Mind Games: Michael Fuller finds much to consider in the Vienna State Opera’s ‘Parsifal’

Reiew of Parsifal, directed Hermanis, conducted Bychkov, Vienna, 2018.

July 2018, Volume 12, Number 2, 84–7.

Alvis Hermanis’ production of Parsifal in Vienna, first unveiled at Easter 2017, is deeply imbued with the genius loci. The shade of Sigmund Freud lurks constantly in the background (for a fascinating sample of the analyses engendered by a Freudian approach to Wagner’s Bühnenweihfestspiel, see the symposium papers in TWJ xi/2). The sets are based on the architectural designs of Richard Wagner’s namesake Otto, referencing in particular the Oratory of St Leopold at the Steinhof psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Vienna, built in the first decade of the 20th century (a location which became notorious for experiments on children that were carried out there during the Nazi period: the costumes in this production suggest a time prior to that). Screens which regularly move across the stage, either to partition it or to allow the use of projections, are similarly Jugendstil in appearance. The words ‘Wagner-Spital’ appear prominently on the rear of the set: we are clearly being invited to see Parsifal through a therapeutic lens, either as a work concerned with the healing of its characters, or perhaps as a form of catharsis for its audience.