Seeking the Holy Grail of Meaning

The Holy Grail--so miraculously made musical in Wagner’s last opera, “Parsifal”--can serve as a symbol of truth and beauty for all of us; and that is something we ever more urgently need as we approach the millennium.

At least that’s the message in the script that Placido Domingo reads, with beguiling sincerity, at the end of Tony Palmer’s “Parsifal: The Search for the Grail,” tonight at 8 on KCET. And the famous tenor probably means it, given his powerfully convincing singing--some of his finest in years--of the title role in the excerpts contained in this very curious documentary.

But I imagine that Domingo would want to strangle Palmer after seeing how the filmmaker has set him up here. Somehow, stars never learn. This is, after all, the same British filmmaker who has cruelly dug into the dysfunctional lives of Maria Callas and Yehudi Menuhin; who made an exploitative film on Polish composer Henryk Gorecki (using the luminous Third Symphony as soundtrack for Nazi concentration camp film clips); who cast a bloated Richard Burton as Wagner in a ludicrous (but now camp) eight-hour docudrama about the composer.

Domingo’s Holy Grail statement comes not long after biblical scholar Karen Armstrong has explained to us that the Grail, the cup from which Jesus drank at the Last Supper, has little significance in the Bible. Its iconography began a millennium after Christ’s death with the Arthurian legends. By making the Grail the source of redemption, as Wagner does, Armstrong insists that it becomes a mere idol and loses any spiritual meaning. And that allows appalling things to be done in its name.

Robert Gutman, the Wagner biographer, goes further. “Parsifal” has nothing to do with Christianity, he claims. Racial purity is its subject matter, and how the Aryan race can be restored. In short, “Parsifal” was Hitler’s blueprint.

Not everyone agrees, of course. There is Wolfgang Wagner’s defense of his grandfather. The 79-year-old head of the Bayreuth Festival and patriarch of his own dysfunctional brood (his defiant son, Gottfried, has just written a book, “Twilight of the Wagners,” which heaps scorn upon the whole clan) turns steely in his response to talk of Wagnerian racism. “ ‘Parsifal’ has no definite message,” he says backstage at the Bayreuth theater.

But Palmer offers his own evidence. He shows how well the music suits some Leni Riefenstahl footage of Nazi youth. Then again, he also shows how well it suits just about everything from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” to the “Indiana Jones” movies (the segue from Wagner to John Williams is utterly bizarre) to Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal.”

Poor Domingo. It is his job to tell the story of Wagner’s opera through all these interruptions.

Underpinning the film is a production of “Parsifal” in which he starred, by the Kirov Opera in St. Petersburg, conducted by Valery Gergiev. The music in the film comes from that production and a performance by the same forces in Ravello, Italy.

Besides excerpts from the Kirov staging (which, fascinatingly, uses Russian religious icons in its sets), Palmer adds some especially hokey dramatic reenactments on location. Oh, yes, there are also bits and pieces of the opening of “The Valkyrie,” clips of Burton as Wagner, a murderous mob setting a town afire, army tanks, the pope in processional.

Though in many ways, Palmer’s 90-minute effort may be a mess of high and low, the underpinning “Parsifal” is exceptional, however little we get to savor it. Gergiev’s conducting is riveting in its dramatic intensity, ravishing beauty and transcendent religiosity. Along with Domingo’s stunning surety in the title role, Violeta Urmana is the compelling Kundry, Matti Salminen the fierce Klingsor. If Domingo wants to make a statement when he takes over the artistic direction of L.A. Opera in 2000, he couldn’t make a more effective one than to use all of his connections to bring us this opera, production, cast and conductor.

In the meantime, once you’ve seen Palmer’s treatment of Wagner’s last opera, you might try Hans-Jurgen Syberberg’s extraordinary 1982 film of the opera, just released on DVD by Image Entertainment. Based on a fine recorded performance conducted by Armin Jordan (Parsifal is sung by Rainer Goldberg, Kundry by Yvonne Minton, Gunemanz by Robert Lloyd), Syberberg uses actors and avant-garde film and theatrical techniques to create a controversial, visually stunning, postmodern montage enacted around Wagner’s death mask.

As pretentious and humorless as the German filmmaker (of “Our Hitler” fame) can be, he nonetheless does a remarkably vivid job of combining all the troubling and inspiring elements that this opera brings out.

I still don’t understand Parsifal’s sex change at the climax of his duet with Kundry, but Syberberg is at least genuinely provocative, not just Palmer-silly.

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* “Parsifal: The Search for the Grail,” tonight at 8 on KCET.