Scheib's Bayreuth Parsifal dazzles visually, stumbles in pit
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- Jay Scheib's 2023 Parsifal at Bayreuth received a split reception: half-hearted booing for the staging amid energetic applause for the musicians
- The staging reimagines the grail as a large blue crystal with a light show, gives Kundry an avatar who seduces Gurnemanz, and uses stage-wide filmed close-ups of Amfortas's wound being unwrapped, poked, and sewn shut
- Klingsor appears as a "dodgy uncle in pink velvet" dry-humping the stolen spear, while flower maidens inhabit a luridly decorated concrete dungeon where corpses lie on bloody mattresses and Parsifal is stripped to tween-style pyjamas
- Miina-Liisa Värelä's Kundry exuded "goth energy" with chilling low notes and liquid ferocity, while Andreas Schager's Parsifal tended toward fragmentary notes and syllables when not singing at full pelt
- Pablo Heras-Casado's orchestra proved inconsistent in the festival's softly lucid acoustic — unreliable intonation and ensemble in Wagner's chordal motifs — though the symphonic fabric elsewhere reached "almost infinite richness"
- Michael Volle as Amfortas roared and raged but was most compelling in his painfully lyrical Act 3 outbursts, while Georg Zeppenfeld, Vitalij Kowaljow, and Jordan Shanahan drew individual praise
- The production runs at the Bayreuth Festival until 25 August
Why it matters: Bayreuth is the only theatre for which Wagner composed Parsifal, and its acoustic famously lays bare the smallest orchestral flaws. A revival that dazzles the eye but leaves the pit unreliable in those conditions undercuts the festival's core selling point — a unified spiritual-musical experience — and suggests the 2023 production's provocative visual identity has not aged into clarity over its revival run.
