Karin Bergs
Parsifal was tough: six hours with two breaks of 40 minutes each – in great weather you could at least take a deep breath outside in between.
You have to like Wagner – I’m clearly too stupid for that. The opera is in German, the singers also sang to some extent in German, but since almost all of them come from other language countries, the pronunciation wasn’t always a pleasure. One singer didn’t say “I” but consistently sang “ish”.
Positive things about the production
Absolutely remarkable: NO weapons were aimed at the audience, there were no weapons at all. Just the spear around which the story revolves. Whatever you imagine a ‘spear’ to be, this ‘spear’ was a thin metal plug.
Stage design
It was morbid and predominantly gray: white – light gray – silver gray – medium gray – dark gray – anthracite and black. There were transparent curtains with broken gray bodies that were also upside down. Behind me a woman said: “Depressing stage setting”. The forest consisted of trees that looked like stripped fir trees with white stuff hanging from them. Since there was a white skeleton in the foreground, in my opinion a dinosaur skeleton, the hangings on the trees also looked like white bones, at least in the lighting of the first act. In the third act, the trees were hanging from the ceiling and were therefore upside down. But the lighting was different there and they gave more of the impression of stripped fir trees with tinsel hanging on them – with the ‘tinsel’ hanging upwards. At some point the trees were lit purple, why? I didn’t understand.
Plot
As far as the plot goes – no chance. The texts on the display didn’t really help because they sometimes consisted of cryptic sentence fragments that would be difficult to understand even for native speakers. They were words I had never heard before. Conclusion: Nothing understood.
Singers and choirs
The men’s choir was idiosyncratic: around 30-40 men in long coats who looked extremely beefy. When they took off their coats, ‘naked people’ appeared underneath. The men wore baggy, wrinkled bodysuits in skin color with bulging bellies (=> jowls), round buttocks and, for men, breasts that were too large. Some of the men’s breasts were so big, some women dream of having that much breasts. The penises, on the other hand, were tiny. The baggy bodies made it all look like fat cellulite. In the second act the women’s choir also appeared, also ‘naked’. The only difference between the women and the men was their bright red nipples, which were exactly the same color as the lipstick. The women’s hairstyles were reminiscent of shower hairstyles, with their hair tied back from their faces with a headband (at least I wear my hair in the shower with this style!).
In the third act, some seats around me remained empty. Obviously not everyone was in the mood for so much Wagner.
