Parsifal in the Metaverse

PARSIFAL at OPERA VLAANDEREN is a musical triumph that drowns in visual excess. With its tension between music and image – between transcendence and technology – this production is a true reflection of our times in a world overflowing with stimuli.

© Annemie Augustijns / OBV

Algorithmic imagination
It is only fitting that a production of Parsifal, Wagner's “Bühnenweihfestspiel”, confronts us with new possibilities for staging an opera. Since its premiere in Bayreuth in 1882, Parsifal has always been more than just a musical work. It is an opera that raises questions about philosophy and religion, an opera that would raise important questions about how to stage an opera and thus be at the cradle of important theatrical developments in the 20th century. After the Second World War, each generation seems to have recreated the work for its own time: Wieland Wagner's minimalism stripped the work of its mythological trappings in the 1950s and presented it as a meditation on redemption; Hans-Jürgen Syberberg turned it into a cinematic drama full of psychoanalysis, symbolism and Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the 1980s; Calixto Bieito placed the Grail community in Covid times in a post-apocalyptic landscape populated by zombies (a kind of Walking Dead Parsifal) and now, at Opera Vlaanderen, Susanne Kennedy and Markus Selg carry Parsifal into the post-digital age by condemning him to an aesthetic of algorithmic imagination.

A musical triumph
If the staging led to division (we will come back to that later), this was certainly not the case with the music. Conducted by Alejo Pérez, the Symfonisch Orkest Opera Ballet Vlaanderen played with great clarity - a transparency of sound that Wagner himself would not have advocated when he composed the piece with the acoustics of the Festspielhaus in mind. Whereas in Bayreuth the orchestra sits below the stage, allowing the music to blend into a mystical soundscape, here the orchestral sound was open and exposed: refined strings, softly glowing brass and fresh-breathing woodwinds. Pérez's tempi were supple; he pulsed gently through the four-hour score in one long breath. One could hear how Wagner's harmonies never rest, but are constantly moving, always evolving – music as an atmospheric phenomenon.

The Choir and Children's Choir of Opera Ballet Vlaanderen have probably never sounded better. The final chorus was exceptionally heartfelt and radiant: redemption not through faith, but through pure, sublime beauty of sound.

© Annemie Augustijns / OBV

A Parsifal in ten days
At the centre of it all was Christopher Sokolowski, who made his role debut as Parsifal following Benjamin Bruns' sudden departure – a role he learned in ten days, according to his own account (the press release mentioned three weeks). The result was nothing short of astonishing. His voice - clear, open, with a core of steel - conveyed both innocence and latent authority. His natural naivety was moving: not a seasoned messiah, but a boy who discovers his compassion step by step, amazed at the world he must save.

Sokolowski's Parsifal is in the tradition of lyric tenors who approach the role from Lohengrin rather than Tristan: lighter in tone, fresher in spirit. One couldn't help thinking of the young Peter Hofmann, or Jonas Kaufmann in his early years. This first Parsifal will be certainly not be his last and if his star keeps rising it seems only inevitable that Bayreuth, always in need of new saviours, will invite him sooner or later (let's get that out of the way).

Sokolowski was surrounded by a strong cast: Albert Dohmen, the Wagner veteran, gave Gurnemanz, father abbot and unreliable narrator in one, the authority that this leading role demands of its interpreter. His narration sounded as if it had been carved from oak. Kartal Karagedik gave Amfortas a poignant intensity, with a voice and delivery full of pain and longing. Dshamilja Kaiser was a fascinating Kundry, but she was plagued, more than the other singers, by the almost total absence of an effective stage direction. The direction offered her little more than the opportunity to sing her lines, which she did with a rich, physical timbre that encompassed all aspects of her character but that did not save her Kundry from really coming to life. Werner Van Mechelen's Klingsor cut through the digital scenery with sharp articulation - a human curse in an inhuman world.

© Annemie Augustijns / OBV

Welcome to the Vortex
The setting for the story of the Grail community is a kind of vortex: a world in which digital and physical reality converge. We see a kind of nativity scene behind which an almost inexhaustible amount of AI-generated images are projected. In the centre is Parsifal, sitting in an illuminated capsule, a kind of igloo, from which he observes the events. In the first act, he remains completely passive – we see the result of the swan he kills in hallucinatory AI: a creature with two heads and three legs, floating in a digital wasteland (apparently there was no time or budget for iteration in the prompt design).

The staging works best in the third act when Parsifal, like in a 1970s science fiction film, shoots through space and, on his way to enlightenment, sees the Hindu god Shiva and some Greek gods pass by. The religious manifests itself in various forms, not unusual in a Parsifal staging. This journey leads to the final scene in which Parsifal, now enlightened, ascends with his igloo. The saviour redeems himself and the world (the Grail community). Behind him, a dove flutters in AI kitsch. (Wieland Wagner would turn in his grave. At the insistence of Bayreuther Parsifal maestro Hans Knappertsbusch, he once reinstated the dove he had deliberately omitted from the final scene. But he did so in his own way: he had the bird appear so high up in the stage roof that only the conductor could see it; the audience did not see the animal. Wieland did not like to emphasise the obvious.)

© Annemie Augustijns / OBV

Total theatre and the collapse of time
Kennedy and Selg's pursuit of a form of total theatre – in which sound, image, body, text and technology become one – could, on paper, tie in with the sacred, sensory dimension of Parsifal. Yet, when seeing the result, one's thoughts turn rather to other, more successful examples of total theatre, such as Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Die Soldaten, in which time is 'flattened': a theatre in which everything happens simultaneously, in which cause and effect disappear.

Such a concept could also work for Wagner. In his work, characters and their actions are never confined to the ‘now’. Flashbacks, flash-forwards and the present coexist. In Parsifal, the traditional theatre of action and psychological motive disappears. What remains is a mystical, process in which music and time coincide. When the action in the third act slows down to a near standstill, Wagner achieves a form of timelessness that is closer to meditation than to drama. A staging that successfully elaborates on this 'flattened time' should therefore not add more images or information, but rather remove them and create space for stillness and contemplation.

The AI-generated images, intended to blur the line between simulation and reality, often look like visuals from a video game from twenty years ago. The images come and go but rarely have any meaning. Jay Scheib's Parsifal in Bayreuth suffered from the same problem: new technology that conceals rather than reveals. One succumbs to the temptation to use new means as an end in themselves, while the real curiosity about the visual, about what images can add to music that is already so evocative in itself, is lacking.

© Annemie Augustijns / OBV

Due to the continuous stream of images, Wagner's last opera gets lost in a pixelated landscape in which the sacred fades into decorative spectacle. Eventually, one wonders why the creators did not simply use stock videos and photos: they would have contributed just as much – or just as little – but would at least have been of better quality. Paradoxically, Kennedy and Selg's post-digital total theatre narrows the view: the AI reduces Wagner's universe to an aesthetic of the exterior – a screen that obscures the view of the inner world. 

This Parsifal-in-abundance was the opposite of the previous production of Wagner's last opera that Opera Vlaanderen presented. In 2013 and 2018, Tatjana Gürbaca provided Parsifal with a extreme austere staging by bathing an empty stage in bright white light for the duration of the entire opera. That was not ideal either, but at least her Parsifal was supported by ideas that she had formed about the work. That underlying layer of ideas seems to be absent here. 

© Annemie Augustijns / OBV

Adolphe Appia and the innovation of opera staging
Parsifal was once a source of inspiration for real theatrical innovation. Adolphe Appia, who attended the premiere in Bayreuth in 1882, was completely mesmerised by it: he saw Wagner's work not as a sacred ritual, but as a blueprint for modern theatre - light, movement and architecture in harmony with music. Appia's vision led to some great revolutions of the 20th century: Edward Gordon Craig's symbolic spaces, Bertold Brecht's alienation, Robert Wilson's sculptural lighting.

Against this backdrop, Kennedy and Selg's digital images feel strangely conservative. GenAI is used in a clumsy way here; it is not a new language, but simply a brush with a manufacturing defect. A more innovation-oriented production would involve, for example, AI interacting with artists, responding to the orchestra and modulating its textures in real time. (Perhaps the AI Ring in Bayreuth next year can achieve something here – we await this with some reservation). 

© Annemie Augustijns / OBV

Between transcendence and technology
Musically, this Parsifal is a triumph: warm, balanced, spiritually charged. Visually, it drowns in excess. With this tension between music and image – between transcendence and technology – this production is a true reflection of our times, in which the search for meaning in a world of excessive stimuli can be a challenge in itself. The accusation of excess would not have sounded strange to Wagner. After all, he was accused of the same thing: his music was said to overwhelm the senses and thereby paralyse the mind instead of uplifting it. As far as the latter is concerned, we could see that the visuals did indeed paralyse the mind at times, but the music uplifted it again, as always with a musically excellent performance of Parsifal. 

PARSIFAL, Richard Wagner / Opera Ballet Vlaanderen, Antwerp 11 October 2025

Parsifal: Christopher Sokolowski
Kundry: Dshamilja Kaiser
Gurnemanz: Albert Dohmen
Amfortas: Kartal Karagedik
Klingsor: Werner Van Mechelen

Concept: Susanne Kennedy & Markus Selg
Direction: Susanne Kennedy
Scenography and video-design: Markus Selg

Conductor: Alejo Pérez
Orchestra: Symfonisch Orkest Opera Ballet Vlaanderen
Choir: Koor Opera Ballet Vlaanderen
Kinderkoor Opera Ballet Vlaanderen

EPILOGUE:

​WAGNER & AI
When the first generative AI became available a few years ago, allowing the general public to easily create their own images, I was triggered. My curiosity about what images to add to Richard Wagner's fascinating musical dramas allowed me to let my imagination run wild by simply pressing a button.
​
What would the world of Der Ring des Nibelungen look like in Steampunk style?
Das Rheingold as a Gothic horror story?
What if Cthulu appeared in a Wagner opera?
Der Ring des Nibelungen as comic book or
Operas as LEGO boxes?

​You name it, the possibilities were seemingly endless.

​PARSIFAL & AI
Inspired by Parsifal, and as a postscript to the performance described above, come the following AI-generated images. They are images from a shadow world, hallucinatory in atmosphere. They have something sketchy about them that suggests something definitive. You can finish what you see in your head. And to be honest, I miss that aspect, an imperfection and dreamy elusiveness that arouses curiosity and fascination, in many artistic outputs, in videos and theatre, where AI imagery currently is incorporated.

- Wouter de Moor