If the Royal Opera’s new Parsifal had ended after Act One, you’d be reading right now that it was one of the finest British Wagner productions of recent years. The prelude is played with the curtain down; a rare gesture of faith these days. When the curtain does rise, it’s on a dark vaulted space that might or might not be Wagner’s Grail temple: sublimity from the perspective of a broken and brutal age. Figures in overalls cluster at a bank of screens (Wagner specified no period for the mystery that’s about to unfold). Others tend, gently, to a man who lies bloodied and prone on the floor.

This is an ambitious Parsifal with some hideous, possibly terminal wounds

This is an ambitious Parsifal with some hideous, possibly terminal wounds

This is Amfortas (Christian Gerhaher), and we’ll see, shortly, that there will be no glossing over the physical side of his spiritual pain. In fact, nowhere in this first act does the director Evgeny Titov shy away from the unsettling, appalling implication that the drama is being enacted in reality. The murdered swan twitches; the vast columns of the set (by Etienne Pluss) reconfigure themselves imperceptibly as Parsifal (Stanislas de Barbeyrac) walks forward, amazed. We laugh when he stands up at the wrong moment in the Grail ceremony, because that’s what humans do.

It’s a daring........

© The Spectator