An unforgettable evening, five hours and fifteen minutes, with intermissions, seeing one of the epitomes of opera at the Wiener Staatsoper tonight. Superb singing of all the major roles in Wagner's Parsifal, especially the strong and passionate rendition of Amfortas, sung by Falk Struckmann. But the conductor, Christian Thielemann, drew the loudest roar from the audience at the end, with many curtain calls and a bouquet tossed onstage for him. He elicited consistent clarity and warmth from the orchestra, with elegant effortlessness and economy, almost never even cuing the singers. The set and staging were consistenly inventive and hovered at times on the verge of kitsch, which was very cool. In Act II, where Parsifal encounters and ultimately resists the seductions of the flower girls, a disco ball twirls overhead. The spear that will ultimately heal Amfortas, a glowing Star Wars - like object in this production, could have been an unfortunate cliché, but the direction was sensitive and convincing enough to steer clear of such an obvious association.
Afterwards, walking through the underground to the U-Bahn line going to my apartment, I encountered one of the stars scattered throughout inner Vienna, set in concrete, like the ones in Hollywood---but the Vienna stars are for composers, like this one commemorating Alfred Schnittke. Surely there's one somewhere for György Ligeti...when I find it I'll post the photo of that star as well. Schnittke took over the professorship at the Hamburg Hochschule für Musik when Ligeti retired. They are two of my favorite composers.
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