Culture Magazine
The Vault of Heaven This video of Wagner's Parsifal, shot for Teldec in 1992 at the Berlin Staatsoper is notable for its strong, youthful cast of major Wagner singers and its stark production values.
Harry Kupfer is of the older school that the Germans call regietheater, in that his ideas actually work. Here, he places the valued mystic objects (the Grail, the Spear) in a vast subterranean bank vault, a shifting puzzle box with moving walls and a huge vault door predominating.
This was one of the first "concept" Parsifals released on home video, and its ideas hold up well. The claustrophobic setting is populated by weak, tottering Grail Knights that treat their daily worship as a narcotic fix. Amfortas (Falk Struckmann) is a haggard mess, with a very visible wound in his side.
One day, Parsifal (Poul Elming) blunders into the vault. He is taken to a strange Grail ritual where Amfortas is placed on a sort of metaphorical spear point, and lifted high above the Knights to "trigger" the Grail's magic. Klingsor's realm is a mirror image (on the other side of the vault door.) His "magic garden" is a matrix of televisions populated by vapid models in various stages of undress. At the end of Act II, Parsifal sets off a massive system crash.
The best performance here is Waltraud Meier, caught in her prime as Kundry. Ms. Meier manifests four different faces of this complex character, and hits the big high notes at the end of Act II with clear, ringing tone. She is well-matched with Mr. Elming, whose clear, if slightly pinched tenor is caught before its rapid decline.
Gurnemanz (John Tomlinson) is young and bold, kept youthful by the magic of the Grail. Mr. Tomlinson sings the narration with an artless energy, not always pleasing in timbre but conveying the character's good nature and a kind of bluff bravado. Mr. Struckmann is an excellent Amfortas, combining an excruciating physical performance with rich, warm notes. Gunther von Kannen is slimy yet curiously noble as Klingsor.
Mr. Barenboim is an acclaimed Wagner conductor, caught here on the flip-side of his successful Bayreuth performances of The Ring. He draws clear, differentiated orchestral colors from the Berlin players, highlighting key phrases in the woodwinds and allowing the brass and strings to express the rich colors absent from Mr. Kupfer's visual palette. The Good Friday scene is magical, with a transcendent joy as you realize that these troubled characters have, at last reached journey's end. This makes the funeral march that follows even more terrifying: Wagner's version of the Dies Irae.
The longtime absence of this set from home video is probably due to legal issues in the transfer of the Teldec catalog to its new label, EuroArts. Happily, the deep blacks and bright whites of the original laserdisc image come off cleanly on DVD, with rich tones of darkness set off by the stark lighting. The image never flickers or greys, although the audio recording occasionally overloads its own balance levels. Some buzzing is the result, appearing at key moments.
