2023-09-04 17:50:09
Flowery love affairs: Excerpt from Klingsor’s magic garden in the new production of Parsifal at the Bayreuth Festival 2023 Image: AP
Botany for Wagnerians: What blooms in Klingsor’s magic garden invites you to make relevant associations and ranges from flower girls to botanical brothels.
A monstera, of course. Her painted flower hangs large and greenish over the stage of the Bayreuth Festival Hall, behind her decoratively slashed foliage twines, which is why members of this genus are also called “window leaves”. Plants from the aroid family (Araceae) have to be used from time to time because of their inflorescence stems, which invite relevant associations, when the flower is intended to allude to lewdness – as on these pages recently in the case of the titanic arum, the most massive of the Araceae.
Ulf von Rauchhaupt
Editor in the “Science” section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.
And so here, in the second act of the current Bayreuth new production of Richard Wagner’s “Parsifal”, in the scene in which the magician Klingsor populates his magical garden with a group of flower girls who are supposed to seduce the hero and thus render him harmless.
#Botany #Wagnerians #Klingsors #plants