Missing in Action: Claus Guth fails to connect the dots in the Gran Teatre del Liceu’s ‘Parsifal’, reports Jerry Floyd

Review of Parsifal, directed Guth, conducted Boder, Barcelona, 2011.

July 2011, Volume 5, Number 2, 79–81.

Claus Guth’s new production of Parsifal at the Gran Teatre del Liceu received its premiere on 20 February, the 100th performance of the opera at the Barcelona theatre and another milestone for a company that was first to produce the opera outside Bayreuth after the work’s legal copyright expired on 1 January 1914. But to paraphrase Mark Berry, who recently reviewed Guth’s Zurich Opera production of Tristan und Isolde in these pages, the director’s newest Wagner production ‘was of Claus Guth’s Parsifal, not Richard Wagner’s’.