While Wagner’s final opera traditionally commands the best from the greatest musicians of any era, the visual presentation of Parsifal grows ever more discursive due to the story’s open-ended symbolism and musical expanse that stage directors rush in to fill. This 2023 production promised technology with new visual vistas but with results so questionable in the Blu-ray format that the simultaneously released sound-only CD release is far more recommendable, and a significant addition to the Parsifal discography.

Savaged by critics and booed by audiences, the Jay Scheib production – said to be about finding hope amid the potentially apocalyptic ‘end of days’ – eludes the visual medium: an entire ‘augmented reality’ element was available to live-performance audiences, enabled by the necessary goggles connected to a digital feed of visual imagery, but is absent on Blu-ray (to judge from performance reviews). In addition, onstage video cameras captured much of the action, magnifying it on large backdrop stage screens. That effect is only occasionally glimpsed on Blu-ray and not missed, since home viewers already have the real-people close-ups that theatre audiences did not. At best, the projected images conspire to create welcome visual disorientation that comes with the opera’s coexisting netherworlds. We can share the confusion of the hapless saviour Parsifal and the tortured witch-of-sorts Kundry as they move between the monk-like knights of the Holy Grail (Acts 1 and 3) and the profane domain of the magician Klingsor with his seductive flowermaidens (Act 2).

Scenic elements on the Holy Grail side include a stage-dominating circular sunburst – an object resembling the decor in some 1960s hotel – that moves up and around during significant religious moments, later over a pool of greenish water. It lacks any majesty. On Blu-ray, Act 2 is the most successful. Klingsor appears inside what resembles a large, red wound-like slit in the set, which ultimately opens up into a richly decorated multi-level set for the flowermaidens and Kundry to seduce Parsifal. The onstage camera effectively shows close-ups of the flowermaidens as they persuade Parsifal. Act 3 presents a post-apocalyptic Gurnemanz climbing out of what appears to be abandoned construction machinery, where he apparently sleeps. After Parsifal arrives, he wades in the pool, comforts Kundry, and handles and abruptly mishandles the Holy Grail, which is actually a large dark blue crystal.

Costumes are often aggressively eccentric. The Grail inhabitants wear shirts with blotches that could be stylised wounds or crushed poppies. Men wear tunics that might also be skirts. In Act 2, Klingsor casts spells by donning a malevolent-looking horned helmet (weren’t such things out of fashion 70 years ago?) while Parsifal emerges with silly-looking valentine hearts stuck to his T-shirt.

Lacking a complete picture of the production, one can only guess what was envisioned. Even the most tech-savvy production teams can be bumped out of the driver’s seat when stage machinery starts telling them what to do. On the casting front, does one legitimately complain when Andreas Schager’s supposedly youthful Parsifal looks a bit older than the Grail guardian Gurnemanz, as portrayed by Georg Zeppenfeld? Or that the tortured Amfortas (played by Derek Welton) looks younger than anybody? The one singer who makes sense on all levels is Elīna Garanča as Kundry, who brings noble charisma to the role plus a richly coloured vocal splendour that’s only taxed in the final moments of Act 2.

The audio-only version of this 2023 Parsifal reveals a musical artistry that’s less apparent on Blu-ray. Schager’s voice isn’t as steady as in the 2016 Berlin DVD (Bel Air Classics, 10/16) but remains capable of great expressive beauty and dramatic truth in Act 3. His reading of ‘The day of greatest anguish’ shows the benefits of his many years singing the role. Zeppenfeld is alive to the crusty, rigid and benevolent sides of Gurnemanz, revealing a particularly affecting upper range in his Act 3 ‘They seek to dedicate’ passage. Derek Welton is in the Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau tradition of Amfortas – extreme anguish conveyed with exceptional elegance. Garanča is particularly flattered by the Bayreuth acoustic, and is in more articulate form than in her Parsifal recording from the Vienna State Opera under Philippe Jordan (Sony, 4/24).

The most distinctive element, both on Blu-ray and CD versions, is conductor Pablo Heras-Casado. Though Wagner gave Parsifal the fancy moniker Bühnenweihfestspiel, Heras-Casado treats it like what it is – an opera with sharp dramatic contours and distant echoes of Meyerbeer and Verdi – full of respect but not reverence, and miles away from the contemplative Hans Knappertsbusch recordings. Heras-Casado blows the incense out of Parsifal. However symbolic the characters may be, they each explore elemental regions of the human psyche.