SAN FRANCISCO – San Francisco Opera has a long, prolific, often distinguished history with Richard Wagner’s operas, yet one of the mature canon of ten — his final work, Parsifal — has been underrepresented. It had to wait until 1950 for its first complete SFO staging, and after just six productions over a span of 50 years, it hadn’t been performed here since 2000. Maybe it’s better doling out productions of this opera sparingly so that each performance becomes a special event the way, say, Beethoven’s Ninth and Mahler’s Second Symphonies were before performances of them saturated our concert hall schedules.
In any case, in its new Matthew Ozawa-directed production, SFO seemed to go out of its way to make this Parsifal something to remember. The superbly prepared 77-piece orchestra stuffed the large War Memorial Opera House pit. A hundred performers, including the 72-member chorus and nine dancers, occupied the stage. They got top-flight singers with not a weak link in the cast. The lighting was enlightening to the storyline, the costuming was imaginative, and in the case of the Flower Maidens scene in Act II, wildly colorful. And lo and behold, the total effect was greater than the sum of its considerable parts. It was a glorious performance on Oct. 25 — for me, a deeply moving one that struck at the heart of what can be an ecstatically radiant score under the right conditions.
As per his intentions, Ozawa’s staging ideas were of an ecumenical nature, a blend of several colliding performing traditions, whether from East or West, without one dominating the other. Nor were there any regie theatre distractions that shoehorned the opera into a specific period. A lot of the stage action was executed in slow motion à la Japanese Noh classical dance theatre, which is well attuned to the meditative pacing of the music. (The late Robert Wilson’s famous production, as seen at LA Opera in 2005, was even more entrenched in that ethos.) The overtly Christian elements were toned down; Parsifal didn’t make the sign of the cross after catching Klingsor’s spear, here delivered to him physically instead of him plucking it out of thin air.
Parsifal’s absent mother, mentioned in the libretto but never seen, actually appeared as a young dancer (Charmaine Butcher), expressively miming the narrative as it goes. Robert Innes Hopkins’ Act I set was a simulated forest with stylized branches hovering over the stage, gracefully moving about in the Transformation scene to reveal a multi-stepped platform atop which rests the Holy Grail. Cascades of dry ice fog raced down the curtains on the left and right in Act II like water slides at a theme park. By Act III, it was as if the trees were stripped bare of leaves and branches, leaving behind metallic octagonal columns (perhaps making a statement about man-made climate change?).
Now, let’s get to an always-intriguing element in any work of extravagant dimensions — the timings. Parsifal is one of the lengthiest operas in the repertoire, rivaled mainly by two other Wagner Gesamtkunstwerken: Die Meistersinger and Götterdämmerung. This performance was quite fast, about 228 minutes (excluding intermissions), which is in line with a recently unearthed, newly released 1938 broadcast at the Metropolitan Opera (with Kirsten Flagstad and Lauritz Melchior, no less), and approaches Pierre Boulez’s swift Bayreuth performances of the 1960s. On the extreme other end, to give you an idea of the range of speeds, Reginald Goodall’s glacial EMI/HMV (now Warner Classics) account from 1984 clocks in at a whopping 286 minutes.
With no need to slow down in order to take in the view, SFO music director Eun Sun Kim was able to produce a ravishing Act I Prelude, revealing a golden sonority from the opening notes, with a deep bass end and high-quality brass playing. At Kim’s tempi, Act II felt a bit like the scherzo in a three-movement symphony, with the Flower Maidens and initial Kundry scenes forming a kind of double Trio within that structure. And Act III built steadily to a devastatingly beautiful statement of the Good Friday music and exquisite treatment of the orchestral interlude leading to the final scene. This was the most impressive showing of what Kim is capable of that I’ve experienced yet — and we’re told that a San Francisco Ring cycle under her direction is on the drawing boards (dates as yet undetermined).
In the title role was a familiar Wagnerian face in San Francisco, Brandon Jovanovich. From his youthful Siegmund in the SFO’s 2011 Die Walküre that ripened in the production’s 2018 revival, Jovanovich has become a mature Heldentenor. He telegraphed the evolution of Parsifal at the end of Act I; the supposedly naïve, uncomprehending fool clearly experiences some form of painful, unconscious preliminary awareness of Amfortas’ struggles and what the Holy Grail ceremony means.
The high priest Gurnemanz is a killer of a role. For about three-quarters of an hour in Act I, it is for all intents and purposes a continuous solo vocal recital with nowhere to hide. The veteran South Korean bass Kwangchul Youn delivered a strong showing from his first entrance onward. He conveyed a convincing amount of dignity and poise, the voice occasionally exhibiting a slight wobble, though well within the context of his aged character.
Swiss mezzo-soprano Tanja Ariane Baumgartner seemed to age in reverse as Kundry — an old woman with a towering mess of white hair in Act I, giving way to a younger, dark-haired, purely seductive, powerful-voiced Kundry in Act II and an even younger-looking, chaste penitent in Act III. Curiously, in this staging, the redeemed Kundry doesn’t fall lifeless at the opera’s close; she is still standing side-by-side with the triumphant Parsifal. Baritone Brian Mulligan’s wounded Amfortas doesn’t lie on a gurney; he is almost always standing upright, albeit in great pain, which his somewhat reedy timbre conveyed convincingly in Act I. We did not see his wound until toward the close of Act III, an illuminated red spot within his robe.
Falk Struckmann’s Klingsor appeared to be wearing a dress — a cross-dressing, renegade former knight? — but that didn’t lessen the impact of his strong, sharply pointed bass-baritone timbre. The voice of the gravely ill Titurel (bass-baritone David Soar) emerged from somewhere in the depths, drenched in reverberation. The San Francisco Opera Chorus sang with fervor and luster, and the monumental bell tolls during the Grail scenes were played on a sampler keyboard, which worked well enough.
The total effect was that of taking Parsifal out of a sealed, sectarian environment in order to make the goals of enlightenment and peace more accessible to all. And that made Wagner’s miraculous score all the more moving and the whole event more special.
Parsifal runs at San Francisco Opera through Nov. 13. For tickets and information, go here.
