From around the world: Seattle.(North America--Wagner's Parsifal)(Opera Review)

Wagner called his final opera, Parsifal, "ein Buhnenweihfestspiel" (roughly translated as a consecrating stage work), which is, perhaps, one reason Seattle Opera's general director, Speight Jenkins, chose Parsifal as the work with which to inaugurate the company's new opera house, Marion Oliver McCaw Hall. This production, designed by Robert Israel and directed by Francois Rochaix, was a spectacular and auricular success, more profoundly moving because more profoundly humanized than any other I've seen. The relationships --for example, those among Gurnemanz and the Squires, between Gurnemanz and Kundry, and between Gurnemanz and Parsifal--were all made tellingly clear through intelligent direction, good acting and great singing.

In an interview, Israel said that one of the things that intrigues him about Parsifal is its "elusiveness. If you try to pin it down, you kill it." Sets, costumes, lighting and direction respected that elusiveness. Israel's sets were bleakly abstract for Acts I and III, surreal for Act II, employing huge photographic projections of mountains (by Bob and Colleen Bonniol). The audience was pushed and pulled between a mythical world, in which red and white light (designed by Michael Chybowski) flooded the temple that magically erected itself before our eyes, and the touchingly human world in which Gurnemanz gently instructs his Squires or tries to warm Kundry's cold hands and lifeless body.

All the principal singers ...