Fassbaender's Search for the Holy Grail

The former mezzo stages Parsifal in Frankfurt

The Kiss: Ian Koziara (Parsifal), Jennifer Holloway (Kundry) Picture © Monika Rittershaus

In the three decades since she retired from singing, Brigitte Fassbaender has directed more than 90 opera productions - surely an all-time record for a singer-turned-director. With that depth of experience behind her, she has now turned her attention to Parsifal, Wagner’s valedictory masterpiece, whose leading female role, the ‘wild woman’ Kundry, Fassbaender never performed on stage.

After one of the most remarkable singing careers in concert and opera, Fassbaender the director started at the bottom - working in some of Germany’s tiniest theatres with young singers, many of whom she later mentored during her 13-year tenure as general manager and artistic director of the Tiroler Landestheater in Innsbruck. I saw little of her early directorial work and missed her 1993 Der Ferne Klang for Opera North, her only production to date for a British company. But I count myself fortunate to have seen several of her stagings for Oper Frankfurt, including a beautiful Ariadne auf Naxos in 2013 and an equally impressive Capriccio in 2018, as well as her brilliantly Warhol-esque realisation of Britten’s Paul Bunyan in 2016. Her work at Frankfurt has blossomed in collaboration with the leading German set and costume designer Johannes Leiacker.

Their new Parsifal is something of a mixed bag, however. Although Fassbaender saved Wagner’s final testament until after she had tackled Tristan und Isolde, Lohengrin and Der Ring des Nibelung, this so-called ‘sacred’ music-drama is arguably the hardest nut to crack in the entire operatic canon. The story of how a ‘pure fool’ stumbles on the failing knights of the Holy Grail, resists temptation in a magic garden and becomes the Saviour of all has a clear enough narrative, but Wagner’s text carries so much psychological, political and philosophical baggage that it’s hardly surprising so many productions lose the plot. And yet few directors can resist the challenge: Parsifal is one of operatic Everests to be climbed because it is there.