years corrected to meet the inflation rate, and with a set number of 30 performances per summer bringing in a constant sum of 17 million euros, the economic planning can easily wind up in minus figures.The association of friends of Bayreuth have agreed to cover the deficit sum, and some see in a statement of FDP politician Hans-Joachim Otto a sign that there may be coming up a raising of the subventions: "Culture", said the chairman of the Bundestag's Cultural Committee on a recent visit to Bayreuth, "doesn't only happen in Berlin." Festival Press spokesman Peter Emmerich refuses all talk of a financial crisis. And head of the clan Wofgang Wagner denies a cultural crisis. NonethelessSchlingensief's "Parsifal" is being removed from the festival roster after four years - normally productions are held for five- and will be substituted already next summer with a new production with the italkian conductor Daniele Gatti and the Norwegian director Stefan Herheim. If the festival direction hasn't gone too far. Because after all the routiniers, the photorealists, those full of hot air, the experimenters, the entschleuniger or the simple miscastings of the last few years, Herheim is an illusionless analyst, an ambitious, methodical coldhearted dismantler of pieces for whom nothing is holy.
Picture from Schlingensiefs Parsifal stagings 2007 (Image: Bayreuth)
Christof Schlingensief, on the other hand, and his "Parsifal" has last Friday movingly made it clear, is the last big lover on the green hill of Bayreuth since Heiner Mller. An obsessive, who takes seriously the workshop character of the frankian festival, which so often is avowed but so rarely is carried out. That the directors are asked here by every summer revivial to come back and overhaul their interpretation is not for Schlingensief a burden, but rather a real chance- which he uses. In its fourth year his scenic installation had ripened to a psychologically illuminating production, the figures, more assertions than characters, have acquired a human face.The singers live their parts with every thread of their bodies. Alfons Eberz as Parsifal and Jukka Rasilainen as Amfortas dare to cry out in pain, Evelyn Herlitzius sings a practically expressionistic Kundry. Robert Holl exudes mildness and turns Gurnemanz into a Moses figure, as Schlingensief has conjured them. In the orchestra pit, Adam Fischer attests the humanistic message of the festival with a bewitching sound in the orchestra that is reminiscent of the welling up and down of an endless ocean.

"Bayreuth opened enormous possiblilities for me and granted me a control over my self.", sums up Schlingensief his "hill experience" in the "Nordbayerischen Kurier". And naturally , he wants to return, in a few years, when he has learned more. He would like to stage "Tristan". Because he loves the anachronistic festival that is dedicated to the work of a single artist, his soul relative, Wagner. He doesn't take seriously requests to change the rules and on Bayreuth to set up an off festival. "In order to bring young people here, you don't need all this foolishness. You only have to open the doors to Bayreuth. Thatz is like Cape Canaveral." In Schlingensief's "Parsifal" Karsten Mewes' Klingsor escapes in the end from earthly vale of tears in a rocket. To new deeds, noble hero. Translated from german by Mark Hirsch
PARSIFAL ESTC Projectos Leituras Lumnicas http://www.schlingensief.com/weblog/index.php?p=250
AKTUELLE TERMINE, ARTIKEL, KOMMENTARE...

REQUIEM FOR SCHLINGENSIEFS PARSIFAL (THE WAGNER JOURNAL)
Paula M. Bortnichak and Edward A. Bortnichak offer an intriguing interpretation of the controversial production, now in its last year
The Wagner Journal, 1, 3, 8590
Evelyn Herlitzius (Kundry), Alfons Eberz (Parsifal), Jukka Rasilainen (Amfortas), Karsten Mewes (Klingsor), Robert Holl (Gurnemanz), Artur Korn (Titurel), Clemens Bieber (First Grail Knight), Samuel Youn (Second Grail Knight), Julia Borchert (First Esquire), Atala Schck (Second Esquire), Norbert Ernst (Third Esquire), Miljenko Turk (Fourth Esquire), Julia Borchert, Martina Rping, Carola Guber, Anna Korondi, Jutta Maria Bhnert, Atala Schck (Flowermaidens); Bayreuth Festival Chorus and Orchestra/Adam Fischer; Christoph Schlingensief (director), Daniel Angermayr, Thomas Goerge (designers), Tabea Braun (costumes). Festspielhaus, Bayreuth, 13 August 2007
The great music dramas are masterpieces that serve as mirrors to our lives, and as audiences change over time, so should the representation of these timeless reflections of our common humanity. Every now and then in the performance history of such works there comes a production that enables us to experience it as if for the first time. For Parsifal, the Wieland Wagner staging at Bayreuth in 1951 was such a defining moment. Christoph Schlingensiefs Bayreuth production (20047) was another such, all-too-rare, landmark. Schlingensief may not be a traditional Wagnerite, but he is nonetheless a perfect one: his respect for the inner spirit of the work, his remaining true to both text and music, and his willingness to engage tirelessly with the difficult questions they raise mark him as a Wagnerian of the front rank.1
Schlingensiefs central contribution was to remove extraneous and distracting layers of Western religious symbolism to reveal the more elemental, Eastern (and Schopenhauerian) spiritual core of the drama, utilising Wagners well-documented affinity to Buddhist thought to set the drama as a parable of Everymans and, indeed, every sentient beings (witness references to heilige Hunde onstage in Act I) journey toward Enlightenment. In writing about this production in 2005, we expounded at length on the Eastern spiritual tradition, specifically Tibetan Buddhism, that forms the basis for this staging. Interested readers are referred to that earlier commentary for more

extensive background.2 We recapitulate here the essentials of Buddhism necessary to appreciate Schlingensiefs (and Wagners) intent. First, it is important to recognise that the goal of all Buddhists is to achieve the state of nirvana, or oneness with the universe, through renunciation of the ego (the self) and the acceptance of the interdependence of all life. This state of oneness with all creation is marked by perfect compassion for and identification with the suffering of others. All animals and people have souls or spirits, and this essence of being persists after death. The Eastern terms for soul are astral body or body double, and it is this latter term that literally describes how Schlingensief presents the souls of the departed, with identically clad actors doubling for the singers. Every soul has the potential to recycle in the cosmos through reincarnation (also referred to as metempsychosis or transmigration) in an effort to resolve residual conflicts that continue to trouble it and impede its progress towards the state of nirvana. The soul can undergo as many reincarnations as needed. The work of the soul is largely accomplished in transitional zones of heightened awareness known as bardo states. The most important bardo is that of death: the interval between life and death and between death and reincarnation. The death bardo is vividly described in the classic Buddhist text The Tibetan Book of the Dead as a highly energised place, filled with conflicting images, strong sensations and vibrant colours, in which the soul is literally bombarded with information. That is exactly the stage picture for much of this production: the stage itself represents the death bardo. Time and space in the bardo are interchangeable: hence Gurnemanzs famous lines at the start of the Act I Transformation Scene: Du siehst, mein Sohn, / zum Raum wird hier die Zeit (You see, my son, / here time becomes space). Before the soul can complete its journey to nirvana, it must resolve conflicts remaining in every area of its former life. To accomplish this, it must navigate through all levels, or chakras, of human consciousness and functioning. These chakras correspond to anatomical regions of the physical body: the heart for love, the brain for intellectual life, the genitals for sexual passion, and so forth. Finally, it must be recognised that souls search for integration in the bardo in tandem with other souls that they were related to in life. The souls in these soul families must find each other and work through issues they have in common before their journeys are complete.
A few stage conventions and properties are repeatedly used by Schlingensief to make his Eastern spiritual concept more tangible to the audience. For these physical markers of concepts and states of being, the director has drawn on symbols from various philosophical and spiritual traditions, both ancient and modern, that are universally accepted and understood. Life is represented by both a vaguely formed animal-like sculpture figure and by the most universal symbol of all: blood. The outstretched hand, soaked in the blood of the primordial womb of the Earth Mother (representing the grail) signifies the community of all existence, living and dead. Death is always signified by funerals, and such ceremonies are marked by red floral tributes. Reincarnation is denoted by a lotus blossom, as this flower is a universal symbol of Eastern

traditions for regenerated life. The grail, as mentioned, is present in its most ancient form as the ultimate cup of creation: the womb. Thus, a well-endowed female figure represents the grail in the temple scenes. The physical body is represented by the barbed wire of a prison compound literally, the flesh as the mortal prison of the soul. Finally, and most strikingly of all, hope is represented by a living rabbit.3 One may recall that the rabbit is an ancient and universal symbol of fertility, and procreation the hope of all creation for the survival of the species. The rabbits death and slow decay over the course of the evening represents the very different goal of the soul of all beings: the hope of achieving nirvana. The reduction of the rabbits remains to its basic elements symbolises the great lifedeath cycle of all creation.
In this production Schlingensief presents the drama from the perspective of Parsifal: all the characters we see on the stage are actually souls of the dead at various stations within the bardo. As the work opens, Parsifals soul (seen as a body double) has already begun its spiritual journey. His bardo guide in Act I, as he will be for us, is Gurnemanz. Gurnemanz organises the maze of images that confront the hero (and us), and will introduce him to the kinship of the dead as signified by the grail knights whose costumes indicate that they are representatives of peoples and cultures from the whole of civilisation. Parsifal is in search of his soul family (his mother and father) as he attempts to integrate his former existence with theirs and find nirvana. His father, Amfortas, is an agitated soul at an early stage of its work in the bardo. His mother, Kundry, has long been dead, but her soul is also very restless as she is repeatedly reincarnated. Kundry first appears, heralded by a projected lotus blossom, in fanciful childlike dress; soon after, she reappears as a sophisticated, seductive figure. She never appears to her son in this act as a traditional maternal figure, and that is a first hint of what Parsifals principal work in the bardo will involve: his confused, ambivalent, feelings towards his mother. This is all in the text: he loves Herzeleide but precipitately leaves her and is riddled by incapacitating guilt at any mention of her. What, then, is the nature of that love? We next meet Amfortas on the way to a representation of his own funeral. Amfortas appears as Parsifal either actually knew or imagined his father (the distinction makes no difference in the bardo, nor, often, in the conscious mind; perception can be our reality). Amfortas wound is highly significant: it is death itself. He carries it over his side as a bouquet of red funeral flowers which he unsuccessfully attempts to give away to every soul he meets onstage, thus signifying that he does not accept his own mortality. His soul is not at peace and it will wander long in the bardo, for it has much work to do. His great monologue in this Grail Temple Scene now makes complete sense if it is understood figuratively and not literally: his soul yearns for acceptance of death and the eternal rest of nirvana. The rabbit makes its first appearance during this scene, first alive, and then slowly disintegrating in death as Amfortas embarks on the next part of his spiritual journey. The Grail Temple Scene is a reenactment of Amfortas funeral, with the spirit of Parsifal observing, in awe, the horrifying torment of his fathers troubled soul. The souls of the other dead present at this re-enactment (the grail

brotherhood) welcome the new soul of Parsifal by ritualistically imprinting him with their bloodied hands, dipped in the eternal womb of creation of the grail/Earth Mother figure. Amfortas soul cannot yet be thus welcomed into the brotherhood of death he resists the kinship of these other souls who already are at peace. The Act ends with Gurnemanz pointing Parsifal on his way through the prison fence (the mortal coil) and into the next station of the bardo where he will confront the central conflict in his former earthly existence.
Act II introduces Klingsor as the bardo guide (a parallel to Gurnemanz) for the realm of the senses: the chakras pertaining to primitive functioning and to sexuality. Klingsor is neither good nor evil; rather he is, like sex itself, simply an attribute of our human state. Schlingensief again takes his cue directly from Wagner: Parsifal asks Gurnemanz who is good and who is bad. Parsifals soul, throughout the drama, constantly tries to resolve the basic questions of all existence: what is right and wrong, who am I, what is the true nature of my parents, why do I exist? The bardo is not a concrete place, just as ours is not a concrete existence. Life and death, the conscious and the unconscious are part of a single great continuum that embraces us all. Onstage graffiti include the inscription Erinnerung ist Vergessen (Remembrance is forgetting) and this production drives that point home repeatedly and powerfully. Kundry awakens again from death and is reincarnated as a creature of the realm of the senses, with Klingsor as her bardo guide for this phase of her souls progress. The ensuing Flowermaidens Scene is the re-enacted funeral of Parsifal as presided over by Klingsor and is accompanied by the strewing of red flowers as the heros white-shrouded shade is led through space. His great scene with the mother-figure Kundry is marked by body doubles behind the singers re-enacting the source of the guilt and pain of both: the physical abuse of the child by the mother and the subsequent act of incest between mother and son. The great drama of the Parsifal soul family is revealed as the most primal and profoundly disturbing of all: the Oedipal conflict. The pivotal kiss sequence has Parsifal sitting up in his coffin and recoiling with horror after he kisses the seductress image of his mother; his father, Amfortas, meanwhile, comes upon the scene and observes the act in great pain. Parsifals subsequent outpouring of self-reproach is accompanied by his (unsuccessful) attempt to embrace his father and to join the hands of his parents, as if to say Forgive me, father, for my childhood sin against you, and be reconciled with your wife! Both Parsifal and Kundry try to anoint Amfortas with their outstretched, bloodied hands as a gesture of kinship and peace in death, but his soul will not yet accept the resolution. Never has this difficult scene made more sense to us, or been rendered more powerfully, on the stage. For Kundrys piercing cry of und lachte (and [I] laughed), the stage turntable, which has been in constant movement, suddenly stops and isolates her entirely; she is alone in her pain and beyond the emotional reach of either son or husband. It is only at the conclusion of the act that Klingsor and Parsifal, together, touch her with bloodied hands, halting her agitated recycling through eternity, leaving her still and peaceful as the curtain falls. Act II is the fulcrum of the drama, and it has been the station of the bardo in which all three

souls in the Parsifal soul family triad have done the most work to end their troubled search through time and space for reconciliation with each other.
In Act III, we encounter some of the most memorable images of all. Kundry is reincarnated, for the last time, as she enters this highest chakra station of the bardo (heart, mouth and brain images abound onstage). Both Gurnemanz and Klingsor serve as the bardo guides for this act, thereby symbolising that all the spheres of human expression and existence have been united and are now in harmony. Kundrys kiss of passion in the previous act is now replaced with the kiss of affection between mother and son in the Good Friday Meadow scene, and the peace which Parsifals soul experiences is shown by his simple childs play at see-saw during Gurnemanzs narrative on the regeneration of life. Amfortas is reconciled at last with wife and son as the triad, all shrouded in white, circle in unison around a maypole in the spring meadow a stroke of genius. The ritual of anointing the head and feet of Parsifal becomes the ancient purification rite of the body before burial and entry into the afterlife. Groups of soul families sit on steps at the gates of eternity and, presided over by Klingsor, ritualistically take turns anointing each other. All of humanity is consecrated; all is one in this magnificently moving scene. The final scene shows Amfortas funeral once again re-enacted as his soul makes its final attempt to complete its resolution and find nirvana. Amfortas kneeling alone onstage, lit by an eerie bluish light, in front of his own open coffin, is one of the most arresting images we have ever experienced in the theatre. At the end, the ParsifalAmfortasKundry soul family is reunited by the son and redeemer as peace is granted to all, the projected image of the rabbit corpse disintegrates completely at last, and Parsifal, alone on an empty stage, walks into the eternal white light of nirvana. It is, indeed, redemption for Parsifal, the redeemer. It is further made clear to us, the audience, that his souls journey in the bardo will also someday be our own, as the light that envelops him at the fall of the curtain seems also to reach forward and enfold us.
In keeping with the tradition of the Bayreuth Festival as workshop, Schlingensief evolved and perfected his production over the four years of its run. We did not see it in its inaugural year, but we did attend performances in the subsequent three seasons. By 2005, when we first encountered it, we understand that it had already been considerably simplified. Certainly we witnessed significant changes between 2005 and 2007.
Although the basic concept held firm over these seasons, the plethora of film clips and image projections was steadily reduced. In addition, the audience was provided with more visual cues (such as the lotus and images of the Buddha) that the drama was conceived along Eastern spiritual lines. There was also less use of actors and body doubles, and the production became less reliant on the specifics of chakra references. The concept of soul families wandering together through the bardo was also made clearer over the years. Importantly, the original idea in 2005 of

Parsifal being alone onstage at the end was reinstated in 2007. In 2006, we found the ending, in which several characters walk off into the light, less compelling. Schlingensiefs refining and sharpening of the focus between 2004 and 2007 served to make the production more powerful and more likely to be understood by any receptive, open-minded audience, even one that had very little knowledge of Eastern spiritual thought.
Thus, with the end of the 2007 season, the Christoph Schlingensief production of Parsifal passes into history and into Bayreuth legend. We would have wished it to remain on the stage far longer than four years, and we plead that any video recordings of it be made available for study by theatre professionals and for the enrichment of a larger audience. No production would be harder to capture adequately on film, but none would be more deserving. We are in Schlingensiefs debt for this Parsifal the reference production for a New Age in the staging of Wagners music dramas.
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The following is intended as an exegesis of the production as we understand it, not as a
conventional review.
2 3
Wagner News, no. 172 (Feb. 2006), 1017. Schlingensief also photographed a rabbit in Namibia. Some observers believed the animal in
question was a hare and saw it as an allusion to the iconic symbol of the German performance artist Joseph Beuys.
Gepostet unter Artikel, English. Eingetragen am 5. November 2007
PARSIFAL ESTC Projectos Leituras Lumnicas http://www.therestisnoise.com/2004/08/emparsifalem_at.html Schlingensief Parsifal at Bayreuth
"Nausea" by Alex Ross The New Yorker, Aug. 9 and 16, 2004. "A ray of light: the Grail is fully radiant. A dove floats down from the dome above. These are Richard Wagners stage directions for the maximally transcendent final moments of Parsifal, his last opera. Christoph Schlingensiefs production at the Bayreuth Festival last week gave us instead two dead rabbits, their rotting bodies intertwined, their images projected on a screen above the stage. We then saw a sped-up film of one rabbit decomposing, its body frothing as the maggots did their work. Ive seen a lot of stupid, repulsive, irritating, befuddling, and boring things on opera stages over the years, but Schlingensiefs dead-rabbit climax was something new: for the first time, I left a theatre feeling, like, ready to hurl. The trouble with this sort of provocation is that if you criticize it, even with an involuntary emetic reflex, you end up playing a role that the instigator has written for you. You are cast as the reactionary, the sentimentalist, the sort of person who requires a kitschy white dove, as if white doves and rotting rabbits were the only options. You are suspected of harboring Fascist tendencies. When Endrik Wottrich, the tenor who sang Parsifal, disavowedSchlingensiefs attempt to transplant the action to Namibia, the director accused him of having uttered racist slurs. No matter that the staging was full of hackneyed darkest Africa imagery, with several singers done up in inky blackface; the provocateur will always have the upper hand against the provoked. If my enemies shout boo at the premire, then all is in order, Schlingensief told Stern. Indeed, when the curtain fell, the audience responded with the loudest, lustiest boos Ive heard outside of Yankee Stadium. Less than a third of the audience applauded whenSchlingensief took his bow. In other words, a triumph. A curious charade played out in the press afterward: everyone denied that anything untoward had happened. The bigwigs who had walked down the red carpet at the gala Parsifal premire said nothing negative when a reporter from the Nordbayerischer Kurier canvassed their opinions. Edmund Stoiber, the Minister-President of Bavaria, claimed that the production had suited him because it presented an entirely new point of view. Jos Manuel Barroso, the President of the European Commission, found it only logical that Parsifal had been transplanted from Germany to Africa. (The opera is set in Spain, but never mind.) Who, then, had made all that noise? Perhaps ordinary opera lovers who had paid for their tickets? When I read the reviews two days later, I was amazed to discover that there hadnt been any scandal at allonly a few boos, perhaps. A new reality was agreed upon that had little to do with what had happened in the theatre.
Its all politics, of course. Because German opera houses are heavily supported by state and local governments, the audiences opinion is relatively immaterial; productions are bought and sold in a marketplace of intellectual publicity. Whenever I attend this kind of opera-esque event, I feel as though I were being called upon to judge some intricate sport I dont understand, like synchronized swimming. Still, opera it nominally remained, and, as opera, it was god-awful. Schlingensief is what the Germans call an Aktionsknstler, or action artist, meaning that his theatre pieces take the form not of conventional performances but of happenings, demonstrations, media pranks, talk shows, even B movies. He is the head of something called the Church of Fear, one of whose slogans is Dont expect too much from the end of the world! He is notorious for taunting politicians; in 1997, he was arrested for displaying signs that said, Kill Helmut Kohl. In 2002, he targeted Jrgen Mllemann, of the Free Democratic Party, who had allegedly made anti-Semitic slurs. Schlingensief staged mock neo-Nazi rallies with banners modelled on the F.D.P. colors. Kill Mllemann, he reportedly said. A year later, Mllemann committed suicide by cutting loose his parachute while skydiving. To be sure, the politician had bigger problems to deal with thanSchlingensiefs antics: he had recently been accused of alarming financial irregularities. But the coincidence was striking. The decision to unleash this scary clown on Bayreuth came as a result of ongoing debates over the future of the festival, which, since 1967, has been solely in the hands of Wolfgang Wagner, the composers eighty-four-year-old grandson. Pundits had urged Wolfgang to bring in new directors and to appoint a more daring successor. In response, he asked Lars von Trier to direct the Ring in 2006an assignment von Trier has now declinedand also hired Schlingensief, who had never directed opera before, and who once said of Wagner, I hate his music and his lyrics. Nonetheless,Schlingensief wasnt necessarily an absurd choice; after all, Wagner himself had once been a leftwing firebrand with anarchist leanings. Schlingensiefs projects in the months before the premirestaging race-car rallies with Wagner blasting from loudspeakers, for exampleled me to expect something gaudy and raucous, perhaps with a thuggish Fascist swagger. (This artist obviously gets off on striking Nazi poses, even as he condemns others for doing so.) However dubious its sources, Brechtian grandstanding can be galvanic in the right theatrical hands. But Schlingensief never got a grip on Parsifal. He started off with the adolescent conviction that the opera was all about death. He took trips to Namibia and came back laden with sub-Saharan folklore. He imagined witchdoctor scenarios in which the Holy Grail takes the form of totemic objects and creatures. Enter the rabbit: a live one is seen onstage during the Act I procession of the Grail Knights, and globes emblazoned with Joseph Beuys rabbit figures hang over the magic castle in Act II. There are dim stirrings of a good idea hereWagners drama as an earthy rite rather than an Aryan ceremony. Done far more simply, it might have attained a surreal beauty. But Schlingensiefbotched the transformation. When Kundry, in Act III, was
costumed as a big black mamma, the audience burst into giggles. Was the intrepid African explorer commenting on stereotypes or was he recycling them? Certainly, he had not de-sacralized the opera, as some critics said. He just put new mumbo-jumbo in the place of Wagners. In this respect, his version resembled the secularized Parsifal that Hitler commissioned in 1934, to the distress of many old Wagnerians. Despite jaw-dropping lapses of taste throughout, the general impression was of dull chaos. Schlingensief made heavy use of a rotating stage, which became a lazy Susan conveying assorted art-world and pop-culture artifacts, including Andy Warhol soup cans, David Lynch freaks, graffiti and placards, muscleboys, Flintstones and Lord of the Rings costumes. It was difficult to see it all amid the obscure lighting, although I wouldnt blame the lighting designer for this, since the blocking was too random for spotlights to track any one figure. The entire thing was like a nightmarish avant-garde counterpart to one of Franco Zeffirellis overstuffed Met productions, except that no one knew what they were supposed to be doing. The ineptitude of the direction was obvious in the final scene, when Amfortas had to fight his way out from under a curtain that landed on his head. On some other plane of existence, singers were singing and an orchestra was playing. The only singer who gave a memorable, fleshed-out performance was John Wegner, as Klingsor; for once, the evil magician was sung and not rasped. But Im not inclined to condemn the other singersAlexander MarcoBuhrmester, as Amfortas; Robert Holl, as Gurnemanz; Michelle De Young, as Kundry; and Kwangchul Youn, as Titurelgiven the harsh working conditions. Some kind of medal should be given to Wottrich, who dared to criticize the director and then endured his hypocritical anti-Fascist posturing. Pierre Boulez returned to Bayreuth for the first time since 1980, when he last conducted Patrice Chreaus classic production of the Ring. He led a beautifully controlled performance that managed to cut nearly an hour off the usual running time without ever sounding rushed. Particularly strong was the Act III Prelude, which pulsed weirdly, like a flickering bulb. It would have perfectly evoked the torpor overcoming Wagners knights, if there had been any knights. In another context, Boulezs interpretation might have seemed too refined and becalmed, but in conjunction with Schlingensiefs busy nullity the music was a ray in the darkness, a Grail glowing out of sight. What a change the following evening, when Christian Thielemann led a revival of Tannhuser. Maybe the Parsifal nightmare left me starved for nourishment, but this was the strongest Wagner performance Id heard in years. Philippe Arlauds production, which had its premire in 2002, is a serviceable, vibrantly colored affair, placed in a vaguely Eurasian medieval setting. It sometimes dangled, but never fell, over the edge of kitsch. The great thing about the set design was what it did for the sound: its main oval room became a huge, resonating chamber. In the Pilgrims Scene of Act III, the Bayreuth Festival Chorus entered from an unseen chasm in the back and then disappeared into an unseen chasm in the front. Wagner called his sunken orchestra pit the mystic
abyss; in this production there were three abysses, and the sound took on a hallucinatory, sculptured richness as it soared up from one pit or another. The second great thing about this Tannhuser was the lead singer, the young American tenor Stephen Gould. He has a powerful, flexible, beautiful voice, and, wonder of wonders, he is a charismatic actor. He sounded just as vivid at the end of the opera as he did at the beginning, which is a sign that he has the stamina for the biggest Wagner roles. The third great thing was Thielemann, who sounds more happily inspired every time I hear him. Shaking off Teutonic heaviness, he now favors shimmering textures, dancing rhythms, and endless singing lines. The storm of applause for the conductor, for the singers, and for the incomparable Bayreuth chorus seemed not only an affirmation of what had just been heard but a protest against the previous night. Bayreuth returned to sanity, at least for a moment. When Thielemann conducts the 2006 Ring, with Gould as Siegfried, Ill be there, even if the management decides to replace Lars von Trier with Paris Hilton. Please, Herr Wagner: this is a joke, not a suggestion.
PARSIFAL ESTC Projectos Leituras Lumnicas http://www.schlingensief.com/schlingensief_guggenheim_eng.php
GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM - BIOGRAPHY SCHLINGENSIEF

Summer 1998, Guggenheim Museum IT,S NOT GOING to win you any friends in Germany if you excitedly teil them about an adventure you had with Christoph Schlingerisief But it will get you attention. In Berlin, you might find yourself at a party in the middle of a dying conversation, and the mention of Schlingensief will jolt everyone back to life. One person has seen his latenight TV show, which was first shown an the largest private network and then rebroadcast by its competitor, a historic first, 1 believe. Someone eise once saw a Schlingensief play and is still outraged ar enthusiastic or bewildered, A third has read an interview in which Schlingensief declared he would carnpaign for the unemployed in the runaff for this year's national elections (art must get involved in life, he believes). And still another has heard that Schlingensief is breaking up with his girlfriend. Following such preliminaries usually comes a bitter argurnent an whether or not Schlingensief is any good. My friends and acquaintances know by now that I've seen a lot of Schlingensief and his workin the last two years alone there have been eight stage productions, a radio drama, a talk show, and a new movie, none ofwhich 1 skippedso everyone keeps pumping me for Schlingensief stories. Like the woman in my office who recentty barged into my room to teil me about a TV appearance by Schlingensief: He looks really nice, she said. But how is he in real life? And was it really necessary, that incident they wrote about in the papers? Nothing against art, but maybe Schlingensief is nothing but an immature jerk. Did he really have to shout, "Kill Helmut Kohl!" Must he really do such things? My response: There is na art that doesn't da what must not be done. Outside Europe: Schlingensief is not a popular cause to take up either. In November of last year. I was invited by the Goethe Institute, in Tel Aviv. to participate in a symposium "GermanIsraeli Relations and the Stage." 1 was supposed to give a talk an German theater in the 90s. Given the popular notion that theater and dramatic iiterature go hand in hand, 1 wanted to speak about a different kind of theater, one that uses literature only a5 a field of reference, seelcing its purpose in itself, in the theatrical pracess. in action, in a confrontation with the audience. Schlingensief !s a good case in point, the best we have in Germany right now. The way his theater works is clear in advance. lt only takes the apprapriate words, signs, and signals to make it happen; or the inappropriate ones. 1 showed a video clip from his play Rocky Dutschke 68 (1996), which is about the late studerit activist Rudi Dutschke. "Red Rudi." who was shot in the head as he was leaving Berlin's Student Sociaf Dernocrat Building an his bike, and never fully recovered from the injury. The action is chaotic. Actors run through the auditorium. Schlingensief is among thern; he encourages audience members to join an attempt to get away. Over and over he shouts: "Try to escape! Try to escape!" lt is undear what to escape from arid where to escape to. Onstage, an actress grabs a microphone and explains that every year she and her husband and kids travel to BergenBeisen, the fornier Nazi concentration camp, which is now a museum. They cook, the children make wreaths, and her husband reads out the nanies of all six million murdered Jews. From the auditarium, an actor then begins to read out Jewish names. The lights go dim, artificial snow begins to fall, orchestral music fills the room. More and more names are solemnly read out, some of them now recognizable as those of Gerrnan celebrities. A screen onstage suddenly begins to sho. images from Bitte melde dich (Please Get in Touch), a TV show in which ~veeping relatives send out pleas for a sign of life to missing loved ories. At the end of the broadcast, the perky hast says,1 hope you enjoyed our show a bit." 1 had barely started the video when 1 felt like calling the whole thing off. In Germany, it would have felt normal to me to present Schlingensief's depiction of the German inability to g,ieve, the dogged ambition to live u, to an inime~,5e quilt with grandiose gestures, as exemplified in the

controvers~ about Berlin's planned Holocaust Memorial, the first and already rejected proposal for which was to list the names of every Jewish Holocaust victim an a huge plaque (others believe it would be better to coristruct a less imposing but more practical structure, for example. a children's playground). But in Israel, even in a private symposium, 1 had committed a grave faux pas. One woman left the room and the director of the institute has never forgiven me. 1 wanted to confront the situation and said, 1 showed you this even though I'm not sure about my own feeiings in the matter. How da you feel about it?" Na one responded. Some Israeli participarits would only say that there were interesting topics other than the Holocaust. 1 had stepped into the Schlingensief trap." The Schlingensief trap corisists of words, which, when quoted as facts or perceived as political ' tatements outside the theater context, have na relevance. But context is literally everything in Schlingensief's work. His group of collaborators seeks to contextualize: the group is the context, and it actively connects apparently disparate things. That perception is naturally beyond the scope of news itenis. For its part, the world of the news media understands Schlingensief after its own fashion, and so it is reported that he has slandered Helmut Kohl or Princess Diana. For such perceived slanders, the police once took him away in handcuffs. Schlingensief has forced his way into the news through the stage door and leaves through the auditorium. That is confusing for many. Born in 1961, in one of the prettier corners of the industrial Ruhr Valley, Schlingensief lang concentrated an making movies. His first feature film, made in 198S, is titied Menu Total, and much of the dialogue consists of the exclarnation, "Mama!" A young boy is lying in bed screaming for his mother. But mama is away performing military exercises in a meadow with a sectlike group. People yell, fleeing through dark basements to the thunder of bomber planes and an insistently peppy, upbeat jazz score. Voices echo, tinny and distorted, as in early talkies; there are chases and orgies. It is a nightmare of grainy black and hite, reminiscent of silent niovies. A sirnilar mood prevails in 100 Jahre Adolf Hitier Die letzte Stunde im Fhererbunker(100 Years of Adolf Hitler. The Last Hours in the Fuhrers Bunker), shot in 1989: Hitler, Eva Braun, Goring, Goebbeis, and others are playing "Death in the Fuhrer's Bunker" and celebrating Christmas. Sex and vioience mingie with petty bickering and silly games: the person who catches Hitler's mustache will be charicellor. lt is pure insanity, performed by the actors in a straightforward mann er, as if their behavior was perfectly normal. These early movies already show an interior, a herrnetic logic that is relentlessly followed through. The director is well aware of the inherent contradiction. He finds Menu Total funny. But during the premiere, fights broke out in the audience, and Schlingensief's father was so horrified he cried. Schlingensief's theater has learned to adapt to such reactions. The turning point came at a performance of his second play in 1994, he told me. He was sitting in the commissary of Berlin's Volksbhne, where most of his plays are produced. Occasionally checking the proceedings on a nionitor, Schlingensief had the sinking feeling that the audience wasn't taking the play seriausly. He began to get drunk. Then, for the first tirne in his life, he stormed onto the stage shouting, "Turn on the lights! This is me! The pharmacist's son from Oberhausen!" And he began to tell the story of his mother's visit to his grandmother on her deathbed, when she asked the dying wornan whether she wanted to listen to some music and the radio coincidentally played "Grosser Gott, wir loben dich" (Dear God, we praise you). At that point. Schlingensief broke into tears and the audience fell silent. Since then, Schlingensief has always played the MC, or presenter, who quides the audience through the evening's performance. He no lotiger sends his troupe of ten to twenty actors onstage by themselves. Not Mario, who lives in a home for the disabled; not Marios parents, from the beginning a permanent protective onstage presence and now actors, too; not mumbling Adam von Peczenski, one of Schlirigensief's oldest companions, who by virtue of his governrnentissue glasses always plays Heiner Mller, a writer religiously adored by German intellectuals; not Kerstin, the difficult one, who teils and reteils the story of how the East Gerrnans forced her to have an abortion; not Werner Brecht, alias "Bertolt Brecht," the troupe's unemployed character with the unintelligible diction; not the real actors from the Volksbhne, who must struggle to keep up with the others' unforced madriess, All of thern, the steady players and the occasional quests, are patt

of the family. Each new production is also a family outing with Schlingensief, who when not yelling "mama"is performing the role of papa. But these outings are no picnic. The family's social engagement takes precedent. They always have a lot to say, and whether they are a band of religious sectarians or a circus family or a political tribe or a countercultutal cabaret or the Saivation Army is hard to pin down. Everything is constantly in flux with giant steps the Schlingensief family rushes through history and through the small stories at its margins. The audience is the troupe*s starting point and it addresses them directly and asks for their attention but eventually it zeroes in on itself. The performances rambie along roughly predetermined paths: there are lectures, educational slides on the overhead projector, films, sometimes guest appearances by a children's choir or a brass band, then private confessions, small music interludes, and so on. lt is a theater that knows and uses every conceivable didactic tool. Its goal, embarrassing as it may sound, is experience of the self, up on the stage and down in the auditorium. What happens between the actors is as important (and unpredictable) as what happens between the troupe and the audience. Schlingensief's theater goes after group experierice: it is ensemble theater and social work at the same time. The family's onstage activities seem to concern no one but itself. Though they may be undecipherabie from the outside, they have an interior logic. One of his favorite actors. the late Alfred Edel, was a man of superior intelligence. Schlingensief says. He could explain a lot of things. True, no one could follow Edel's reasoning, but in itself it was totally logica 1. There's a secret l(nowIedge that holds his ensembie together, says Schlingensief: "How absurd it is that we are all still alive." Schlingensief's troupe is caught up in a systern of nonlogic. We allo. ourselves to establish a philosophical context that we carl understand," he says. His characters are dancing on the abyss, never standing still but simufating a firm stance. They connect clich6d phrases to create statements that .ould never occur to the habitual users of tho 'e clichi5s. They escape from one thought to the next but the thoughts are already lost or in the wrong hands, so that putting thern in a paradoxical order seems the only way out. When Schlingensief irs onstage (or in the audience), he attempts, half desperately, half ecstaticaily, to build a frame around chaos. The frame consists of the coriditions of theater at large, the expectations that his name conjures, and the messages he and his troupe com m unicate. In euphoric transport, Christoph Schlingensief and his friends are trying to make connections that may be lost or may never have existed and never will exist. Faced with a thousand things that are impossible to reconcile, Schlingensief's theater has always struggled mightily: Who am 1? Where do 1 come from? Where am 1 going? With these questions, Schlingensief's theater destroys itself each time. It demolishes itself before it has even started. It demolishes itself so it can begin. Schlingensief's aesthetic has always postulated a background of shared experience. Against it unfolds a bazaar of phrases. opinions, and quotes, which he arranges, a man who grew up watching too much TV. Schlingensief rummages through the dustbin of quotations. throws characters and story together like lottery balls, and raises chaos. Time and again, someone pops up who refuses to dron in confusion, someone searching for clarity, for an order of things, someone who will feel, time after time. the futility of the effort. That is the point. There is also a wild desire to be responsible, truly and deeply responsible, hich is another contradiction that drives Schlingensief's theater to paradoxical (and productive) despair. At the bottom of its heart theater is naturally irresponsible. It assails people, offends them. shows ugly things and says nasty things. But if Schlingensief is interested in the scandals his theater provokes, it is solely for the emotional agitation, the feelings of opposition that are set free. In outrage, emotional life reasserts itself. His theater provokes private behavior by providing, for a few hours, a shared experience in an enclosed space. Like neighbors at a communal barbecue, who suddenly notice all the things that separate themand wind up throwing hamburgers at each other. It has all been done before, people say to me. 1 answer: But he knows that! So what if artists did the same kind of thing in the 60s and 70s and 20s, Schlingensief thinks. How does that affect me?

1 was too young then! 1 want to do it, too! Now! (Of course, Schlingensief's theater is adolescent and rebellious, but it makes you appreciate your own adolescence and rebeiliousness.) in his new movie Die 120 Tage von Bottrop (The 120 Days of von Bottrop, 1997), Schlingensief again tries to catch up on everything he's missed. It might be a destructive impulse, but even more it s an attempt to recapture the past: German movie history of the last thirty years in the space of ninety minutes. He asks all its heroes to join in: those from Rainer Werner Fassbinder's era and the new ones, such as Roland Emmerich, the director of Independence Day (1996). They are invited to participate in a great rebuff to German film by helping him to create chaos. Yet Schlingensief loves each and every one. The critic Robin Deije cails the movies a great prank by that student of life and film, Christoph Schlingensief, and also a great depiction of a student's prank. Art. In very bad taste. Schlingensief has almost run out of subjects. He is in a permanent hurry, he doesn't allow himself much time. He says being in a rush is a hedge against looking too clever, against the feeling of not coming to grips with a subject. As long as he can avert this. he and his friends will continue doing what they've always done: to go at everything headfirst. Their method stays the sarnerun, run, run. screaming all the way. Late breaking news! Late breaking news! Schlingensief is in the process of founding his own political party! Called "Chance 2000," he will use it to fight against Helmut Kohl in a bid to become chancellor of Germany. Schlingensief is serious, he says. It is not a question of irony but of good and evil, of truth and lies, of telling the world about the five million unemployed in presentday Germany, of giving selfconfidence to those five million (who do not yet demonstrate as do their French counterparts). VIPs are willing to give Schlingensief money for that. His first act will be a socalled Electoral Contest Circus" in Marcha real circus with animals and freaks and a big tent and Christoph Schlingensief, who, of course, is perfect for the roie. R. Koberg, translated from the German by Jrgen Riehle.
PARSIFAL ESTC Projectos Leituras Lumnicas http://prod_art_br.prosite.com/20784/302857/productions/trem-fantasma-(debra)
rem Fantasma (DE/BRA)
Trem Fantasma
Uma instalao operistica de Christoph Schlingensief
O trem do parque de diverses desliza nos trilhos e coloca o espectador em um universo multidimensional em que a saturao simblica bloqueia a razo. Renda-se. No h alternativa possvel nesse bombardeio dos sentidos que obscurece a conscincia para alcanar a camada mais funda. Arqutipos do inconsciente em conexo direta com os signos da obra o animal decapitado, a mulher martirizada, o sangue na guilhotina, o circo, a cruz, o tribunal. O palco gira e as imagens se sucedem, sobrepem-se, arrastam, hipnotizam. A msica operstica invade os ouvidos, os sentidos se fundem. Fantasmas contemporneos em caleidoscpio. Ao som de trechos de peras de Wagner, Bizet, Verdi, Schnberg, entre outros, e um pontual samba enredo, um trem fantasma de parque de diverses conduz o pblico por ambientes e palcos giratrios, desembocando em uma praa-bordel com bonecos gigantes. Participam da instalao atores, cantores e pessoas comuns. Recursos audiovisuais, incluindo filmes produzidos por Schlingensief, durante as duas semanas desta montagem. Trem fantasma uma obra indita, concebida especialmente para a Mostra SESC de Artes e realizada pelo SESC SP em parceria com o Goethe-Institut.
Christoph Schlingensief tinha 17 anos e trabalhava com cinema. Por um descuido, acabou filmando cenas em uma pelcula que j havia sido gravada. O resultado, a sobreposio de imagens, foi a epifania do artista em formao: Eu fiquei fascinado com as imagens sobrepostas, porque o mundo no claro, uma constante transformao, sobreposio. Isso uma verdade dolorosa, explica o cineasta, que est no Brasil pela quarta vez. Trem Fantasma, segundo ele, algo prximo ao cinema do futuro. Nada que se possa imaginar ou preconceber. A cada apresentao, uma experincia diferente. E por que pera? A pera uma sobreposio de imagens e personagens, e, apesar de no ter mais a fora que teve em outros tempos, ainda desperta sentimentos e sensaes, responde. Na infncia, o cineasta no queria entregar os trabalhos de escola, porque para ele nunca estavam prontos, acabados. Inquietao presente na sua obra e nos vages imaginrios do trem. Trabalho com as imagens, a transformao, a metamorfose. Quero que o trem no tenha fim, que as coisas que fao continuem se transformando, mesmo aps eu morrer, dizSchlingensief.
Sim! Reconhecemos que o velho mundo est caindo aos pedaos! Um novo mundo renascer de seus escombros, porque a elevada deusa, a Revoluo, vem depressa nas asas da tempestade! A cabea erguida, iluminada pelos raios, com uma espada na mo direita, uma tocha na esquerda, e com seu olhar que castiga. Olhar to escuro, to frio e ao mesmo tempo chama de amor mais puro, irradiando plenitude e felicidade, para aquele que ousar olhar com firmeza para dentro desse olho escuro.
Sobre a revoluo de Richard Wagner
Instalao, direo e filmes: Christoph Schlingensief
Elenco convidado: Klaus Beyer, Karin Witt, Stefan Kolosko| Elenco: Alexandra Borges, Alexandre Antunes, AlexandreNascimento, Ana Carmen Collado, Andra Rafael, Andressa Miguel, AntonioCorreia, Arnaldo Moura, Apollo Faria, Ana Claudia Faria, Beatriz Nunes, BetianeCristina, Bruna Vieira, Camila Faria, Camila Nascimento, Camila Vinhas, CintiaValria, Clara Coelho, Cleuby de Carvalho, Creusa Barbosa, Cristiane Martins,Darci Campos, Del Cestal, Eduardo Amir, Edilson Morais, Eduardo Lettiere, rikaInforsato, Fabiana Lucas, Fabrcio Pedroni, Fernando Bento, Geraldo Silva,Gilda Moraes, Graziela Campanha, Iolanda Camargo, Isa Silva, Isabel Nascimento,Isis Junqueira, Jailson Nascimento, Jairo Basilio, Joana Darc Pereira, JooLuiz Ferreira, Joo Nascimento Loduvico, Las Lia Campani, Laryssa Moraes, LeonardoCavalcanti, Lilian Castanyo, Lourdes dos Santos, Luana Csermak, Luiz Collazi,Marcello Augusto Mesquita, Mrcia Malaquias, Mrcio Yaccof, Marcos Abranches,Margarida Leite, Maria Aldeny Pinto, Maria Aparecida de Azevedo, Maria Bezerrade Morais, Maria Lucia Ferreira, Maria Rita Ferreira, Maria Rodrigues de Souza,Marina Lopes de Campos, Maxwell de Almeida, Michele Toms, Miguel Batista, NinaWiziak, Ones Antnio Cervelin, Osvaldo da Silva, Paula Francisquetti, PauloBorges, Patrick Aguiar, Paulo H. Santos, Priscila Martin, Priscila Olegrio,Reinaldo Silva, Renata Cristina, Renato do Vale, Rodrigo Sanches, RodrigoLisboa, Rosa Luna Ferreira, Silvia Rosana Pereira, Simone Luiz, SimonyRodrigues, Suhzy Costa, Tatiana Aguiar, Valria Manzalli, Verinho, VernicaGiordano, Virgnia Las de Souza, Vitor Gomes, Weverton Batista, Wilson Benati,Yoshiko Nagahasi
Cenografia: Thekla von Mlheim, Ben Neumann, Julio Cesarini | Figurino: SimoneMina, Vanessa Poitena | Vdeo: Marlia Halla | Sonoplasta: UweAltmann | Sonorizao: Renilson Celestino dos Santos | Iluminao:PauloJos Ribeiro | Co-Direo: Sophia Simitzis, LeonardSchattschneider

| Coregrafa: Adriana Almeida | Treinadordos atores: Stefan Kolosko | Maquiagem: mersonMurad, Anderson Batista | Contribuio de imagens: GeorgSoulek (fotos), Aino Laberenz (fotos), Meika Dresenkamp (vdeo e edio),Kathrin Krottenthaler (vdeo e edio)
Direo de Produo: Ricardo Muniz Fernandes, Matthias Pees | Assistentes: ClarissaMastro, Evandro Almeida, Iramaia Gongora, Julian Poerksen, Patricia Brito,Ricardo Frayha, Veridiana Fernandes | Tradutores: AnnetteRamershoven, Dieter Gern | Direo tcnica: Julio Cesarini| Cenotcnicos: Wiliam Torres, Ednomar Mendona, Cassio Luiz| Produo de figurino: Rosangela Longhi | Costureiras: Adelinada Silva Gomes, Alcina Nogueira, Silvia de Castro | Camareiras: Catherinede Lima, Inara Gomide | Projeto arquitetnico: Selma Bosqu
Realizao: SESC SP e Goethe-Institut DEZEMBRO | 2007 | unidade provisria do SESC Belenzinho

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PARSIFAL ESTC Projectos Leituras Lumnicas http://www.guardian.co.

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