The other new principal was the tenor Klaus Florian Vogt, who has been assuming several of the Jugendlich Heldentenor parts in all the big places, and came to the Met last season as Florestan (I did not see it). He’s a good singer, musical, with some warmth in his tone. He did not struggle unduly vocally, and was a perfectly plausible presence in the context of this production. Nor is the size of the voice small for the sort of voice it is: he would fill out Bach’s Evangelist very nicely in any appropriate venue. But there’s no metal anywhere in the sound. His attack is habitually gentle, and he naturally gravitates to effects he knows how to make, but which are frequently the reverse of those called for, e.g., lovely little morendos at a place like “Erlöse! rette mich,” etc. The voice contains neither agony nor redemptive assertion, so the journey from Guileless Fool to Grail King is mostly a detour.

I had received several early warnings about the Gurnemanz of René Pape, owner of the most beautiful voice, other than Cesare Siepi’s, I’ve heard live in this role. Beautiful, but never my  favorite kind of Gurnemanz voice, which would be that of Alexander Kipnis or Ludwig Weber—deeper basses of greater presence in the lower octave for the long stretches of conversational narrative, yet in full command of a proclamatory top for the great climactic moments and the long line needed for the Good Friday sequence. Nor has Pape ever been an artist who seeks out interpretive profundities, like the late-season Hans Hotter, or who hits on a motivational key to keeping the Act 1 narratives urgent, like John Tomlinson.

But these have all been audio or video experiences for me, and in the theatre I have in the past been very grateful for the easy lyricism, the outpouring of warm, ample tone that Pape has offered in this and other roles. He has always had a frustrating tendency to coast, to undersing, as if complacent about the effect he was making, and in 2013 this was already true of his Gurnemanz. But now I was hearing of worse than that: “He must be sick—he sounded like he was marking;” “I can’t tell what he’s doing, he sounds like he’s just saving;” or, from a first-time Parsifaler with operagoing experience, “Get someone else or give that man a mike!” These reports were accurate, and when this vocal withdrawal is matched by only token indications of interest in the proceedings, Act 1 is left for dead. It’s puzzling. Apart from a flicker of disruption on one upper note on an open vowel, I heard nothing wrong with the voice. So, while one can’t rule out some undisclosed medical condition, this has very much the sound and look of a man in retreat from performance obligations.

By way of contrast, Peter Mattei gives all he has, and perhaps a bit more, as Amfortas. This, too, is the lightest voice I’ve ever encountered in the role. It has a pleasing, typically Scandinavian timbre reminiscent of Jorma Hynninen’s, though not of that refulgence. His physical performance, in the framework of an effective staging of his scenes, is an extraordinary embodiment of sustained suffering, and when the voice goes beyond its natural containment zone (on this occasion, the excursion of the vibrato blurred pitch and line in a few midvoice phrases), it’s the result of overzealousness, and one is in no mood to complain. Still: this is not a high baritone part, and from the standpoint of its archetypal vocal set, its primitive satisfaction potential, is better served by an instrument with a lower center of gravity. And if you ask me who that might be, I can only shrug. The Londons and Schöfflers are long gone, not to mention the Schorrs, the Whitehills, the Van Rooys. That leaves us with a single principal, Evgeny Nikitin as Klingsor, whose instrument had the firmness, clarity, and weight appropriate for his music. Even the alto voice from above at the end of the first Grail Temple scene wasn’t an alto, which it has to be: only that deep, settled sound can bring the annunciatory promise of the just-ejected, still-awaited Pure Fool. As with the offstage women’s voices and, most ruinously, the pleas of Titurel, this magical moment was further compromised by low-quality, poorly gauged amplification. If it’s so difficult (really?) to find an acoustically workable positioning for these important effects, at least get the tech up to grade.