Royal Opera House
Gurnemanz – René Pape
First Grail Knight – David
Butt Philip
Second Grail Knight – Charbel
Mattar
First Esquire – Dušica
Bijelič
Second Esquire – Rachel Kelly
Third Esquire – Sipho Fubesi
Fourth Esquire – Luis Gomes
Kundry/Voice from Above –
Angela Denoke
Amfortas – Gerald Finley
Parsifal – Simon O’Neill
Titurel – Robert Lloyd
Klingsor – Sir Willard White
Flowermaidens – Celine Byrne,
Kiandra Howarth, Anna Patalong, Anna Devin, Ana James, Justina Gringyte
Stephen Langridge (director)
Alison Chitty (designs)
Paul Pyant (lighting)
Dan O’Neill (movement)
Thomas Bergmann, Willem
Brasche (video designs)
Royal Opera Chorus and Extra
Chorus (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera
House
Sir Antonio Pappano (conductor)
Yet again, I am afraid, the
Royal Opera House seems to have come up with a Wagner production for those who
are not very interested in Wagner. Thunderous applause issued forth for Sir
Antonio Pappano, when the best that one could say about his conducting was that
it was a bit better than the appalling mess he had latterly made of, say, Götterdämmerung and Die
Meistersinger. I am
told, though I have yet to look at them, that newspaper critics have praised
him to the skies; I wish I could say that that surprised me. There will be some
writers who have a genuine alternative view on this matter, though I admit that
in this case I find it difficult to understand how, but many of our opera
critics seem not to know their Knappertsbusch from their Kempe, still less
their Karajan from their Boulez. Members of the audience are perfectly
entitled, of course, to attend a performance with as little or as much
knowledge as they please, but the whole business of criticism is on very dodgy
ground indeed when one doubts whether some opera writers can even read a score
– let alone bother to do so.
I can only assume that in
some sense, unless the first night performance were entirely different from the
second, audience members and critics had confused some fine orchestral playing
with the conductor’s sense of line, or rather lack thereof. There were even
early signs, I admit, when it seemed as though Pappano might at last have
learned to conduct Wagner. (Surely such an apprenticeship should have been
served long before deigning to try one’s hand at Covent Garden, but anyway…) The
First Act Prelude sounded both beautiful, sometimes luminously so, and
possessed of a decent sense of direction, even if it were far from unclear that
Wagner’s transcendental meaning(s) had been grasped. Yet soon we were back in
the bad old arena of stopping and starting, underlining a motif and failing to
grasp how it might be part of the composer’s fabled ‘art of transition’, let
alone fit into a complex, dynamic, quasi-symphonic web. Has Pappano ever so
much as read, let alone understood, Wagner’s words in Über die Anwendung der Musik auf das Drama?
To be an artwork as music, the new form of dramatic music
must possess the unity of the symphonic movement; this it attains by spreading
itself over the whole drama, in the most intimate cohesion therewith … This
unity centres upon a web of basic themes, which contrast, complete, re-shape,
divorce, and intertwine with one another as in a symphonic movement; yet here,
the requirements of the dramatic action dictate the laws of separation and
combination.
Somehow I doubt it – and that
is even before one considers the complex role played by Wagner’s poem in all of
this. As I said, there were passages in which, on a basic level, continuity was
maintained, and there was some very fine orchestral playing too considered in
isolation, but nothing in Wagner should be considered in isolation. That is the
problem – and of course the ultimate opportunity. This was Wagner conducting
devoid of any understanding of what makes Wagner Wagner – and we can be pluralist
in that, of course. Yet such pluralism does not, or certainly should not,
extend to having Wagner reduced to a slightly Teutonic Verdi. One can only weep
when thinking that the last time Parsifal
was staged at Covent Garden, it was conducted with unassuming greatness by
Bernard Haitink. Sadly it seems that Haitink is destined never to return; in
which case, might we not have someone else, if only occasionally, to do
Wagner’s works a modicum of justice? Barenboim? Thielemann? Gatti? What might
pass muster in a provincial house ought not to have any place on a world stage,
a house once presided over by Haitink, by Sir Colin Davis.
Let us move on, without
enthusiasm, to the production. ‘Stephen Langridge’s production emphasises the
timeless and universal nature of the Parsifal
story,’ claimed the cast list’s ‘quick guide to Parsifal’. I am not at all sure what that is supposed to mean, the
drama of Parsifal lying in an epic
theological struggle between time and eternity. But even if we could somehow
accept that claim – very odd or unspeakably trite; most likely, both – it was
not at all clear how Langridge’s production does anything of the sort. It
certainly seems to retreat from the
mythological, from the questioning, to a weird unspecific specificity, which
gave incoherent answers where answers were the last thing that was required. We
appear to be in a world, not unlike that of Simon
McBurney’s dreadful ENO Magic Flute,
over which a quasi-Scientologist cult rules; yet that potential menace is undermined
by a weird obsession with hospital care. I had thought a friend who attended
the first night was being facetious when he asked whether the production had
been intending a comment on British sanctification of the NHS; now I am not so
sure. Much of the action takes place in something resembling the strange ‘Sex Box’ of Channel 4’s
recent risible television programme. (I wonder indeed whether it were the
worst television programme I have ever seen: four ‘couples’ have sex in a box
in front of a studio audience, though unseen by that audience, after which they
briskly emerge – they are not allotted much time – to answer, or rather not
really to answer, questions put to them by Mariella Frostrup and some alleged
experts. Parody seemed to be absent but who knows?) The box has a bed, on which
scenes from Gurnemanz’s narration – Kundry’s decidedly unerotic ‘seduction’ of
Amfortas, Klingsor’s self-castration – are depicted, since we are clearly
unable to listen to Gurnemanz for ourselves and imagine, still less to play
with past and present, with different modes of perception and understanding, as
Wagner would have us try. Amfortas’s hospital ‘care’ also takes place there.
For some reason, the Grail is
replaced by a little boy, whose side is pierced, echoing Amfortas’s own wounding,
and presumably as some sort of Christ-like reference. Indeed, when we
reencounter this ‘Grail’ in the third act, the boy has grown into a nubile
young man, still in his underpants, still ready to be pierced, though that does
not happen and instead he simply retreats inside his box. The way Titurel and
some of the knights touch the boy’s wound suggests paedophilia, but that does
not seem to be carried through, so maybe it is just another unfortunate
misjudgement. Parsifal has arrived dressed like a vagrant, with more than a
touch of the Jimmy Savile about him, so again: who knows? Frankly, who cares? There
is, moreover, no castle to be destroyed, no sign of the Cross, etc. Instead,
presumably as an Œdipal allusion, Parsifal is blinded, though just when an interesting
idea might have manifested itself, its effect is blunted by the banal
restitution of Parsifal’s sight at the end. Needless to say, the NHS works its
wonders, Amfortas and Kundry walking off
together
Alas, Parsifal, as sung by
Simon O’Neill, sometimes even sounded a little like Jimmy Savile too. There were
better moments, especially during the third act, but too much was crude,
undifferentiated, and most of all vocally unpleasant, redolent, as is this
singer’s wont, of a misapplied pneumatic drill. His acting was little better,
though seemingly by default, since there was little difference form the first
two acts, he did a passable imitation of a blind man in the third. Why can the Royal Opera not at last engage Jonas Kaufmann in German repertoire, rather than waste him on largely trivial Italianate works? Or what about Christopher Ventris, or Stuart Skelton? The rest of
the cast – and here were the only real candidates for redemption – were much
better. Top of the class was René Pape’s Gurnemanz: authoritative, suave, and so securely founded in Wagner’s alchemic
combination of words and music that one could forgive a great deal – just so
long as he was on stage. Likewise Gerald Finley’s wonderful Amfortas, for whom
dramatic commitment was of course a greater task. This was the first time I had
heard Finley in Wagner; I certainly hope that it will not be the last. Angela Denoke's
Kundry was again a committed assumption; many of the notes she reached, but a
good few she did not. Why she appeared in the third act as she had in the second,
rather than as the creature seen in the first, I cannot imagine. Unfortunately,
Willard White as Klingsor and Robert Lloyd as Titurel both suggested that they
would be well advised to retire from vocal performance. The male chorus
improved significantly in the third act, having lacked focus in the first.
Whether it were a matter of the female chorus’s placing offstage or something
else, its words were entirely inaudible. I hope that having Kundry sing the
part of the Voice from Above was a matter of cost-cutting rather than a ‘dramatic’
decision; in the latter respect, it made no sense at all.
Only last year, I saw Stefan
Herheim’s Bayreuth Parsifal for
the last time. It did not receive its finest musical performance, Daniele Gatti
having been replaced by Philippe Jordan, who was little better – if at all –
than Pappano. Moreover, the cast had been better in previous years too. Yet the
dramatic integrity, the intellectual commitment, above all the sheer musicality
of Herheim’s staging once again won out. Here I struggled and failed to find a
single case of the director engaging with Wagner’s score. Haitink managed, more
or less single-handedly, to salvage something from the meaningless triviality
of the previous, at least equally dreadful production. But it needs someone of
that stature; we seem fated endlessly to be denied such redemption.
