Parsifal, Royal Opera House, review

Wagner's opaque opera resists interpretation, as usual, but the musical quality of this production is as clear as day

Rene Pape as Gurnemanz in Parsifal, royal opera house, wagner
'Magnificent': René Pape as Gurnemanz

Several bemused Telegraph readers accosted me after this performance and flatteringly said that they hoped my review “would tell them what it was all about.” Alas, I’m not sure I can oblige.

Parsifal is, for a start, the most elusive and illusive of texts: a hall of dark mirrors, where meanings and identities implode or dissolve, stretching into infinity. Stephen Langridge’s new staging fares no better than its recent Covent Garden predecessors (directed by Terry Hands, Bill Bryden and Klaus Michael Gruber) at iluminating a path through the murk.

It is set in a forest clearing, designed by Alison Chitty. In the centre is a large white cube, framed by screens which are sometimes translucent, sometimes opaque, inside which the tormented Amfortas lies on a hospital bed. Gurnemanz appears to be some sort of physician, but there is no other indication as to what unites the Grail Brotherhood - its members are simply identikit men in cheap business suits.

During Gurnemanz’s narration, the cube also gratuitously displays tableaux illustrating the back-story (Kundry seducing Amfortas, Klingsor’s castration and so forth) and at the climax of the first Act, it reveals the Grail not as a chalice, but as a Christ-like pubescent boy in a loincloth, whom Titurel stabs in the abdomen. Mobsters armed with pistols stigmatize themselves and rush off into the forest: why?

Klingsor’s magic garden is no such thing, and his flower maidens are night-club floozies. After his revelation of compassion, Parsifal is blinded. He makes his way back to the clearing, where he redeems a Brotherhood turned ragged, proletarian and mutinous. When the healed Amfortas walks off into the sunset with Kundry (not Wagner’s idea), the final image inside the cube is of the hospital bed lying vacant.

None of this convinces: we are left knowing nothing about the Brotherhood’s moral character and there is no sense of the natural world. The overall effect is clunkingly clumsy - Langridge tripping up on his own pretensions - and devoid of the numinous radiance that permeates Antonio Pappano’s shimmeringly beautiful and deliquescent conducting

René Pape’s Gurnemanz is magnificently sung: nobly authoritative, but never pompous or barking, and despite indignities heaped on him by the production, Gerald Finley makes a compelling Amfortas.

Angela Denoke is dramatically electrifying as the chameleon Kundry, even if the end of Act 2 defeated her vocally; Simon O’Neill’s Parsifal, on the other hand, was fully equal to Wagner’s demands, but cut a prosaic figure on stage. An excellent supporting cast and chorus as well as the ravishing orchestral playing boost my rating: that fourth asterisk reflects the performance’s musical quality, not the over-egged production.

Until December 18. Tickets: 0207 304 4000; www.roh.org.uk