San Francisco Opera Gives ‘Parsifal’ Power, Imagination

“Parsifal” is not so much an opera of ideas--although it has some--as it is an opera that generates them. Wagner’s final stage work about the dispirited knights of the Holy Grail who spend their time trying to keep away from the sexually alluring but deadly flower maidens in the castle across the way and who are in desperate need of redemption by an innocent fool is a weird collection of a megalomaniacal composer’s obsessions with religion, women, himself and his obsessive need to belong. Musically, “Parsifal” pushes boldly into the future, the opera being this heady stew of screwy, sacred pageant and visionary score that seems to get under its admirers’ skin. Early 20th century artists, and not just musicians, were entranced by it and saw in this 1882 example of late Romanticism a wonderful path to a modern new century, to liberating art from simple narrative and raising it to the power of dream. For the National Socialists, it was the most powerful statement of us and them ever created. It comes to us, today, with perhaps more baggage than any other great artwork of recent history.

The visually stunning and musically eloquent new San Francisco Opera production of “Parsifal”--which was unveiled Sunday afternoon as the centerpiece of the three-opera June extension to its season in the War Memorial Opera House (the other two are Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” and Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress”)--is a ritual solemnization of a whole airport’s worth of leftover baggage. Director Nikolaus Lehnhoff, as explained by his dutiful dramaturg in a lengthy essay in the program book, sees the need to both expunge the world of “Parsifal” from its Christian mysticism (too much of a Hitler problem if you go there) and at the same time to bring in lots of other myths of past and future.

He doesn’t accept Wagner’s notions of good and evil but sees contradictions in every character and situation, in the music, in the whole universe they inhabit (Parsifal as victor and victim, etc.). The people of the opera are all peoples, past and future (there is no present) who have ever been lost. The Knights of the Grail are ancient Chinese terra-cotta warriors and hapless World War I soldiers. Parsifal is a barbarian who becomes a samurai. Kundry, Wagner’s half Anna Magdalena and half Salome, is a giant insect who breaks out of her shell as a voluptuous larva. Flower maidens seduce with their flowing sleeves and Mouseketeer ears. The costume designer, Andrea Schmidt-Futterer, is not without an imagination.

The historic amalgam, however, speaks ultimately of postmodern apocalyptic future, a sort of “The Waste Land” meets “Star Wars,” and the extraordinary set by Raimund Bauer is Eliot’s Waste Land bending up into space. A terrifyingly alien landscape of the damned, it is dusty and strewn with rocks, boulders and debris. A giant meteor the shape of Texas revolves around the stage in the first act, and on it Parsifal, the savage outsider, rides into this Godforsaken world. The evil Klingsor’s castle (where the flower maidens reside) is a giant skeletal pelvis--rebirth imagery, which also includes much shedding of outer skins, is the production’s main metaphor for the opera’s many manifestations of transformation. In the third, redemptive act, the meteor is gone, replaced by a large black hole in the middle of the even more desolate wasteland--a railroad track (the “holy rail” it has been dubbed) emerges from it.

It takes a strong, game cast to tackle such a heavy-handed “Parsifal,” and San Francisco Opera has one. Kurt Moll is a veteran Gurnemanz, the wise old knight and the opera’s most demanding role. He is now 62 and, on the evidence of Sunday’s strong performance, a genuine wonder of the opera world. Coping with a heavy costume and a director who saw him as something of a statue who had come (but barely) to life, he nevertheless invested the role with commanding intensity. His voice is not just still strong, it is domineeringly strong and forceful, the loudest on the stage.

Catherine Malfitano, singing her first Wagnerian role, is also an exceptional theatrical presence--her squirming out of her shell was quite something. At 52, she now has a voice that has the proper heft for Wagner, and she is a convincing hysteric, which made up for some of her reduced vocal agility. But she was the powerful life force among the zombies.

Lively, too, was Christopher Ventris, a young British tenor, making his American debut. He was an unusually frisky Parsifal, his voice healthy and focused if not ideally luminous. Franz Grundheber was another particularly strong presence, an Amfortas who seemed to personify the whole concept of unbearable suffering. Tom Fox was Klingsor, a magician here more wily than evil. Reinhard Hagan crawled up from a hole in the stage to utter the deathly sounds of the ancient Titurel.

Donald Runnicles conducted the performance with somber sweep. It was an often colorless performance that strained the orchestra and seemed to emphasize the desolate nature of the production yet still felt the need to wring good old-fashioned romantic emotion from the score. I wonder if a faster, more modern approach might not have worked better. Too reverent musically, Runnicles also followed Wagner’s instructions to keep the women and children choruses offstage; they were practically inaudible. This “Parsifal” is a theatrically provocative fusion of time and space; the next step would be the fusion of sight and sound, which was only partially attempted. Still, San Francisco has a “Parsifal” production, which it is sharing with English National Opera and Chicago Lyric Opera, that offers something to talk about.

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* “Parsifal” continues through July 2, $22-$145, War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco (415) 861-7508.