This is the critical moment in Parsifal not only for the character, who must experience crisis and transformation (albeit incomplete) in about eight minutes, but for the singer of the role. It also represents, better perhaps than any other comparably brief passage in music, the fin-de-siecle moment at which tonal instability could be stretched no further before its moorings snapped and it was washed out into the sea of atonality. The harmonic chaos induced by Kundry's kiss never fails to shock me after sixty years of acquaintance with this work. Against an orchestral turbulence in which Wagner, with Tristan's agonies as preparation, magically keeps nauseatingly vertiginous harmony under such control that Schoenberg spent a lifetime trying to one-up him (sorry, Arnold, but the tone-row gimmick is no substitute for Wagner's harmonic intuition), the interpreter of the innocent fool has to show us the young man's world being turned upside down and inside out in a collision of sexuality and spirituality that, as far as I know, stands unique in opera and in art in general.
It's fortunate for tenors that the complex emotions of this scene are so graphically depicted in the orchestra. There's no danger of our mistaking this music for a fun night at the opera no matter what the singer does. But what the singer does still matters greatly, and Wagner asks him to do many things that separate the dramatic tenor men from the wannabe boys. Both Domingo and Kaufmann could reasonably be called wannabes. I'm more disturbed here than I've sometimes been by Domingo's Spanish-inflected German, but am even more bothered by the incongruity between his lovely Latin lyric tenor voice and the psychic agony it's being asked to depict. Kaufmann's dark timbre which, at least briefly during his prime years (represented here, I think) led many of us to see him as the great heldentenor hope, sounds much more idiomatic in this music, and his German is of course unexceptionable. I very much enjoyed him in this role as heard at the Met a few years after this recording was made, but I don't hear much dramatic tension or specificity in his performance here. It's just eight minutes, but eight minutes that don't allow the tenor to relax and just sing for even a moment.
Not everyone can be Melchior or Vickers, but any number of tenors, not all of them paragons of sheer vocalism, have extracted more meaning from this music than these two. Of the two, I'll take Kaufmann, who at least doesn't sound as if he was scheduled to sing Rigoletto when the Gilda came down with laryngitis and Parsifal was substituted at the last minute.