`Parsifal' Explored on PBS
By MARY CAMPBELL, AP
NEW YORK (AP) - An opera first performed in 1882 can still be relevant and
controversial in 1999. Such staying power is part of the story of Richard Wagner's
``Parsifal: the Search for the Grail.''
The 90-minute program airing on PBS Wednesday at 8 p.m. EDT isn't only for opera
buffs, says Tony Palmer, the film's director, ``though I think opera buffs will be
thrilled by the singing, and conductor Valery Gergiev is giving the performance of his
life.'' Placido Domingo was filmed singing the title role for the first time with
the Kirov Opera in St. Petersburg, Russia, in May 1997. Violeta Urmana sang Kundry.
But this ``Great Performances'' program also recognizes other, decidedly
non-operatic versions of legends about the grail, said to be the cup Jesus drank from at
the Last Supper and in which his blood was collected when he bled on the cross.
There are clips from the movies ``Monty Python and the Holy Grail,'' ``Indiana
Jones and the Last Crusade,'' Ingmar Bergman's ``The Seventh Seal'' and ``Wagner,'' made
by Palmer for TV, in which Richard Burton plays the composer.
``Search for the Grail'' also hears from Wolfgang Wagner, who runs the Bayreuth
Festival of his grandfather's operas; from Bible scholar Karen Armstrong; and from Robert
Gutman, who wrote the biography ``Wagner'' and connects Wagner's ideas with Adolf
Hitler's.
In the opera, Amfortas, son of the leader of the medieval knights who guard the
grail, has gone into the territory of the evil Klingsor. There he is seduced by Klingsor's
servant, Kundry. Klingsor then grabs Amfortas' magic spear and wounds him.
Only with the retrieval of the spear from his foes can Amfortas be saved. Enter Parsifal,
who instinctively realizes his mission is to regain the spear and thereby give his own
life meaning. The opera begins with the 17-year-old Parsifal being brought before
the knights. Since Domingo, in his late 50s, hardly passes for a teen, an actor was hired
to set the scene.
Domingo also was filmed telling the ``Parsifal'' story in a public garden in
Ravello, south of Naples, Italy. ``Parsifal'' often is performed on Good Friday because
Act 3 takes place on Good Friday, but Domingo says its contemporary relevance goes beyond
Christianity.
``If the cup represents truth and beauty and the human need for truth and
beauty,'' he says, ``then it has something to offer all of us.''
But Gutman insists the opera ``has nothing to do with Christianity. The subject
matter is racial purity.'' He believes Wagner intended Amfortas to represent Germany; the
wound doesn't heal because his blood is tainted by non-Aryans, and healing will come only
when non-Aryans are eliminated from Germany. Not all scholars agree with Gutman.
Ernest Newman, in his study ``The Wagner Operas,'' calls Klingsor the epitome of evil. He
writes that ``the simple old tale of a misfortune befalling the rash Amfortas had to be
made a symbol of sin in general, and its atonement by one made wise and understanding by
pity not merely for an individual but for all men.''
Palmer agrees with Gutman. ``A lot of works of art are very dangerous,'' he
says. ``I think this is very dangerous. Wagner had a view of utopia in which mankind was
pure. It's easy to be used as an excuse, as Hitler did, for ethnic cleansing.
``This doesn't ruin the opera for me,'' he adds. ``Wagner was an appalling man,
very anti-Semitic. And he did write the most wonderful music. I'm not attacking the opera,
which is one of the greatest ever written.
``The opera also contains the extraordinary message that, through sacrifice, we
can achieve love and forgiveness. Domingo quotes what people sing in the opera: ```Through
suffering, understanding. Through understanding, compassion. Through compassion,
love.' ``I think, in the end, that is what the film leaves you with. I hope so,
anyway.''
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