We’re off on the wrong foot with the first statement of the Prelude, for no sooner is the ear seeking out the music than the eye is caught by rows of white blobs beaming at us from the gloom behind a scrim. In a moment we discern (for our attention has shifted there; the eye has asserted its dominance and the music is now underscoring) that these are faces, and soon that there is one erect figure in their midst, and then that there is going to be movement, some kind of pantomimic enactment more or less synched to the music. I can’t tell you about the enactment because, since this is great music that asks to be communed with and which, if taken in, would prepare me for everything that is about to transpire as well as conveying the more general message that close listening—attention that leads with the ear—is advised, I have shut my eyes or inspected the ceiling on both of my times through the presentation. The quality of the enactment, or its presumed appropriateness, is not at issue. Nothing is  what is appropriate, and were this the most stunningly beautiful of all possible pantomimic enactments of the Parsifal Prelude, I would only resent it all the more.

As the Prelude melts into the trombone reveille and the scrim lifts, we get our first chance to size up the Kingdom of the Grail and its inhabitants. These last are surprisingly numerous, for in addition to the usual cohort (Gurnemanz, a couple of knights, a couple of esquires), it turns out that the blobs are the entire Grail brotherhood. Dressed as if to the uniform code of a  gathering of businessmen on cultish retreat (white shirts, dark pants), they now deploy upstage left, where they form a circle on chairs that have been set for them. They will remain there throughout Act 1, bent forward in prayerful attitude, shifting from time to time into little changes of pose. To the right of center, a wide crack extends down from the upstage rim of the raked deck almost to the apron, where it takes a sharp turn and runs off to the right. At times it’s a rivulet, at others just a crack, and at one point it’s a deep, glowing cleft down which Parsifal peers after his dismissal from the temple. More importantly, it sections off the right third or so of the stage, and in that third, off to the back, is a cluster of women. They are clothed in black, as if in nunnish order, or perhaps in mourning, or in the concealment required of women in certain societies. They never cross into the larger male territory; the men never invade theirs. The set’s overall aspect is twilit and dun. Projections form its background. They are continuous, sagaciously programmed, and very influential atmospherically. They show, among other things, blowing cloudscapes at daybreak or sunset, abstractions that might be great folds of fabric or sand dunes, and cosmic spheres reminiscent of the colliding worlds of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, which had their own Wagnerian soundtrack. I’m sure that beyond their purely illustrative function they have thematic connections to the work (the spheres, for instance, to Gurnemanz’s Schopenhauerian spacetime references), but it would take another time through the production, with attention exclusively on them, to identify them.