3D Technology comes to the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth

The second opera I saw this year in Bayreuth was a technologically innovative new "enhanced" production of Richard Wagner's Parsifal (1882), staged by the director Jay Scheib, and conducted by the Spaniard Pablo Heras Casado. I almost always enjoy this opera, and have probably seen five productions around the world. Musically, Wagner pushes the use of chromatic harmony to extremes, and achieves a ritual timelessness with the recurring themes. Plotwise, not much happens. A group of knights is charged with protecting the Holy Grail, Jesus's cup from the last supper. They do this by ritualistically revealing it daily in a ceremony. However, the knights now seem to be aging and declining, and their leader Amfortas has been wounded with a spear; his wound is agonizing and unhealing. A new boy Parsifal arrives, clueless (he is a tenor) and ignorant of the rituals. He sacrilegiously kills a swan. He undergoes an odyssey/initiation, repelling the seduction attempts of the voluptuous Kundry and killing Klingsor, a fallen evil knight who earlier wounded Amfortas and was therefore banned to a castle, far away from the knights. He takes Klingsor's spear, earlier stolen from the grail knights. Parsifal, having passed his test, returns to the knights, heals Amfortas' wound with the holy spear, and rejuvenates/redeems the brotherhood. The end. 

The redemption plot has led many directors to treat Parsifal as an allegory of change and renewal. The last production I saw in Bayreuth in 2018 (meh) ended with adherents of the various established world religions rejecting these for a new pan-global-eco-nonracial Kumbaya philosophy. The 2011 production (terrific) portrayed the decline of Germany in the world wars, seduced by the evil knight Hitler, and finally redeemed by a new more tolerant democracy. This 2025 production was much more conventional, pretty much playing the opera as written. What was depicted on stage was very conventional and close to Wagner's instructions, except for some odd pastel colors for the knights and their castle. As always at Bayreuth, the production was musically solid, with good conducting, a fine Parsifal (Andreas Schlager, who had just sung Tristan the day before! Wild!), and an excellent Gurnemanz (Georg Zeppenfeld) and Kundry (the dramatic Elina Garanča).

However, the big innovation here was the use of Enhanced Reality (ER) glasses, turning the entire theater into a 3D production. This is apparently the first time this has been done in a large opera house, and fits into Bayreuth's tradition of staging and technical innovation. For example, in the very first Ring of the Niebelung, Wagner devised innovative prisms to bend the onstage light to form the rainbow bridge used by the gods to enter Valhalla. Unfortunately for this new ER production, costs prevented providing the glasses to all 1200 attendees, so only 300 or so per performance (including me) got to try it. I imagine this made the director's job difficult, since a production he envisioned completely in ER now had to be seen by most attendees without the enhancement. Unfortunately for them, the non-ER production on stage was dull and lacked visual interest. 

So what about the ER glasses? You are fitted for them the morning before the performance, so they can account for head size and glasses lens prescriptions. The customized glasses are then provided to you at your seat. They provide a panorama of about 250 degrees, so you can turn you head and see new things while wearing them. If you tilt your head more extremely  up or down you can see the stage with the naked eye. The glasses are small (the size of sunglasses) but a bit heavy, and I found that I had to remove them at times when they caused the bridge of my nose to get sore. This will likely improve with tech improvements. I noticed that most of the people in my row (all of whom had ER glasses) had removed them by the end of the opera. 

Did ER enhance the opera experience? First the pros:

1. At its best, there were excellent enhancements. When Parsifal kills the flying swan in Act 1, you see an actual flying swan getting hit with an arrow. This depiction has mostly been dropped from modern productions, since an old fashioned wooden swan over the stage looks fake for audiences used to modern technology. Klingsor's grim grey castle in Act II had a creepy ER floor of blood. The magic garden that springs up in Act 2, often a problematic stage effect, led to my field of vision flooded with fronds, blooms, vines, and shoots--all both beautiful and menacing. When Klingsor flung his spear at Parsifal, a spear also came directly at me, Disney style, eliciting a gasp from the audience. There was a wild image where one of the flower maidens, scantily clad in a gauzy drape only, seemed to sit in my lap. Lap dancing at Bayreuth! 

2. Even when without specific plot linkage, I thought the routine background use of ER often added atmosphere. For example, unobtrusive falling leaves in Act 1 symbolized the decline and aging of the knights, and big realistic moons and planets provided a timeless quality. Oddly, there was very little on the actual stage that communicated these affects, possibly indicating the the designer assumed that all attendees would have the ER enhancement. 

3. It was easy to look above or below the glasses to focus on the actual stage.

4. Remarkably for new technology, there were no technical failures, and all around me seemed to use the technology successfully. 

What about cons?

1. The heaviness made it hard to use the glasses consistently. 

2. The glasses caused a darkening of the action on stage, making me constantly move my eyes away from the ER version. 

3. Like any new technology, the ER was overused. Too many times a flower, rock, or tree obscured the stage action, even in some crucial solos. The director was reluctant to dial back the technology, so it seemed that every moment had to have some ER effect that could keep us entertained. This sometimes distracted from the opera. Less can be more sometimes. This reminded me of when, as a professor, I started using Powerpoint in the 1990s. I initially used many of its bells and whistles, with slides swooping in, rotating, fontvariety, etc. I then found that much of this distracted the learners, so I dialed it back and became more expert in exactly how and when to use the effects. I suspect with experience that this will happen with ER at the opera. 

4. A few effects were cool but peripheral to the opera action. For example a fly appeared to perch directly on my glasses, with me seeing its anatomically correct underside. This had little to do with the Act 1 action with the grail knights and was a fun, but distracting event. 

To sum up, I'd like to experience ER at the opera again. It was fun, and at its best enhanced the Parsifal experience, and may eventually help opera reach younger audiences. But the directors and technicians need to gain experience at integrating the ER with the stage, how not to make it distract from crucial stage action, and how to avoid the darkening of the stage behind the ER effects. Bravo to Bayreuth for pioneering this!