Since it was created at the Coliseum in 1999, Nikolaus Lehnhoff's staging of Wagner's final opera has been seen across Europe and the US, but it has not been revived by English National Opera until now. The production has inevitably evolved over those 12 years, and the version of Parsifal that has returned to London differs in some details from what was seen here before. What has remained intact, though, is the remarkable power and conviction of Lehnhoff's treatment, and its disturbing post-industrial, post-religious world.
The visual landscape this Parsifal inhabits is purged of all Christian references. The text, of course, remains stuffed with them: redemption, holy blood, guilt, sin and suffering. But the power of ritual that is depicted on stage, and which sustains this raggle-taggle crowd of grail knights in dusty fatigues, is blissfully much less specific. Lehnhoff subverts the ending, too: Parsifal does not assume leadership of the knights, as Wagner indicates, but instead leaves them to it, walking away with Kundry along the railway line that leads into a dark, uncertain future, an endgame without an end.
As before, too, the dramatic power of the production – with sets by Raimund Bauer and costumes by Andrea Schmidt-Futterer – is matched in the music. Mark Wigglesworth's conducting is wonderfully poised, timelessly spacious in the outer acts. If he is less unbuttoned than he might be in the second act, then the production also seems less sharply focused there: despite their testicle-like hairpieces, Lehnhoff's Flowermaidens are a pretty frumpy bunch, and the carapace-like layers that Jane Dutton's Kundry has to moult before she can get down to seducing Parsifal don't help the party go with a swing, either.
Dutton is a replacement for Iréne Theorin, who was originally cast as Kundry; her one-dimensional vocal performance is the only weak link in an otherwise superb lineup, in which the standard is set by John Tomlinson as Gurnemanz, with diction and projection that make surtitles superfluous. Iain Paterson's Amfortas is almost equally fine, depicting the cringing, broken king of this production with touching vividness. Stuart Skelton is Parsifal, not always moving around the stage as convincingly as he might (though the heavy black armour he wears in the last act hardly helps), but with a voice of authentic Heldentenor scope, in a staging that is as good as any Wagner seen in London in the last 20 years.
