Criticultura em Portugal

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 v...

My most recent journey to the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, Germany was eventful, mostly because of some challenges getting there and because of the innovative use of Enhanced Reality glasses in the Parsifal  production, which I will review in a later blog. I've done this pilgrimage three times now, with about 7 years between each visit. The experience remains atmospheric and oddly comforting, as I easily re-settled into traditions that have persisted since Richard Wagner founded the festival in 1876. Wagner, after initially trying to persuade Munich to build him a proper opera house for his spectacles (the Ring of the Niebelung was about to premiere), he gave up and instead built his new "shrine" in the sleepy town of Bayreuth, in the farmland north of Nürnberg in Bavaria. This was a good decision, as he could 1. have complete control over the construction, and 2. get festival goes away from the congested cities, so they could concentrate 100% on his music. Traveling ther...