At times I'd like to think I can write any ol' thing, indulge myself and trash anyone I want. And no one will be the wiser.
Note to self: You are not alone.
I was alerted to the fact that the Bieito Parsifal production is still hotly debated on Parterre Box. Also in the same week I was made aware this blog is quoted in the Bologna Carmen review in Opera Magazine this month. Aside from the feelings of having "made the big time" when yer name appears on La Cieca or OperaCake's blog or are called superlatives in Opera Magazine reviews (my own mom couldn't have written a more glowing review), I'm tempted to retract my determination to be a rebel or write my honest reactions. I'm tempted to watch what I say, to be politically correct.
Blech. How boring would that be!?
In an attempt to deal directly with the myriad of comments made on Parterre, I've quoted them here (with La Cieca's permission) and try to address them as best as time and recollection will allow.
sharky says:
July 30, 2010 at 2:52 AM
I love what I’ve been able to see of this Parsifal in video, stills and sounds. A fellow opera lover and Wagnerian saw this production twice and – one not prone towards liking regietheatre – pronounced them amongst the most powerfully gripping evenings of theatre of her life. Her posts on it only made me sorry I couldn’t make this and sorrier still it wasn’t filmed. Bieito can make has of a lot of things, but when he gets it right – it’s nothing short of amazing (e.g., his Wozzeck for the Liceu). This sounds (and from the clips) to be equally amazing.
This is kinda how I felt too. I felt the Kommische Oper Butterfly here in Berlin was just w.r.o.n.g. But being a part of this musical staging, while trying, was very rewarding. Most of which centered around the fact I simply made it thru the experience!
brooklynpunk says:
July 30, 2010 at 3:43 PM
....visually..it did work and ( as an undergrad major in medieval history) sort of is what I felt the era to look like…possibly…
…as does the feeling I get from from this Parsifal…which I don’t from any other………
Harry says:
July 31, 2010 at 5:47 AM
The Assassination of Wagner’s Parsifal as Performed by the Inmates of Bieto’s Stuttgart Insane Asylum. Check list; Nutter with flame thrower, strait jacket costuming, delusions, cruel predatory behavior, nudity, violence, filth, decay, zombie dementia acting………..perfect!
Harry, LOL. Many times during the rehearsal process Bieito did say he was going for an absolute annihilation of the "Temple of Wagner." The impetus of the moment in the video of singing to the bust of Wagner was mine, and when I did it in the pregeneral rehearsal (the YouTube tape is of that reh, I believe) he ROARED with laughter. I was actually going for a Hamlet homage, but mid-way in doing so got to realize it was pretty profane by Wagerian standards. Nothing was to be thought of as sacred. This was the only moment in the show where people laughed. And hard. I wasn't going for humor though.
La Cieca says:
August 2, 2010 at 4:10 PM
...
I would further question your assertion that “the real world of phenomena is unreal” etc. in Parsifal. He doesn’t gain enlightenment through meditation, but rather by suffering in the real world. Parsifal’s real qualification to become the new guardian of the Grail is that he is not working from any abstract philosophical basis, but an intuited empathy gained through real experience.Though Wagner was influence by his readings in Buddhism (and more so in the same vein via Schopenhauer), his own thought (as expressed in Parsifal was not strictly Buddhist. Essentially his approach was syncretic, combining elements of Buddhism and mystical Catholicism with the early humanistic philosophy inherent in the Parsifal stories he used as source material.
That explains a mystery to me. One of the very first characters you saw onstage (besides a very pregnant and naked woman wondering about) was that of a tibetan monk. I never understood that reference. Now I do. Thanks.
luvtennis says:
August 2, 2010 at 4:40 PM
...
Also, while I agree that Parsifal cannot be read as “Buddha II, The Revenge” (”This time it’s personal!”), I think that Parsifal, like the Buddha of legend was a young man of tremendous intrinsic gifts who learned the truth of his gift (and of the world) by experiencing the falsity of the world of phenomena.Kind of like if Mother Teresa had started off as a star on an MTV “reality show” like “The Hills.”
squirrel says:
July 30, 2010 at 12:19 PM
Nice trash Concept, but this looks pretty inept. Everybody seems to be milling about unsure what their character’s motivation is.Batty Masetto says:
July 30, 2010 at 12:37 PM
Huh? As opposed to normal chorus behavior, which is always meticulously motivated? At least these folks have the excuse of being sick or stoned. I had uneasy flashbacks to some demonstrations I was involved in back in the day…
Squirrel, uncertainty was precisely what he wanted. In each of the 10 performances the movement onstage might be vastly dissimilar. After we had put it onstage, we were instructed to "go make art. I don't want to see the same thing over and over. THINK! Fill every single moment with life or death, but don't just stand there!" It was designed to be about malaise and hopelessness. That's a very hard thing to show onstage without it appearing boring. As La C says below, precision is not what CB is known for. If anything, he's very much against it, except in moments of safety.
La Cieca says:
July 30, 2010 at 12:43 PM
This is a valid criticism, I think, in that Bieito’s strong suit as a director doesn’t seem to be precision. The movement does look tentative or (unintentionally) clumsy at times. Again, it’s hard to say what the cumulative effect would be in the theater, or if as the performances progressed the movement cleaned up.
What I'm told the affect was was that it was "5 and a half hours that seemed like 2. You never knew where to look." As a audience member, you didn't sit there bored. As performers, we are taught in school to not pull focus during a colleagues big moments. Here, we were implored to do exactly that. Try to pull focus. I felt weird doing it, but the Bieito style is a mania that is very hard to describe until you see it.
Harry says:
July 31, 2010 at 6:04 AM
The acting standard looks like ham acting from a alternative school bunch of naughty kids trying to shock. Putting on a self written play to show their equally f****d up parents attending, they are feeling still little ‘out of it’ and don’t know how to communicate with the World. Their kindergarten standard plagiarized version of ‘Hair’, with a psychotic touch!
...
Re: Acting choices...it's not clear in the video but during the mighty chorus scene at the end of Act 1 (where the YouTube clip begins), I take cocaine in the form of crushed up coco leaves. The entire scene is a drug trip, wandering amoungst the men, falling down on the ground, violently shaking from my 'trip.' During the loudest moments I was literally laying over the net on the pit, looking down on the players and conducting along with the maestro (apologies to the clarinetist who I dribbled spit on more than once). The rest of the opera is with this same type of euphoria going on. The 'trip' continues into the Blumenmädchen's scene. (Think about it, is there any BETTER music for a psychedelic trip than the orchestral music in the latter half of Act 1?)
La Cieca says:
July 30, 2010 at 1:45 PM
Well, okay, I haven’t seen the whole thing (obviously) so it’s difficult to say whether I would say the whole thing would work.One thing that does seem to be happening for sure, though, is that the singers are strongly physically invested in their acting. It might be possible to get that same level of commitment in a “tabards and tights” traditional visual presentation, but that’s not what Bieito does, so that point is irrelevant in the present case.
What I’m talking about in the previous paragraph is this: there’s a lot of operatic performing (not just acting, but the singing part taken as a thing in itself) where (for example) when the performer is singing “I am going to kill you” all you get from his performance is “At this point in the opera my character is supposed to kill your character.” In a Bieito production, when you’ve got performers like Richards and Milling and the guy who plays Klingsor, when they sing “I am going to kill you,” you really think are terrified that someone is going to end up dead. Unless opera can grab the audience by the throat like that, it’s dead. Again, it doesn’t have to be done a la Bieito, but he does seem to be able to find and tap that unbridled passion in performers.
I don't think Stephen Milling (Gurnemanz), Gregg Baker (Amfortas) and Christiane Iven (Kundry) would mind me speaking for them here. All 4 of us had big moments where we would say to ourselves and each other: "This is crap. I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing. It's too much. Too dangerous vocally. I'm DEAD tired. Somebody turn down the !#$% smoke! And what the Q@#$T%^ was I thinking when I said I would do THAT?!" And then there were other times when we would joyfully put our craziest ideas out there. Above all, we were valued as artists. Why I balked in the Bologna Carmen about "doing the DVD" was I felt like I had no input. Calixto, early on, said: "In these rehearsals I want you to have perfect freedom. There is no wrong choice, there is nothing that can't be done or tried." (to which our seasoned Bieito veteran, Claudio Otelli (Klingsor) promptly started dry humping a wall during Act 2.i, and it stayed in the show....)
La Cieca continues...
On a broader plane, what impresses me is that this direction does more than mickey-mousing the text and the music. In other words, if the text and the music are saying “oh what a transcendent moment of beauty this Grail ceremony is,” then why is it necessary to make a redundant visual statement with marble columns and domes and flowing vestments and stately processions? Especially, I would say, since the columns and domes are more or less what we expect to see, or know from the libretto are supposed to be there. What Bieito does in this production I think is to create a visual counterpoint for the text and the music, and in doing so force the audience to re-examine their accepted meaning of that text and music. Yes, it’s beautiful and lofty, but (I think the question is being asked) to what purpose? What if all this gorgeousness is in the service of a lie? What if the whole Grail scene is pretty much a racket devised by a scam artist to keep miserable starving people in their place? What if Gurnemanz has suffered so much in his endless waiting for the new guardian of the Grail to arrive that his reason has cracked, and now he will basically say and do (and believe) any old thing to try to force the latest newcomer into the role of redeemer? (It’s not Bieito’s idea, but Wagner’s, that the path to personal redemption is long and unpredictable, in other words, that if a man is to develop into a savior, he is going to have to do it in his own time and most likely at the cost of a lifetime of suffering.)So I would say that what is important about this staging is that it forces the viewer to question what he thinks he knows Parsifal is about. The biggest coup, it seems to me, is to set up the end of the action not as a conclusion but as set of possible new beginnings: Parsifal accepts the office of guardian of the Grail and is borne away naked by his followers, maybe to do good deeds of charity and, well, maybe not. Meanwhile, the pregnant Kundry is left behind, forgotten by everyone, eating raw food out of a can. But (who knows?) maybe her child will have an easier way in the world than his suffering elders. By not answering these questions, Bieito leaves the work open: the public continues to consider the philosophical questions after the performance is over.
One technical detail that impresses me is how (at least in the scenes on this video) Bieito finds dramatically motivated reasons to turn the chorus out toward the audience: the Grail ceremony seems to be passing by on the road as the knights hold up their signs, and the Flower Maidens are so listless that all they can do is trudge forward without noticing their surroundings.
Also poetic (and in no way contradictory to the text) are the ideas of making Gurnemanz blind in the final act, or Kundry deliberately cutting out her tongue at the end of the second act.
Ok, now I've just become La Cieca's biggest fan. Even without seeing it he got it. Dead on the money. The entire production was to be "open." That is going to be interesting to some, not-so to others. My recent "Regie Rant" tells you I'm by nature a literalist. "Open" for me is a hard pill to swallow. All I can say is, your summation is precisely correct. I would have sworn you saw the production for how accurate it is.
Jay says:
July 30, 2010 at 4:07 PM
...Based on the clip La C posted, the Bieto Parsifal production is a potpurri of disparate ideas that don’t mesh. A rock star Parsifal approach (think Jim Morrison) could certainly work, but Bieto undermines it with a lot of extraneous shock value action, including smearing a blumenmadchen’s body with raspberry jam or whatever they use.
I suppose some will think Bieto is provocatively making a point about cultural degradation, soulessness, etc. But Parsifal is grounded in Bhuddist beliefs about attaining enlightment and redemption.
Based on reports, clips, photos, etc., Bieto wilfully subverts the art form he makes his living from. To return to the anatomical nether region, we’re generally too timid to acknowledge that Bieto is farting in his audiences’ collective faces (and sneering all the way to the bank as he does so).
There was a time when I would have said precisely the same thing. That he hated his audience. No more. At the premiere, the response was a very boisterous mix of boo and bravo. He was crushed by it. I got the very distinct impression he felt very strongly about the points he was making in the production, and made choices out of love for the artform and the attendees. Yes, he's a peculiar sort, evidenced by his work, but no more so that any other modern day artist. He is struggling with Big Ideas. And he deeply cares about the artform. Maybe not his artists comfort level, but....
Rock Star? Nope. That wasn't it. It was "nature's wild boy." At one point, I felt like we were missing the boat by not presenting Parsifal as a lofty elevated sort. But in keeping with the production's concept (my job) I began to see the character as a-moral. A Perfect Fool.
Jay says:
July 30, 2010 at 5:33 PM
I for one didn’t say it was a rock star concept. I said a rock star concept could work.
Ok, gotcha.
By now, it’s patently obvious that Bieto doesn’t enough about his art form to approach it in a logical, coherent, dramatically overarching fashion. He comes across as someone with a lot of infantile fantasies and hangups, rather than a disciplined, focused director. Whether his “subervsion” is wilfull or passive-aggressive, or of whatever ilk, it’s still trashing an art form, rather like the child who trashes his room.
I worry you are right on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On the other days of the week, I don't. :-)
CerquettiFarrell says
July 30, 2010 at 3:05 PM
... Discussions like these are what makes Parterre one of the most intelligent AND entertaining sites ever.I loved every minute of this trailer. Beito’s ideas here stike me as thought-provoking and legitimate, and he can produce a highly charged, electric atmosphere and eclicits extremely committed performances from his cast, as you saw fit to mention earlier.
Richards seems to have found a very fit role. He looks great and sings pretty well here. His last act outfit looks like Joseph and the Amazing Tech meets Bernstein’s Celebrant ...! The flower maidens scene has more ’shocking’ value but is immensely effective, I thought. I’d like to see this production.
Thanks! The first time I tried on the helmet and robe with dangling babbles of iconography from the sleeves everyone started howling with laughter. I nearly threw a temper tantrum. I imagined everyone in the audience doing this while I'm trying to sing and it didn't sit well with me. Even my son got in on the act and when he saw he he said "Dad! You are the Archangel of FABULOUS!" The laughing died down quickly though, and while there was some snickering going on in Act 3 when I donned it, the only real laughing was when people became aware I was singing to the bust of Richard W.
brooklynpunk says:
July 30, 2010 at 3:08 PM
While I’m not sure what I would really think, after seeing it in …Its ENTIRETY….
…I WOULD LOVE TO SEE THIS…. preferably in an live performance, to see how it works, in the flesh (pun maybe intended…..)..BUT… but it would be interesting as a DVD , as well…I am VERY eager for a Bieto production to make it to this side of the Atlantic…someday..just so I can make up my own mind as to how “sick” he is…or isn’t…….
Again, there is no plans to make a DVD of this production but there was a movie made during the rehearsal process. Google it, but there is a documentary now being edited and to be released in October 2010 about the entire thing. Perhaps it will contain stage footage, but I don't think so. It will be remounted in the coming two seasons. I'm scheduled to return to it in some of the performances.
jvhovig says:
July 30, 2010 at 4:29 PM
Parsifal himself weighs in:Andrew Richards – Regie Rant
[...] Some people might boo for a Bieito or Warlikowski production, but most people refrain from it. Most people want to appear like they “got it.”
Well, most of the time, I’m onstage and I don’t get it.
Is it just me, or is anyone else in Europe tired of going to the opera and rather than have a good story told thru music, have to struggle with all the hyper-stimulus and hidden meanings?
[...] Why can’t opera just be opera? [...] Is the form of opera so despised it must be totally done away with? [...]La Cieca says:
July 30, 2010 at 4:35 PM
It might be noted that a couple months earlier Richards posted:The transition from absolute freedom and play and exploration in the Calixto Parsifal to this production where — on the first day of rehearsal being plopped down in a chair and shown the entire opera of Carmen in dvd form, and then told: “So, that’s your blocking. That’s what you’re going to do…” — stunk. I’m thinking: “Erm, I’m in rehearsal for 5 weeks. Why?!” We pay our own apartments in cities, and pay for homes, and miss beloved families and I am going to be made to do what’s on a DVD?! Great. So much for art.
Right now he’s at the Arena di Verona singing Carmen in a production by Franco Zeffirelli, so he’s certainly getting his wish for “opera being just opera.”
Note that this is not calling Richards a hypocrite (my impression is that he’s a pretty sincere guy) but rather suggesting that maybe he changes his mind from time to time depending on his moods, the way most of us do?
Thanks to both of your for bringing this up. I've been thinking a lot about my entry "Regie Rant" and will try to respond to it soon. Yes, I was pretty pissed off when I wrote it, but it has more to do with the extenuating circumstances of the MacBeth (being called to an 8hr reh day time and time again, and actually working 20 mins....). I also got my eyes opened while watching the Lulu at Salzburg Fest this last week. I am starting to realize times have definitely changed, and most importantly, I am the WORST person to judge the efficacy of a production while I'm in it.
Quanto Painy Fakor says:
July 30, 2010 at 8:14 PM
Richards is sort of the second coming of Jacques Trussel, only 100x better in every way. I wonder if kids in conservatories these days have any idea of what to expect when they are faced with reality of a Bieto.La Cieca says:
July 30, 2010 at 8:21 PM
If I could give the kids advice, what I would say is: you have to trust and believe 100% and give all you can. What you end up doing on stage may be ridiculous on an intellectual level, but the public is going to react primarily to the level of commitment in the performance. If you believe passionately in what you’re doing onstage, then the public will believe in you.
Which is what I started to realize in Salzburg. There can be no room for doubt onstage. Offstage, sure. But the stage is the place of the Magic If.
yappy says:
July 30, 2010 at 7:11 PM
Word.I note for those who remain staunchly against “Euro-trash” that I’ve never had an artistic experience where the Big Issues of our time have been so vehemently talked about, by the artist, in the press, in the foyer. I now understand how important it is to not simply consume art, but argue and fight and disagree and discuss what we take in, what we worship.
...
As an occasional reader I was wondering what had happened to Mr. Richards with that Regie Rant post. Thanks La Cieca. He’s simply human.
Word!
Melot's Younger Brother says:
July 30, 2010 at 4:39 PM
Andrew Richards, the tenor in question, fretted quite a bit about flashing his butt.
Yes. I did. I had people standing in the wings preventing any chorister or devious sort of bringing a camera into the wings and taking a picture from the front. I'm confident, but....I'm a tenor, not a bass. ;-)
jvhovig says:
July 30, 2010 at 6:18 PM
My only question is whether one can make any statements about the commitments of singers and the amount of dedication and emotion they invest in a role — as I think was done above? — when one of those singers doesn’t necessarily appear to show an unmitigated investment himself. Just a question.La Cieca says:
July 30, 2010 at 8:17 PM
That’s a good question. There’s a difference between commitment onstage and “investment” offstage. In other words, the singer might well buy enthusiastically into the process created by the director, how rehearsals are run and how excited the director is about his own work, but meanwhile not necessarily agree with the director on every intellectual idea that goes into the production.
That explains my point I was making about all of us at one time or another admitting we thought what we were doing onstage was utter crap. Singers like to bitch and we did our share, but once rehearsal started there was no holding back. My big fight with Calixto was over this. I, being new to Wagner, was marking vocally for nearly 2 weeks, while singing musical rehearsals. CB and I nearly came to blows over my choice to do so, and both left town in a huff over it. We calmed down, found a groove and began to trust each other. He would rather have you work your butt off with the scene once, giving everything you had, then sit there and try and retry things and talk a bunch. He'd say: "Here's an idea for the scene. Do it. Make magic." Rehearsals were often 2 hours shorter than planned.
The creative process is about just that, process, more than it is about content. This is particularly true for recreative artists like singers. Or actors, who from time to time do scripts of no particular literary value because they enjoy taking on the various acting challenges posed by a shallow but exciting play.
Another point here, one that I posted to Richards’ blog earlier today, is what Martha Graham called “the divine discontent.” Artists are chronically dissatisfied with their work and think it falls short of their ideal of what it might have been. As such, they’re never really happy with the work in retrospect and may come up with various reasons why it didn’t go they way they hoped it would. But according to Graham (who cribbed the idea from Goethe) that sense of dissatisfaction is in fact to be cherished because it’s the goad that leads the artist on to take on new and greater challenges. Satisfaction would lead to complacency and so no more art.
So when I talk about commitment of singers, dedication and all that, it’s not referring to loyalty to a director’s personality or even belief in the ideas he spouts. Rather, that sense of passion arises from the artist’s striving to surpass his limitations, to overcome the “divine dissatisfaction.” It’s an impossible task, but it’s what Emerson was counseling when he said “hitch your wagon to a star.”
...
I hope my family reads that....it's very hard for people outside the business to understand that.
SanDiegoSuzanne says:
August 2, 2010 at 9:32 PM
I attended two performances of the Bieto Parsifal in Stuttgart last April. I went with some trepidation having seen cuts of previous Bieto productions. What I experienced was possibly the most affecting production of opera in my some forty years of opera attendance. The dramatic force of the production built continually and I was simply amazed by how well the production communicated the universal mythical elements of Parsifal. Perhaps because I saw the production well into the run (the faint of heart having been warned away), but I found that the audience was totally in sync with the production.Because the any Bieto production is such a personal statement by the director, the performances of the singers are not as commonly discussed. However, it should be noted that in the Stuttgart Parsifal, the cast was as close to perfect as a cast can get. Especially notable were: Andrew Richards as Parsifal, Stephen Milling as Gurnemanz, Gregg Baker as Amfortas and Christiane Ivan as Kundry. ...
Thanks, Suzanne. Truth is, I asked Suzanne to pitch in and contribute on Parterre Box. She had seen the performances and because so much was being written 2nd hand on Parterre, I asked if she would write a bit on it. Here's a very personal note she wrote on FB (reprinted with permission):
Parsifal, Wagner, Bieito and Me: And so his search begins with new focus. He is garbed in the pretense of the divine and decorated like a Christmas tree with the religious and secular symbols which had meaning in the old world. Thus “empowered” he accepts the adoration of his companions and “blesses” them with the holy water from a sacred spring. However, this has no impact on the greater world which is still full of violence and fear.
Parsifal exits and then reenters with new purpose. Striped of the iconology of the religious and the secular and in communication with God he is able to bring life and comfort to a few individuals. However, to the majority, he is a magician who has no message for them as individuals other than the magical acts he creates. Finally, he strips himself of all but that which God made and kneels alone before God. In that moment, he is seen, as God made him, in complete simplicity and innocence and in perfect communication with his God. Like John the Baptist before him, he accepts God’s will on earth and accepts his fate as the vessel of God’s message to the lost people of an apocalyptic world. Again, like John his expressive hands and body tell us and the people of the apocalypse, the true value of this acceptance of God’s will. We are alone no more.
Source: http://tenorrichards.blogspot.com/2010/08/parterre-box-responses.html
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