“Put deed and song where they belong,” Wagner’s great master singer instructs the aspirant Walther. However —
The perils, or rather the trade-offs that result when opera singers are cast by celebrity and physical attributes rather than vocal appropriateness are evident in Jonas Kaufmann’s Parsifal at the Met. Parsifal is a guilless youth. Kaufmann has a legitimately tenorial but neverthelss dark and mature voice.
Kaufmann is being recruited for Wagnerian roles above all because he is a box office draw, but in addition because he can produce the requisite volume. There simply aren’t enough viable tenors around to sustain this rep. His sound was not really clarion enough for Siegmund when he sang it here two years ago and it certainly isn’t youthful enough for Parsifal. But he is tall and slim and so he can spend much of Francois Girard’s production shirtless in a way that other singers could not.
And yet, all that said—why be doctrinaire about it? For one thing his enunciation of the German text goes a long way. For another, despite some telltale signs of vocal wear in the early parts of the opera—Wagner will do that to you— Kaufmann’s piano singing in act 3 could serve as every type of redemption.
But if you want to hear what a true Parsifal voice really is, listen to Sandor Konya’s many broadcasts from the 1960s.