Let us take a moment to notice what’s been established, and thereby also notice what’s missing from the creator’s vision. Three major departures are evident at first glance. The first of these in thematic importance is the presence of women. They are included in order to be excluded. Having no part in the action, they huddle upstage, in constant, silent rebuke. In their one moment of disturbance, Kundry bursts from among them, as from a group parturition. But even she, Messenger of the Grail bearing Arabian balsam for Amfortas’ wound, dares not cross the boundary. (Herlitzius played this keeping-in-her-place limitation well.) This is a fundamental distortion, a contradiction of the work’s given circumstances.

A second departure is the pandating and displacement of the action. The pandating is, as usual, done mostly with costume, which is contemporary but generic enough to cover us for at least the seventy-five years just past and, I suspect, the seventy-five now to come. The displacement is largely in the set and the projections. In Acts 1 and 3, there will be no change of scene from glade or meadow to temple, and the projections will only make us wonder where we are. These are intentional erasures, a de-rooting of the work’s time-and place orientation. They lead directly to the third departure, which is from the world of Nature, the unspoiled, verdant one that is so memorably extolled by Gurnemanz and of which Parsifal, like Siegfried (another perfect fool) is at the outset a native inhabitant, a specimen of its fauna.

Some brief notes are in order regarding these conceptual interventions. The introduction of the women is a cheap exploitation of current feminist sentiments. Once Kundry has at last stepped over the line of gender separation the director has drawn, the women may apply for membership in the chivalric order of guardianship and sally forth to fight the Saracen or perform bold deeds on behalf of oh, right, women, for instance Elsa of Brabant. Kundry herself takes the Grail from its shrine and holds it aloft before handing it over to Parsifal—a real glass-ceiling-breaker there—before dying. As the curtain starts to descend on the final tableau, the women, now rid of their cover-ups, swarm into the male domain (this would be a trifle too shocking if there were a physical sanctuary, and this is a typical modern reason for turning a place into a space). In a move I hadn’t parsed on first viewing because it just sneaks in at the last second, one rather predatory-looking female heads straight for Parsifal. Lohengrin’s Mom-to-be? This thread lays a twisted, crumpled film over the whole work, another querulous message from inside the relevance bubble.

The pandating detaches the story from its early-Medieval, Legendary Times source, the deep background of myth from which Wagner’s fantasy grew. It is meant to persuade us that the myth is timeless, and lives yet amid the businessmen hunched on their chairs in a gloomy space. But the timeless parts of the myth would be those that survive the trip from  Legendary Times to ours, that remain true despite the great difference between those worlds, between then and now. If we don’t see that difference before us, “timeless” only means “now,” or “any old time.” Wagner had in mind the borderland between legend and history. The tale is medieval, not Biblical, in origin, and the opera is placed in the era when the poets invented it. If we wish to be literal about it, we can pretend Parsifal is Lohengrin‘s prequel and count back from the time of Henry the Fowler (876-936), when Parsifal’s son Lohengrin descends from the Mount to banish Ortrud’s pagan magic and restore the proper patrilineal Christian line of descent, to this older-gen one, when Parsifal stumbles in from the forest to banish Klingsor’s pagan magic and ensure the knightly Christian brotherhood’s continuance. But of course with the Grail back on its proper shelf, there is no “generation” in our mortal sense. So we’re in the borderland, though one with a distinct historical frame.