When it was unveiled in 2021, the Vienna State Opera’s production of Wagner’s final music drama seems to have provoked a mixed reaction. While there was almost uniform praise for its musical qualities, opinion was very much divided on the merits and relevance of the staging, directed by the Russian film-maker, Kirill Serebrennikov.
Reliving his experience of imprisonment for fraud and subsequent house arrest four years earlier, Serebrennikov had set Parsifal in a “detention centre for criminals” (by implication somewhere in Russia), in which the self-harming Amfortas was a dissident, protesting against the inhumane prison conditions, and Gurnemanz the inmates’ effective leader (and in-house tattooist). Kundry was a visiting journalist and Klingsor her magazine publisher, while Parsifal himself was another of the prisoners, who in the first two acts had an onstage double, reliving his experiences as a younger man through a series of flashbacks.
