Even by operatic standards, four women characters represent the feminine at its most mysterious. Handel's Alcina, Wagner's Kundry, Debussy's Melisande and Berg's Lulu are women with deeply uncertain pasts and present-day deadly allure. (Elena Makropulos is another, but we reliably learn her story.) All four have made arresting appearances on video recently. The Pelleas et Melisande, with out baritone Stephane Degout and to-die-for Barbara Hannigan, is viewable online free on The Opera Platform.
A central element in director Dmitri Tcherniakov's 2015 production of Parsifal for the Berliner Staatsoper (BelAir DVD/Blu-ray), as thoughtful and penetrating a Parsifal as can be had, is its clarity that Kundry's story is in fact the opera's through-line. The character goes back at least as far as the Crucifixion, and the curse she incurs by laughing at the cross-bearing Jesus makes her a vassal to the Grail Knights and their evil outcast brother Klingsor and, more gravely, a slave to sex. ("Just give me one hour." Ouch.) She's not just the star of the opera's teeming, tortured second act, she's the magnetic presence that binds all the characters and drives the story as her curse drives her. No less a singing actress than Anja Kampe could have risen to the challenges of Tcherniakov's extraordinarily complex Kundry, and although her singing is as good as any I've heard (and I've heard Ludwig, Rysanek and Meier in the house), she's as strong a presence in the considerable stretches of music when she's not singing but remains the focus, or a reflector, of events.
No other Parsifal I've seen has realized Wagner's opera as fully aurally and visually. There's no swan, but there is a Grail chalice, a spear and a suppurating wound, and the Christian symbols Wagner drew on reclaim their potency cauterized of Church and creed.
As often these days, the Grail knights are cult followers down on their spiritual luck. Tcherniakov's, too, is a modern-dress Parsifal (he's the author of the whole physical production, working with trusted designers), but none of these down-and-out spiritual seekers looks like any other; particularly in the crucial massed scenes, every last chorister knows precisely who she is. The stage is never still, but nothing feels staged. The Flower Maidens are nymphets in flowered dresses, and even the singing ones are little Lolitas at the extreme lower end of legal. The returning Parsifal sings, "Heil mir, das ich dich wiederfinde" straight into Kundry's welling eyes, and the rest of the act proceeds from shock to shock, almost all of it grounded in Wagner's text.
The principals don't seem directed so much as released into their characters. Tomas Tomasson is the Klingsor I've long awaited: no generic villain, but rather, a tweedy old duffer with a comb-over that requires frequent attention who darts about like a tweaking marionette, a death-dealing pucker seeking a target. We've not had a character singer this good since Gerhard Stolze.
If you've seen a great Parsifal this lifetime, Rene Pape was probably the Gurnemanz, and if he's ever given a slack performance, I haven't heard about it. Still, the sharp, multifaceted character Tcherniakov draws out of him makes his earlier portrayals look like sketches for this canvas in Rembrandt oils. There's singing that will bowl you over. Pape's expressive range is complete, his timing incisive and alarmingly immediate. Tcherniakov cleverly turns the first act's long Grail narrative into a slide show Gurnemaz conducts, complete with pointer, but an idea that could have gone terribly wrong is saved by using historical depictions of the Grail legend and early Parsifal productions, Pape a holy Scheherazade talking-story.
There's all the magnificent singing you could want, but that's the last thing on the minds of these singers, charged with making all the sounds they can muster. Andreas Schager, Europe's Heldentenor of the moment, is a backpacking Parsifal who's everybody's fool until he's nobody's, and like Kampe, as compelling a presence when he's not singing. Wolfgang Koch, his fat old-man tits sagging over bloody gauze bandages, makes unearthly sounds for Amfortas' agony in a vocally overwhelming performance not chary of its own vileness. Kundry may have only "Dienen, dienen" to sing in the last act, but the redemption of Parsifal and Kundry, two pairs of eyes orbiting like planets, strikes closer to the heart of the action than the closing of Amfortas' wound.
Wagner's orchestra is always a character of its own, but seldom is that as palpable as in Daniel Barenboim's knowing, explosive yet infinitely subtle conducting. His band is in on the action at every insinuating, evanescent turn.
Sometimes I feel like the old lady in the audience who was hauled out of Bayreuth's latest Tristan wailing, "You can't change the ending." That's where Tcherniakov's Parsifal explicitly departs from Wagner �" the stage directions, not the words or music �" with a plot innovation that left me thunderstruck.