Innocence and Experience

The Staatsoper’s new production of Parsifal – which premièred as part of their annual Easter Festtage – was deeply unsettling, beautifully performed, and in every possible way a tremendous success. It also made a few people very angry. While expressing vocal displeasure with the director is almost a pro forma response these days (just once it would be nice to see the director of a non-traditional production greeted with unanimous cheers) there was a distinct hostility among those members of the audience who, like Parsifal himself at the end of the first act, were unaware that they had just witnessed something extraordinary. Director Dmitri Tcherniakov – whose recent Staatsoper production of Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tsar’s Bride transposed a sixteenth-century Russian story into a twentieth-century television studio and somehow made it work –…