Larger than Life: Barry Millington is disappointed with the experimental new Bayreuth ‘Parsifal’

Review of Parsifal, directed Scheib, conducted Heras-Casado, Bayreuth, 2023.

November 2023, Volume 17, Number 3, 64–7.

Parsifal with Augmented Reality (AR) glasses: embracing new technology to illuminate the mysteries of Wagner’s most enigmatic work or attention-seeking gimmick? Wagner’s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, is regularly invoked to cover a wider range of multi-media projects than he could possibly have envisaged. And yet, given his pathbreaking conception of theatre, not to mention the proto-cinematic nature of his works, there is reasonable justification for offering a cautious welcome to an approach such as that of the American director Jay Scheib, who claims to be using, for the first time in opera, the latest technology (AR and video credited to Joshua Higgason) to open a window onto ‘landscapes portraying the past and depicting destruction [...] a story in which everything is coming to an end’.