Through the Looking Glass

By Michael Walsh

Fantastic imagery abounds in two new films of Wagner

Film ought to be a lively medium for opera. The cinema can broaden a production's scope while narrowing its focus, providing the viewer with a fresh, if necessarily arbitrary, perspective that can simultaneously combine straightforward storytelling with implicit commentary. Watching a filmed opera should be like attending a performance with an omniscient, highly opinionated fan.

It hasn't worked out that way. Directors have generally been content either to substitute handsome actors for the singers supplying the sound track or simply to shoot a stage production. A breakthrough came in 1975, when Ingmar Bergman produced a charming The Magic Flute that began in a replica of Stockholm's 18th century Drottningholm Court Theater and from time to time moved beyond the confines of the stage. Even more ambitious was Joseph Losey's mesmeric Don Giovanni (1979), expansively set amid the Palladian splendors of northern Italy.

Now come two radical settings of Wagner. German avant-garde Film Maker Hans-Juergen Syberberg's 4 1/2-hour Parsifal is a heavily symbolic interpretation that, among other extraordinary devices, uses the composer's own face as a set. French Theater Director Patrice Chereau's complete The Ring of the Nibelung (starting Jan. 17 on PBS with a documentary and continuing a week later with Das Rheingold) is a brash, iconoclastic view that sets the four-opera cycle in the mid-19th century, when Wagner wrote it. The videotaped Bayreuth Ring succeeds triumphantly, while Parsifal a spectacular failure.

Syberberg's problem is symbols: there are too many of them for even a work as complex as Parsifal to support comfortably. "I have tried to keep Wagner's work intact," says the director, "but at the same time to make a film about Wagner, about ourselves and about the future." That is at least one thing too many. As he did in his 7 1/2-hour Our Hitler, a perplexing, impassioned examination of German culture, Syberberg employs symbols the way others use props; in fact he uses them as props. In Parsifal, some of the actual terrain is derived from Wagner's death mask; the prominent nose becomes a rocky outcrop, the nostrils a cave. The final scene takes place in a vast ruined forum, which is contained within one of the composer's richly brocaded jackets.

The heaviest symbolism, however, is Freudian, understandable in an opera about a sacred fraternity of chaste knights who guard the Holy Grail against a lustful, profane world. Syberberg revels in the obvious sexual metaphors of the spear and the wound that will not heal; the wound, which is supposed to be in Amfortas' side, is a disembodied thing that lies ulcerating on a bed next to the suffering knight. Most startling of all is the changing of Parsifal from a man (Michael Kutter) into a woman (Karen Krick) at the moment he rejects the erotic advances of the temptress Kundry (Edith Clever). This apparently signifies Parsifal's transformation from a callow youth to a hero, as Krick's grim, Joan of Arc visage emphasizes. Yet the device, like so many others in the film, is arbitrary. Wagner's opera is merely a pretext for the director, a frame on which to hang a murky, convoluted and, finally, not very original cultural thesis. The performance is led with surprising authority and eloquence by the little-known Swiss conductor Armin Jordan and features splendid singing by Tenor Reiner Goldberg as Parsifal and Mezzo Yvonne Minton as Kundry.

The Ring is more sophisticated and more imaginative. In selecting Chereau, Bayreuth Festival Director Wolfgang Wagner, the composer's grandson, gambled that the French enfant terrible would inject bold ideas into the family opera enterprise. He was right. Chereau began by setting the legend during the social upheaval of the Industrial Revolution. His Rhine maidens are a trio of prostitutes frolicking by a hydroelectric dam, and his Wotan is decked out as a rich capitalist. In 1976 audiences were outraged, but by the end of the run in 1980, when the production was filmed, the Ring was hailed with an hour of bravos at the final curtain.

The Chereau Ring is perhaps even more effective on TV than in the opera house. What is sacrificed in scenic grandeur, such as the looming pile that is Valhalla or Hunding's chilly glass-paned palace, is gained in unorthodox but expressive detail that may be overlooked in the theater. In Wotan's sorrowfully reflective second-act monologue in Die Walkuere, Bass-Baritone Donald McIntyre stands before a full-length mirror; tearing off the patch that covers his lost eye, Wotan searches for his soul and finds only an emptiness that foreshadows the twilight of the gods. For all its mythic dimensions, the Ring is basically a family tragedy, just the thing for the intimacy of the small screen. Conductor Pierre Boulez presides over a transparent reading of the score that is as untraditional in its light texture as Chereau's staging; no wonder the first audiences thought the French had sacked the Festspielhaus.

Now it is 6 1/2 years later; Chereau's Ring seems less outrageous than adventurous, and it has influenced succeeding productions of Wagner at Bayreuth. Syberberg's daring Parsifal, on the other hand, is likely to become a curiosity. Truly cinematic opera remains a Grail-like goal, waiting for its own Parsifal to redeem the promise of artistic salvation.

--By Michael Walsh This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.