Kent Nagano leads Chris Ventris, Thomas Hampson, Waltraud Meier, the German Symphony Orchestra and the Baden-Baden Festival Chorus in an acclaimed Festspielhaus production of Richard Wagner's enigmatic last opera.

Director
Nikolaus Lehnhoff

Performers
Parsifal: Chris Ventris
Amfortas: Thomas Hampson
Gurnemanz: Matti Salminen
Kindry: Waltraud Meier
Klingsor: Tom Fox
Titurel: Bjarni Thor Kristinsson

Baden-Baden Festival Chorus
The German Symphony Orchestra Berlin
Kent Nagano (conductor)


Ever since the premiere of Parsifal at Bayreuth in July 1882, audiences have discussed exactly what Richard Wagner's last opera is all about. Although the music is emotionally charged, there is little in the way of a plot, which has led to ongoing arguments about the problems of staging this work ever since. Previously, Wieland Wagner's early-Fifties production was the benchmark for this particular opera, so it seemed only fitting that his then-assistant, Nikolaus Lehnhoff's English production should have had such an impact at English National Opera in 1999 - that production was widely acclaimed by press and patrons alike.

Audiences have long wanted to see a modern German version however, and eventually, the Baden-Baden Festspielhaus took up the challenge in 2004. This is that production, which features a stellar cast, including Chris Ventris, Thomas Hampson and Waltraud Meier. Nikolaus Lehnhoff's notes on the production are below.

"Parsifal is an existential drama about the dilemma of human existence. Under the guise of a religious drama, Wagner's music clearly tells us about people who live in total isolation in an empty and emptied world. All of them are outsiders, homeless who have lost the ground under their feet and err through space and time without any direction. People with traumatic experiences, not unknown to the world of Samuel Beckett.

Amfortas and the Knights of the Holy Grail symbolise the closed societies of religious ideologies, of sects and cult communities. Having originally got together with the best of intentions, in order to make people appreciate each other more, they have in the course of time forgotten their human roots and exhausted themselves in brutal power games in the name of God. Amfortas' wound is our wound, the wound of civilisation. Amfortas represents the eternal suffering of mankind.

Parsifal's arrival in this world of the grail is a breach of taboo, as an infraction, a natural impulse in a decadent and dead world in which nothing but meaningless rituals are perpetrated whose missionary meaning has been lost long ago. Parsifal is a sort of end-game in a wasteland. After the cataclysm, the last survivors begin to communicate across the ruins in order to re-discover, like Parsifal and Kundry, commiseration and love for each other and to learn about emotions and their expression.

Utopia at the end of the opera cannot be realised. There is a light at the end of the tunnel of mankind, one catches a glimpse of a New World which has liberated itself from all rituals and ideologies. Everything remains open. It is now up to us to take this new direction."
Nikolaus Lehnhoff