Parsifal (1982)

Director:

Hans-Jürgen Syberberg

Writer:

Richard Wagner (text)

Release Date:

1 December 1983 (Australia)

Genre:

Drama | Music

Plot:

Richard Wagner's last opera has remained controversial since its first performance for its unique, and...

Plot Keywords:

Richard Wagner | Opera | Filmed Opera | Based On Opera | Myth

Awards:

1 win

Cast

  (Credited cast)

Armin Jordan	...	Amfortas
Robert Lloyd	...	Gurnemanz
Martin Sperr	...	Titurel
Michael Kutter	...	Parsifal 1
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Edith Clever	...	Kundry
Stephanie Corler
Anahita Farroschad
Miriam Feldman
Johanna Fink
Thomas Fink	...	2nd Squire
Rudolph Gabler	...	1st Knight of the Grail
Monika Gärtner	...	1st Squire
Reiner Goldberg	...	Parsifal (voice)
Alexandra Grunsberg
Aage Haugland	...	Klingsor
Eva Kessler
Vivian Kintisch
Catharina Klemm
Judith Klemm
Karin Krick	...	Parsifal 2
Sabine Kueckelmann
Martina Lanzinger
David Luther	...	Young Parsifal
Isabelle Malbrun
David Meyer	...	3rd Squire
Yvonne Minton	...	Kundry (voice)
Antonia Preser
Catharina Preser
Caroline Riollot
Guillemette Riollot
Sofia Romani
Bruno Romani-Versteeg	...	3rd Knight of the Grail
Judith Schmidt	...	4th Squire
Wolfgang Schöne	...	Amfortas (voice)
Claudia Schumann
Bettina Stiller
Amelie Syberberg	...	Bearer of the Grail
Anya Tölle
Urban von Klebelsberg	...	2nd Knight of the Grail
Sophie von Uslar
Anette Woll

Also Known As:

Parsifal (France)

Runtime:

USA:255 min

Country:

France | West Germany

Language:

German

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Dolby

Certification:

Australia:G | UK:PG | USA:PG

Company:

Gaumont

Trivia:

Among the severed heads at the base of the broken phallus in Klingsor's castle (symbolizing the self-castration that gave the wizard his powers - this is one weird opera) are those of Karl Marx, Wagner himself...and Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher who was one of Wagner's most devoted champions until he broke with him over this very opera (he despised Christianity as a "slave" religion and thought Wagner had caved in to bourgeois morality).

Movie Connections:

Version of Parsifal (1999) (TV)

Quite literally, a travesty

It must be assumed that those who praised this film ("the greatest filmed opera ever," didn't I read somewhere?) either don't care for opera, don't care for Wagner, or don't care about anything except their desire to appear Cultured. Either as a representation of Wagner's swan-song, or as a movie, this strikes me as an unmitigated disaster, with a leaden reading of the score matched to a tricksy, lugubrious realisation of the text.

It's questionable that people with ideas as to what an opera (or, for that matter, a play, especially one by Shakespeare) is "about" should be allowed anywhere near a theatre or film studio; Syberberg, very fashionably, but without the smallest justification from Wagner's text, decided that Parsifal is "about" bisexual integration, so that the title character, in the latter stages, transmutes into a kind of beatnik babe, though one who continues to sing high tenor -- few if any of the actors in the film are the singers, and we get a double dose of Armin Jordan, the conductor, who is seen as the face (but not heard as the voice) of Amfortas, and also appears monstrously in double exposure as a kind of Batonzilla or Conductor Who Ate Monsalvat during the playing of the Good Friday music -- in which, by the way, the transcendant loveliness of nature is represented by a scattering of shopworn and flaccid crocuses stuck in ill-laid turf, an expedient which baffles me. In the theatre we sometimes have to piece out such imperfections with our thoughts, but I can't think why Syberberg couldn't splice in, for Parsifal and Gurnemanz, mountain pasture as lush as was provided for Julie Andrews in Sound of Music...

The sound is hard to endure, the high voices and the trumpets in particular possessing an aural glare that adds another sort of fatigue to our impatience with the uninspired conducting and paralytic unfolding of the ritual. Someone in another review mentioned the 1951 Bayreuth recording, and Knappertsbusch, though his tempi are often very slow, had what Jordan altogether lacks, a sense of pulse, a feeling for the ebb and flow of the music -- and, after half a century, the orchestral sound in that set, in modern pressings, is still superior to this film.