OPERA REVIEW : A Visionary ‘Parsifal’ Debuts

Robert Wilson may have lost “the CIVIL warS”--his global, six-opera cycle that was to have climaxed the Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival in 1984, had the money for it been raised--but his theatrical vision has hardly been diminished.

After having spent the past seven years creating new opera and theater throughout Europe, staging classics ranging from “King Lear” in Frankfurt to Richard Strauss’ “Salome” at La Scala, or redefining music theater in his off-beat collaboration with Tom Waits and William Burroughs in “The Black Rider,” Wilson has begun a new operatic project nearly as ambitious as “the CIVIL warS.”

Beginning with a new production of “Parsifal,” which opened at the Hamburg State Opera on Sunday night, Wilson will, over the next year, create both a Wagner cycle (“Lohengrin” next in Zurich, followed by “Tristan und Isolde” in Paris) and a Mozart cycle (“Die Zauberflote” in Paris, “Don Giovanni” in Berlin and “Idomeneo” in Prague), all produced in traditional opera houses and with conventional opera singers.

Thus far, only “Parsifal,” co-produced with the Houston Grand Opera, which will mount it in February, is slated for the United States.

Wilson is not, of course, alone in his deconstruction of classic opera. But he stands apart from all other innovative directors, since they suggest some sort of psychological or philosophical or political interpretive agenda, and he does not. Wilson, instead, has taken Wagner’s last opera, with all its mystical Christian symbolism, and laid it bare in a production shocking in the severity of its minimalism.

So uncompromising, in fact, is Wilson’s “Parsifal”--greeted by a battle of outraged booing and militant bravoing, all under the glare of post-performance television crews--that it has created controversy even in this hard-boiled industrial city, where bold theater is commonplace and where families stroll happily along the Reeperbahn oblivious to sex-shop mannequins irreverently decked out in Easter finery.

Wilson’s is a “Parsifal” in which the singers--costumed by Frida Parmeggiani like models in an avant-garde Parisian fashion show--strike stylized poses, articulate ineffable hand gestures, seldom relate to each other and move very, very slowly.

His is a “Parsifal” enacted on a nearly barren stage with only a few arrestingly designed props, each abstracted into almost pure geometry, that vaguely allude to a scenic setting. The most stunning of these is a radiantly glowing saucer, shaped like a huge bagel chip, that descends as a halo for the crystalline Grail. So sparse was the stage picture that Wilson even kept the chorus offstage in Act I, lest it spoil the purity of visual image.

The real essence of this “Parsifal,” however, is in Wilson’s inspired lighting design, realized with a mesmerizing brilliance by Jennifer Tipton.

Beginning with a hallucinatory sunrise, slow as real time, the lighting never once loses its spellbinding magic over five hours. In an atmosphere of such visual perfection, Wilson enacts “Parsifal” mainly in a drama of color and luminosity, which serves both to bring the music psychedelically close and simultaneously distance the drama vastly.

That approach, of course, not only profoundly affects how one receives “Parsifal,” but surely disorients seasoned Wagnerian singers. Kurt Moll, a magnificently sonorous Gurnemanz, managed fairly well the oracular presence that Wilson asked of him. Dunja Vejzovic, a mysterious, wind-swept Kundry, also responded convincingly to the director’s slow-motion movements.

But Siegfried Jerusalem, more of a stick-like Parsifal than probably he was intended to be, seemed almost strangled physically and vocally by the production, his voice losing strength with each act. And Franz Grundheber (Amfortas), Hartmut Welker (Klingsor) and Carl Schultz (Titurel) all looked and sounded as if they wanted to be nowhere near this production.

Then there was the letdown of the orchestra’s playing, which was dominated by its nasty brass and wind sections. Gerd Albrecht’s conducting focused on (but, unlike Wilson, did not illuminate) detail, thus offering little from the pit that could equal the sheer, wondrous religiosity of the stage images. It is an otherworldly vision, however, one that haunts the retina long after the stage goes dark.

AVANT-GARDE OPERA

* Avant-garde directors continue to invade every aspect of European operatic life. Concurrent with Wilson’s “Parsifal,” for instance, is an Concurrent with Wilson’s “Parsifal,” for instance, is an Antwerp production of Wagner’s opera set in wartime Britain in a bombed-out cathedral, Parsifal being a German soldier who kills a child dressed as a ballerina. In Bielefeld, Germany, a radical “Lohengrin” staged by the young British director John Dew features Wagner himself as the knight of the Grail, while Elsa is portrayed as Ludwig II. Meanwhile, Netherlands Opera is offering the gritty surrealism of Achim Freyer’s wacky, painterly production of Gluck’s “Iphigenie en Tauride,” in which Salvador Dali seems to meet Joseph Beuys.