In the mood for Parsifal, my Passiontide fare

This week, I have been mostly listening to Parsifal. Not the St Matthew Passion, which is my usual Passiontide fare. And, boy, it’s been quite an experience. You have to be in the mood for the Bach, but for the Wagner you really have to be in the mood.

Parsifal is nearly five hours long. I’m reluctant to say that not a lot happens, because it’s a story of overpowering philosophical transformation. But, alas, no two commentators agree on the nature of that transformation and, unlike the Ring Cycle,  it doesn’t offer many plot twists by way of distraction. The knights who guard the Holy Grail, the chalice of the Last Supper, have lost their second most precious possession, the lance that pierced Christ’s side. It’s been captured by a self-castrated magician, Klingsor, who uses Kundry — a woman cursed for laughing at Christ on the Cross — to seduce knights who try to recapture the lance. Only an innocent, Parsifal, can seize it and return it to the knights so that they can continue their life-giving ceremony of the Grail. This he does on Good Friday, the day of redemption for sinful man.

Plenty to ponder there, you might think. But most of it is back story: the action on stage unfolds at an extremely leisurely pace and can be lethally boring. Wagner was going through a Schopenhauer/Buddhist phase at the time, thus handing modern producers a blank cheque to do their worst. Going to see it is a risk. If you’re stuck in a Parsifal where the Knights are Teletubbies and the Grail a bottle of Fairy Liquid — and, furthermore, the chatterbox raconteur Gurnemanz is a retired Wotan with a voice like sandpaper — then it’s all too easy to identify with Amfortas, leader of the knights, who’s carried around on a litter wailing that he wants to die.