The Globalization of Parsifal
Houston Grand Opera’s Christian-Lite Rendition of Wagner’s Opera
John Caird directed HGO’s now-playing Parsifal into as bizarre and bewildering a theatrical performance as I’ve ever witnessed. I was unable to match what I was hearing to the direction I saw unfold on stage.
THE MUSIC
The rich, even chocolate-y, warrior bass-baritone of Kwangchul Youn as Gurnemanz, a kind of pious, devotional, older retainer’s voice, with a strength of character at its core, convinced me immediately he was the character he pretended to be. Mr. Youn’s every movement was intended. One could see the through line of his characterization in every thought and action from his entrance at the top of Act 1 to his final curtain, front- and center-stage, kneeling head-bow to the dead Titurel – a gesture of such piteous grandeur that I caught a sob within my breast. Mr. Youn’s voice was as fresh at the close as at the open, even after singing for two-thirds of this five hour production.
Elena Pankratova as Kundry was fearless, taking in her US debut all the choices in voice an extreme skier might on an alpine slope, and always dead center in her pitches. With one’s eyes closed, the music, immaculately played under Eun Sum Kim’s leadership, was resplendent.
THE STAGING
With his stage direction, John Caird has rewritten Parsifal, denuding it of its Christian message, weakening its dramatic power, while overlaying it with an irrelevant Asiatic garb. “Asiatic” in the sense that 19th century Englishmen who read Edwin Arnold’s, The Light of Asia, would have used the term to synthesize the hundreds of cultures, languages, religious tenets, cults and sects, skin colors, traditions and mores into a single representative and ultimately false confusion of type. John Caird has created the globalized version of Parsifal.
One might expect, in a production that is faithful to its opera as written, the core ideas of which are Christian -- sin, redemption and salvation – that the cross would show up somewhere on stage.
Rather, an enormous golden hand – ten times the size of any actor -- lords over the set. To one such as myself who has read deeply over five decades in Buddhistic thought and tradition, the sudden appearance of this image in Act I bewildered me.
Why were Teutonic Knights dressed up as Chinese warlords of the 1920s?
Why did they hail the golden hand with a Heil, Hitler salute (oh yes they did!)?
Why was Klingsor’s face made up to resemble a mask of the Peking Opera ( 平劇）and his costume a brocaded kosode in Noh theater?
Why did Parsifal wear a warrior’s helmet after the fashion of early samurai?
Why was Titurel’s corpse bedecked with the famed Han Dynasty jade burial suit?
THE DIRECTOR EXPLAINS
20 years before Parsifal, Wagner may have been inspired to draft a fragment of a sketch of an uncompleted opera, Die Sieger, after reading a book on Buddhism written by a French translator of Sanskrit writings.
Interviewer: Do you think the Buddhist element at all important?
John Caird: It’s part of the central theme – Buddhist philosophy overlapping with Christian faith. And, of course, the two have a great deal in common. The central event of Christianity, the crucifixion, tells of the death of a man who has the wisdom and compassion to understand that he is laying down his life for his fellow man.”
[Source: Houston Grand Opera, Opera Cues magazine, Vol. 64, No. 2, Winter 2024]
CHRISTIANITY AND BUDDHISM EQUALIZED
“Christ” is nowhere printed in the libretto of Parsifal, which is nonetheless rife with Christian concepts. When in Act 3, John Caird has his knights in Chinese warlord garb take the wine and wafer from the Holy Grail in front of the Buddha’s outstretched hand center-stage, he defenstrates Salvation through the Christ and mocks Buddhist teachings. Buddhism and Christianity have nothing in common. Sin, redemption and salvation do not play a role at all in Buddhism.
Whereas the goal of the Christian faith is everlasting life in God’s heavenly kingdom through the Christ, the goal of Buddhist practice is the extinguishment of desire at the core of every living being in the present world, the dousing of the candle flame of individual existence, so as to bring about the cessation of the transmigration of souls from life to life, from this broken world to the next.
Parsifal has nothing whatever to do with Buddhism or with any imagined Asiatic aesthetic or religious tradition. The Christian theology John Caird claims on his stage is, at best, Christianity-lite and his “Asiatic” comparable is of an armchair Buddhism. If anything, it can at most reflect Wagner’s misinterpretation of what he thought he understood to be Buddhism and which once inspired him only enough to abandon the writing of an opera.
REGIETHEATER IS A FRAUD UPON ART
A shallow understanding of the ideas of the libretto – assuredly a confusing cosmology by a composer who rather badly served as his own dramatist -- can not be saved by a hodge-podge amalgam of Orientalism overlaid upon it. By equalizing East and West in glib and inaccurate abstractions of both, he has with this production of Parsifal done the audience and the work itself a grave disservice.
John Caird should have written an opera of his own.
Late to the party but I was there too so thanks for the brilliant take down. The ignorance of these Regie directors obscures the light of the sun that shines from these masterpieces AS THEY ARE.
Thank you for your good work. I'm astonished to find it in a dump like this.