The Redeemer Reconsidered

When Dmitri Tcherniakov’s production of Parsifal opened in 2015, it was greeted with outrage and adulation in roughly equal measure. Three years later, it has established itself as a fixture of the Staatsoper’s Festtage, and a reliable highlight of the Easter season in Berlin. The staging itself has grown no less unsettling in the intervening years; with each viewing, one comes away with an ever-greater appreciation of the degree to which Mr Tcherniakov has confronted the most problematic aspects of what may be Wagner’s most thematically thorny opera. But for its first outing in the recently refurbished house on Unter den Linden, the Staatskapelle and a first rate cast under the direction of Daniel Barenboim delivered the kind of intensely majestic performance that one must consider themselves fortunate to have experienced at least once…