Parsifal, like Lohengrin, also has a real and particular place—in Parsifal’s case, the Northern Pyrenees. To the immediate North is the Languedoc, and beyond, the rest of Christianizing Western Europe. Montsalvat, the Grail Castle, faces that way. To the South and East lie Moorish Spain, the Holy Land, and Arabia. Klingsor’s tower, on the other side of Montsalvat’s mountain, faces that way. His Magic Garden is one of blooming Orientalist exotica/erotica, and contrasts with the deep forest and holy lake of the Grail dominion, the flowering meadow of the Good Friday Spell. This contrast touches on the production’s third departure, from Nature. Composing near the end of a lifetime of industrialization’s despoiling of Nature and science’s fragmentation of it, and working on what he surely knew was his last artistic testament, Wagner wrote into his music not merely Nature’s beauties and temptations, but his belief in the necessity of seeing Nature as an embracing wholeness, and of recognizing humankind’s mortal place in it. His music could not possibly have arisen from among the businessmen stage left, or the women stage right, or from anywhere in our urbanized, unmiraculous culture. Or from a pool of blood. But I’m sure you’ve heard about the blood, through which everyone sloshes for the duration of Act 2.

Now, none of these departures will matter to anyone who subscribes to the auteuristic theory of opera production. To them, Wagner’s music is the only aspect of his work that need be reproduced more or less according to his specifications. Further, the true postmodernists among them endorse the separation of a work’s elements, believing that each functions independently of the others, on its own interpretive plane. That—and this should be self-evident—is in direct contradiction not only of Wagner’s concept of a Gesamtkunstwerk, but of the more general modern notion of an integrated production, in which the elements agree with and reinforce one another, and also accord with what is in the text. In that view, the creative aspect of interpretation lies not with re-conceptualization, but with answering the myriad interpretive questions—musical, verbal, scenic—left unanswered by even the most highly elaborated text. So for every inquiring devotee, the crucial question is: “Do I  believe the director/designer is not merely an interpreter, but truly a co-author, of equal creative standing with the operawright?” If the answer is “Yes, I do,” then there are no grounds in principle for rejecting any departures like those of this Parsifal, or of the many far more egregious productions of the Regietheater movement. If the answer is “No,” such departures are usurpations of the creator’s prerogatives, distortions that threaten the integrity of the artform. Just now, the “Yeses” are winning, and that, in my opinion, is a sure mark of decadence.

In my title for this post I mention an afterlife. The reference is not, as one might naturally assume with this opera, to any version of immortality. It’s to the post-performance lingering on, the half-life imprint of the work. And it seems odd that following a performance that touched me less deeply than any I can recall save one (the Syberberg film—but even there, I guess rage is evidence of being touched), the motifs, harmonies, and colors of Parsifal‘s soundworld have pursued me with unusual insistence. Perhaps this reflects in part an effort to retrieve this work’s peculiar depth of experience from the emptiness of the recent encounter, as with another friend, an experienced and knowledgeable coach, who also found N-S’s reading shallow. He went home after the performance and put on the 1928 Karl Muck/Bayreuth recording of the Prelude. “After just two phrases, you’re in another world,” he said. Exactly.