Cross-Cultural Revelation: Barry Millington admires a thought-provoking ‘Parsifal’ in Karlsruhe

Review of Parsifal, directed Warner, conducted Brown, Karlsruhe, 2015.

November 2015, Volume 9, Number 3, 72–4.

In 1847, just two or three years before Wagner’s own revolutionary series of essays, the German architect Heinrich Hübsch set out his ideas for a Gesamtkunstwerk, bringing together the separate arts of poetry, music, painting, sculpture and architecture in an all-embracing totality. Hübsch’s theories were to some extent embodied in his designs for what was to become the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe. Just along the road from that intriguing complex, which later incorporated allegorical frescoes by Moritz von Schwind, the present-day Karlsruhe Opera (Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe), where the general music director is the dynamic British conductor Justin Brown, is establishing its Wagnerian credentials: a new Tristan und Isolde directed by Christopher Alden is slated for March 2016, a four-director Ring is also to be initiated next year, and this new production of Parsifal by Keith Warner had several performances in the spring, with more following in October, November and December. Full disclosure: I acted as dramaturg on Warner’s 2012 production of Parsifal in Copenhagen, to which, however, the present production, with new designs by Tilo Steffens, bears very little resemblance.