Parsifal

4 stars Festival Theatre, Edinburgh
Tim Ashley

Tuesday August 13 2002

Peter Stein's staging of Wagner's Parsifal opens with blood dribbling down a frontcloth that looks as if it is made from surgical gauze. Bleeding and wounds - the opera's core images - are flung in our face. What follows exposes the work's innards and the dangerous ideology that informs it.

Much of the opera rests on the fact that the German language of salvation is linked to that of health. Being holy - heilig - equates with being whole - heil . Wounds are consequently emblematic of imperfection, though exposure to the blood of Christ, preserved in the Grail, ensures redemption. Add to this the fact that the blood that the Grail elite worship is of necessity pure and you have an appalling combination.

Stein never lets you forget any of this. Though his production is at times traditional - he keeps the medieval setting - blood and its significance are everywhere. Amfortas's unhealed wound bleeds ceaselessly with clinical realism. The Grail hall glows with it when he exposes the holy relics. Even Klingsor's garden turns red when Kundry makes her sexual assault on Parsifal.

Everything conductor Claudio Abbado does takes you completely by surprise. The outer acts are swift and urgent, transcendental but never religiose. Act two has a lingering sensuality. The playing by the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester astonishes, though there are flaws in the singing. Thomas Moser's Parsifal fails to suggest any transition from innocence to enlightenment. As Gurnemanz, Hans Tschammer tires by the end. Albert Dohmen's Amfortas, though moving, does not efface memories of Thomas Hampson at Covent Garden last year. The great performances are Violeta Urmana's sexy Kundry and Eike Wilm Schulte's lethal, sibilant Klingsor. For all its flaws, however, this is Parsifal as it should be - mystic, mesmeric and foul.