Snake Charms in Unsettling ‘Parsifal’: Peter Quantrill assesses two contrasting productions

Reviews of Parsifal, directed Castellucci, conducted Haenchen, Brussels, 2011 (Bel Air Musique, 2 DVDs); Parsifal, directed Wolfgang Wagner, conducted Sinopoli, Bayreuth, 1998 (C major, 2 DVDs).

November 2014, Volume 8, Number 3, 72–4.

Romeo Castellucci recounts in the booklet to this Bel Air recording how he listened to Parsifal ‘once, twenty times, a hundred times’, then determined to discover what lay within the work for himself, led by the music. Such terms are not uncommon among opera directors, especially those coming to the genre for the first time, as he was, and the terms of his apologia may fail to convince those such as Arnold Whittall, who, when reviewing this set for Gramophone, could not perceive fewer than two streams of action and meaning, one invented by Castellucci, and the other somehow belonging to Parsifal itself, though whether through the score, the libretto, the stage directions and/or its performance history was left open.