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 Ian Koziara as Parsifal and Nicholas Brownlee as Amfortas and the Frankfurt Opera Ensemble (Photo: Monika Rittershaus)

If, like me, you thought of Brigitte Fassbaender as a mezzo who recently turned to directing, you haven’t been paying attention. Fassbaender made the switch in 1995, and since then has held Intendant positions at Brunswick and Innsbruck. Nor is she new to Wagner, having directed a Ring Cycle at the Tiroler Festspiele Erl between 2021 and 2024. Her Parsifal at Frankfurt Opera is a lucid and psychologically engaging affair, visually conservative but with some interesting interpretive twists.

Montsalvat is represented through Monet’s paintings of Rouen Cathedral, projected on the curtain through the Prelude, and its gradual decay through his more abstract takes on the same scene later on. The Holy Spring too is Monet, an image of the Seine as the backdrop in the first act. Otherwise, the setting (Johannes Leiacker sets and costumes) for the outer acts resembles a hotel with 1980s-style décor, Gurnemanz (Andreas Bauer Kanabas) as maître d, and Amfortas (Nicholas Brownlee) and Titurel (Alfred Reiter) as elderly guests. The stage rotates for the second scene, revealing the interior to be a ball room with a hole blown out of the back wall, in which stands a huge chalice, towering over the singers.

Nicholas Brownlee as Amfortas and the Frankfurt Opera Ensemble (Photo: Monika Rittershaus)

Fassbaender draws inspiration from a line in the first act, when Parsifal (Ian Koziara) asks, in all innocence, ‘Who is the Grail?’. Fassbaender answers that the Grail is Kundry (Jennifer Holloway), an idea she supports through Carl Jung’s suggestion that the Grail is a symbol of the Eternal Feminine. (Fassbaender never sang the role, incidentally, though she was approached to several times.) Kundry appears during the Grail Ritual in a wedding dress, invoking a complex psycho-sexual dynamic much more interesting than Wagner’s morality of virtue through chastity. Klingsor (Iain MacNeil) appears before the end of the first act, dressed as a showman version of Gurnemanz. He transforms the Grail Hall into a film set, which becomes the setting for the second act. The Flowermaidens appear as Kundry’s bridesmaids, and their scene plays out as a fashion show satire of the Grail Ritual, all suitably tawdry.

For the return to the exterior of the Monstalvat in the last act, much of the scene has been transformed into a graveyard. The previously scruffy and long-haired Parsifal returns looking much smarter and is commanding from the moment of his return. But Fassbaender saves her biggest surprise for the closing moments: Kundry and Amfortas not only both survive but embrace and then leave together, presumably to live happily ever after. That’s a problematic twist, one that removes the self-sacrifice element of the salvation, though it succeeds in focussing attention on Kundry.

Jennifer Holloway as Kundry und Ian Koziara as Parsifal (Photo: Monika Rittershaus)

Musically, the production is a triumph on all counts. The lead singers are a testament to the German Fest system: a world-class cast drawn almost entirely from salaried employees of the company. The imposing baritone of Kanabas as Gurnemanz is the perfect foil for the brighter and more dynamic tenor of Koziara as Parsifal. Jennifer Holloway is well-chosen to portray Kundry in Fassbaender’s elevated conception of the role. She has the ideal stage presence, often fragile but never demure, and her voice abounds in Wagnerian qualities – look out for her Sieglinde this summer at Bayreuth. Nicholas Brownlee is luxury casting as Amfortas – he’s another upcoming Wagner singer worth seeking out. Excellent singing, too, from the Chorus of Frankfurt Opera, especially the ladies as the Flowermaidens, a scene that rarely sounds as precise or as radiant.

Thomas Guggeis, the new (since 2023) General Music Director of Frankfurt Opera, takes a modern, no-nonsense approach to the score and the results are impressive, propulsive and disciplined but also muscular and impassioned. The orchestra plays wonderfully for him, bringing out rarely heard details of the inner textures. The cast wore microphones and a note in the programme indicated that these were for a recording on the Naxos label. That could prove an important addition to the catalogue, a uniformly well-sung Parsifal with a conductor who has genuinely distinctive and coherent ideas.