Mea Culpa

Set against the backdrop of a superlative Ayurvedic clinic where death has been all but eradicated, the first act of Richard Wagner’s "Parsifal" is rehearsed in a therapy-oriented version. We follow the patient Christoph Schlingensief (C. S.) and his fiancée through the various stages of treatment at the clinic. Behind the façade, however, death lurks: despite the best therapy, death is in the air everywhere. But where there is death, there is also opera, and the clinic where an opera was being rehearsed now becomes the subject of the opera itself, which is performed in that very clinic. C. S., who has been told his situation is hopeless, recalls his vision of a festival theater in Africa and takes charge of the clinic’s opera production himself. In his production, the patients leave the clinic and set out for Africa: the projection of an intoxicating escape from reality appears as a saving alternative. Rehearsal for "Parsifal": “Klingsor’s Enchanted Castle,” a place of boundlessness and sin. Yet despite all the dictatorial efforts of the directing team, no genuine excess emerges. In the end, however, C.S. finds the entire clinic community behind a red curtain, engaged in a nativity play that can only be described as perverse. Like Parsifal before Kundry’s kiss, he recoils and confesses his guilt as both a human being and a director: “It is I who created all this misery!” The limits of tolerance have been crossed. Now it is time for penance. At the opening of the African Festival Theater, the secular opening gala and the realm of the dead intermingle: familiar yet long-deceased figures wish to take C.S. with them to the other world. But he would rather experience the other world in this life—that is, on stage. And so the third act ends not with redemption, but with Isolde’s “Liebestod” aria, which celebrates life and the theater, where one can even survive death. 

Recording from the Burgtheater, 2009