The stage director Plamen Kartaloff produced “Parsifal” for the first time in Bulgaria. The world-known dramatic soprano Maria Guleghina knows Maestro Kartaloff’s production and she has expressed by herself the wish to take part in the performances of “Parsifal” on 30 January and 1 February, informed us from the press centre of the Sofia Opera and Ballet.
Guleghina is a singer and artist of genius with rich international career. Her path passed through the stages of La scala di Milano, Metropolitan Opera, Royal Opera House – Covent Garden, Mariinsky Theatre, the operas in Vienna and Paris, São Paulo and others.
She has worked together with Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and the conductors Riccardo Muti, Valery Gergiev, Claudio Abbado. Parallel to her artistic activity, Maria Guleghina joined in with a series of social initiatives, she is honorary board member to the International Paralympic Committee and a Goodwill Ambassador to Unicef. On the stage of the Sofia Opera and Ballet, Maria Guleghina will incarnate herself in the role of the sorceress Kundry.
In the opera take part the soloists:
Parsifal – Kostadin Andreev
Amfortas – Atanas Mladenov
Titurel – Petar Buchkov
Gurnemanz – Angel Hristov
Klingsor – Biser Georgiev
Conductor: Constantin Trinks
Set Design: Numen + Ivana Jonke
Costumes: Stanka Vauda
Chorus Master: Violeta Dimitrova
Artistic Lighting: Andrej Hajdinjak
Musical Training: Richard Trimborn
Senior Assistant Director: Vera Beleva
Soloists, chorus and orchestra of the Sofia Opera and Ballet
Over the opera, conceived in conformity with the acoustics and the technique of the Bayreuth Theatre, Wagner started working hard since 1877, but the first drafts of the libretto were made still in 1857. After the premiere, the rights for the production were held for entire thirty years by Wagner’s theatre-temple, so that abroad the opera saw the light of day just in 1914 in Italy. And this ban increased the interest in this “mysterious and mystical work”, about which were written many pages.
In 1913 the monopoly right for the production revoked Wagner’s widow Cosima, wrote the music critic Gaetano Marchesi from Milano. “This was a wise decision, points out the historian. What constitutes the basis of the opera, its literary original source and plot, acquires a special brightness in the light of the author’s musical ideas. The essence of these ideas becomes visible most clearly in the description of the ceremonial rites of the Grail, in the image of the glittering chalice, in the light, coming down from the mysterious heights, illuminating the righteous Christians, and also in the chorales of the knights. Something unheard of till then in the European music, preceding the orchestra of Berlioz, Brahms’ Requiem, close to the Liszt’s “Poems” and Giovanni Gabrieli’s music ...
Here there is also a fear of carnal sin. And, if according to Schopenhauer the sensual delight was an illusion for the human being that he or she handles because of his/her own good, whilst he or she actually answers the need of human kind”, for him, “the student Wagner”, the sex hides still more serious dangers. It is the curse of love, tormenting the human being from the end of the 19th century, almost to exhaustion, to hysteria. This way Kundry, tortured by her instinctive impulses, is rejected by Parsifal. The relations between the sexes here reaches to high tension, which reveals not only a psychological fear or physical pathology, but expresses the mental experiences of the human being too. Of every one of us!” This opera by Wagner possesses a strong theatrical power, a conquering stage influence.”
About “Parsifal” world-known philosophers and thinkers wrote:
Friedrich Nietzsche: “Nobility of feeling, in the greatest depths of music”.
Stephen Ghee: “A hymn of purity and danger …”.
Samir Rahim: “An enchanting and all-forgiving music … Wagner composed as if the soundtrack of heavens”.
The diaries, which remained from Wagner’s wife Cosima, give us a true revelation about the real inspirations of her husband. According to one record in them from 1881, while Wagner was in the early stages of the “sound recording” of “Parsifal”, she noted that they have visited Palermo and most of all the cathedral in Monreale. Both of them were absolutely taken out of equilibrium by the experience from this sight. Each note in “Parsifal” is an attempt to catch and transfer our feeling, when fate makes us stand in front of something so inexplicable.
On 30 January and 1 February at the Sofia Opera and Ballet the performance of “Parsifal” will offer to the connoisseurs a new possibility to hear the music, not subject to analyses, but allowing to experience its transcendentality.
https://www.24chasa.bg/ojivlenie/article/7253486