Parsifal, Vienna State Opera, 5 April 2018

Amfortas – Jochen Schmeckenbecker
Gurnemanz – Kwangchul Youn
Parsifal – Christopher Ventris
Klingsor – Boaz Daniel
Kundry – Anja Kampe
Titurel – Ryan Speedo Green
Squires – Rachel Frenkel, Miriam Albano, Wolfram Igor Dentl, Peter Jelosits
First Knight of the Grail – Benedikt Köbel
Second Knight of the Grail – Marcus Pelz
Flowermaidens – Maria Nazarova, Lydia Rathkolb, Rachel Frenkel, Hila Fahima, Mariam Battistelli, Stephanie Houtzeel
Voice from Above – Zoryana Kushpler

Alvis Hermanis (director, set designs)

Kristīne Jurjāne (costumes)
Gleb Filshtinsky (lighting)
Ineta Sipunova (video)
Silvia Platzek (assistant set designer)

Children of the Vienna State Opera Opera School

Vienna State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Martin Schebesta)

Orchestra of the Vienna State Opera

Semyon Bychkov (conductor)

 

Parsifal continues its strange career in the opera house, both its ‘home’, Bayreuth, and beyond – the ‘beyond’ Cosima Wagner haplessly, hilariously attempted to prevent with her Lex Parsifal. (Note to pious New York Wagnerians: next time you appeal to the Master’s alleged intentions, consider your house’s role in confounding them.) Wagner’s desire, as expressed to Ludwig II, to protect the work from ‘a common operatic career’ is understandable. Indeed, Pierre Boulez, a highly distinguished interpreter and critic of the work as well as compositional successor, understood this very well when he approvingly noted Wagner loathing a system in which ‘opera houses are … like cafés where … you can hear waiters calling out their orders: “One Carmen! And one Walküre! And one Rigoletto!”’ Bayreuth has veered from the very best, indeed the very greatest, in Stefan Herheim, to the very worst, with Uwe Eric Laufenberg’s festival of Islamophobia, bizarrely released on DVD whilst its predecessor languishes in the (virtual) vaults. I do not think I saw Vienna’s previous Parsifal, directed by Christine Mielitz; at any rate, I have no recollection of it. This first revival of Alvis Hermanis’s production had me wondering, however, whether it could have been any more vacuous.

 

Hermanis would not be my choice to direct anything, whether for his avowed Islamophobia – how he must have cursed Laufenberg for getting there first – or for the limitations of his craft, such as it may be. His Salzburg Liebe der Danae combined the two to an uncommon degree. I am astonished any theatre or opera house would still enlist his services, following his storming out of Hamburg’s Thalia Theatre on account of its having extended a welcome to refugees. What we have here, at seemingly great expense, is a series of impressive designs – with which, to be fair, he is credited too – and very little that could really be considered a production at all. There is just enough – again, to be fair – to permit one’s mind to work, to posit connections between what one sees, essentially tableaux from Vienna 1900. Yet, whilst I am certainly in favour of us all having to do some mental lifting, I cannot, hand on heart, say that my psychoanalytical thoughts had their roots in what I saw, whereas they unquestionably have done in Dmitri Tcherniakov’s outstanding Berlin staging.

 

The conceit, if we may call it that, is that two Wagners, Richard and Otto, shared the same, well, surname. Therefore the action takes place at the ‘Wagner Spital’ – alias Otto’s Steinhof psychiatric hospital. I wondered whether there might be a nod to Nietzsche and/or Thomas Mann on Parsifal, here, but suspect myself, perhaps unusually, of undue charity. A model of the human brain grows larger, amidst some books on shelves: ‘Durch Mitleid wissend…’? There is a half-hearted attempt, which nevertheless made me think, at pschyoanalysis, Kundry on Klingsor’s couch, in the second act, although it quickly becomes unclear, rather than fruitfully ambiguous, who, if anyone, amongst the characters, is analysing whom. Bits of Wagner’s (Richard’s) poem are flashed up above the stage from time to time; having hired someone for video, it must, presumably, have been necessary to find something for her to do. (Not her fault in the slightest, I hasten to add.) As for the final scene, in which a few Vienna 1900 celebrities join the chorus, bedecked in the most absurd winged helmets you will ever have seen, even as devotees of ‘Against Modern Opera Productions’, I simply gave up. The stage direction itself might as well have been a wet Wednesday’s revival of Otto Schenk.

 

Fortunately, musical matters were considerably better. The orchestra sounded better than I have heard it in Wagner for some time. It will always play well for conductors it likes: I can therefore only presume that, quite rightly, it likes Semyon Bychkov. The seamlessness of Bychkov’s account showed that, once again, as in, say, his Lohengrin, his Tannhäuser, and his Tristan, he both discerns and can communicate the Wagner melos. Some passages were thrillingly dramatic, not least an overwhelming close to the second act. Others seemed, perhaps, to tread water a little, but that may just have been my difficulty in dissociating what I heard from what I saw. No one, however, could justly have been disappointed with what (s)he heard here, those hallowed Vienna strings not far from the top of their golden game.

 

However, rather to my surprise, I found Christopher Ventris slightly disappointing in the title role – certainly no match for his 2008 self for Herheim and Daniele Gatti. Ventris can still sing the role, often beautifully, but his stage presence seemed almost tired, whether compared with ten years ago in the same role or indeed with his Bayreuth Siegmund last summer. Perhaps he just needed stronger direction; one can certainly sympathise. Anja Kampe’s Kundry proved thrilling, increasingly so as time went on, her laughter at Christ erotically chilling. Kwangchul Youn’s Gurnemanz has gathered wisdom over the years; this may have been the finest I have heard from him, utterly at ease in the role, without taking a single note or word for granted. At times, I found Jochen Schmeckenbecker’s Amfortas a little underpowered, even monochrome, but again there was much to be savoured from his way with the text, both verbal and musical. Boaz Daniel’s Klingsor had one wishing, as so often with this role, that it were at least a little longer. Choral singing, from boys, men, and women alike was excellent: clear, transparent, and yet weighty, having my mind flit back to Wagner’s work in Dresden, whether on his own, strange Liebesmahl der Apostel, or Palestrina’s Stabat Mater (which he edited, less interestingly than one might have hoped). There was, then, redemption to be had, but in a strictly musical sense.

 

Bayreuth Festival (2) - Die Walküre, 24 August 2017

Festspielhaus

Siegmund – Christopher Ventris

Hunding – Georg Zeppenfeld

Wotan – John Lundgren

Sieglinde – Camilla Nylund

Brünnhilde – Catherine Foster

Fricka – Tanja Ariane Baumgartner

Gerhilde – Caroline Wenborne

Ortlinde – Dara Hobbs

Waltraute – Stephanie Houtzeel

Schwetleite – Nadine Weissmann

Helmwige – Christiane Kohl

Siegrune – Mareike Morr

Grimgerde – Weibe Lehmkuhl

Rossweiße – Alexandra Petersamer

 

Frank Castorf (director)

Patric Seibert (assistant director and dramaturgical collaboration)

Aleksandar Denić (set designs)

Adriana Braga Peretski (costumes)

Rainer Kasper (lighting)

Andreas Deinert, Jens Crull (video)

 

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra

Marek Janowski (conductor)

 

Opera is such a difficult thing to get right: so many variables, so many contradictions. They are, however, part of its attraction and, when everything or most things in some sense come together, its greatness too. Not for nothing did Wagner designate the orchestra as his Greek Chorus: framer of, participant in, commentator and critic on the drama. During the first two acts of this Walküre, I found myself wishing that someone had told Marek Janowski. His reputation – largely amongst those who disapprove of treating Wagner as drama, with a fair sprinkling of pseudo-‘authenticists’ – is a mystery to those who know great Wagner conducting either of the present or the past. The best that could be said of the way he led these two acts – splendidly played, it must be said, by the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra – was that it was efficient. There were no catastrophes; we were not, thank God, on London’s Planet Pappano. But nor was there any great insight. What had come across as possible, even plausible objectivity in Das Rheingold, a very different drama, here merely sounded non-committal: a bit like those churned out Beethoven cycles certain fashion-victims excite themselves about. ‘Modern instruments and period style’ or some such nonsense: anything to avoid commitment, let alone a critical standpoint. Perhaps we should call it ‘Macron-meets-Vänskä’, or ‘music for the high street’; a few years hence no one will have heard of it, let alone listen to it.

 

I have never heard a less storm-like prelude to the first act; it proceeded smoothly, as if mowing a sufficiently, yet not excessively, watered lawn. As for the inconsequentiality of the orchestra during Wotan’s second act monologue, it sounded like recitative as understood by people who do not understand recitative. There is so much going on there: past, present, and future. It is one of the great turning-points of the entire Ring.  John Lundgren’s estimable efforts as Wotan notwithstanding, the tendency was more towards preparing a list for the weekly shopping. There is domesticating Wagner and there is that. Even the great climaxes were undersold – on the terms of the performance, let alone on other terms. I do not know what had been secreted in Janowski’s second-interval oranges, but it proved most welcome. If hardly Wagner on the level of a Barenboim, a Haitink, a Karajan, or a Furtwängler, we heard a much stronger sense of generative drama in the orchestra, more – if still not enough – of a dynamic range, and a greater willingness, occasionally at least, to let the Bayreuth strings have their head at climaxes. Woodwind solos also proved beguiling and, in a few cases, intriguingly curdling, Tristan not so very far away – as indeed the harmony tells us anyway.

 

I am not sure Frank Castorf’s production helped in that respect either. Although I found more to admire in it last year than I had in 2014 – I think! Again I shall re-read later – there was, at least in actual performance, a little too much generalised standing around and singing. I think I understand the reasoning behind it, or at least a possible reasoning behind it, and shall attempt to explain, but it seemed to me to need to be more forcefully projected. A post-Brechtian critique of Wagner’s (post-)Romanticism is apparent, but might have been much more so. And if we are going to deconstruct, even mock, ‘Du bist der Lenz’ and so on, we really need the orchestra – as well as the splendid singers – to be offering the case for the defence, or at least the material to be deconstructed. Alone, there is only so much even singers such as Christopher Ventris and Camilla Nylund can offer – although I loved the camera close-ups on Sieglinde’s knowingly exaggerated expressions as she prepares Hunding’s potions. (One need not agree that such plot devices are hokum to appreciate the accomplishment of both direction and interpretation – especially when allied to such singing.)

 

The scene-setting is good, indeed thought-provoking: both at the time and afterwards. An agrarian yet industrialising society is in many ways ideal, not least on account of little – or not so little – scenic complexities, contradictions, provocations. Hunding makes excellent sense: a barbarous killer in Victorian clothing, ultimately very much Wagner’s vision too. Sieglinde is his chattel; he plays with her, wishes to destroy her (refusing her initial greeting), and then forces himself upon her. Such is marriage. When a bookish Patric Seibert seemingly willingly – yet driven by what compulsion? – takes the caged place of farmyard fowl, becomes animalised, is rescued, and takes his place again as Azerbaijani oil is hit, all manner of possibilities present themselves. Life – and the mind – is never dull when he is on stage; perhaps it is no coincidence that we must wait until the third act for that. For Castorf’s intelligent, illuminating contradictions come into far greater relief then too – doubtless assisted by the greater orchestral canvas. The gods having adopted traditional, patriarchal guise and customs – Fricka with conjugally enforcing whip as much as Wotan, the lazy patriarch drinking shots and reading Pravda – inflict themselves and their continued oil project upon the world, but they might have done more strongly, more clearly. The lack of clarity in who Wotan here is to begin with does not seem to me an especially fruitful ambiguity, at least on this occasion. But perhaps the fault lies with me. At any rate, the shift to alternative historical and geographical paths – Baku, 1942, Hitler in pursuit of oil, such pursuit to be denied, thereby enabling the world of Siegfried... – retains its force, if more in retrospect than in the white heat, and/or Brechtian alienation, of the theatre.

 

It speaks extraordinary well, then, of Ventris and Nylund that they made such an impression – in almost ‘traditional’ terms – as they did. The Volsungs’ musical achievement was unquestionably theirs, not Janowski’s. Ventris’s ardent singing, verbal clarity, and verbal meaning were quite exceptional. I am not sure I have heard a better Siegmund.  Nylund’s Sieglinde, if lacking the final ounce or two of ecstasy in that third act solo, was nevertheless beautifully, thrillingly sung – and, insofar as permitted, acted. Following a surprisingly uncertain entrance – anyone can make a slip – Georg Zeppenfeld’s Hunding proved very much the dark, heartless foil. Again, he never forgets the importance of the words; nor will he let us do. Lundgren’s stage presence, again insofar as permitted, was godlike, the anger of his delivery palpable, indeed terrifying, especially during the third act; Castorf’s touch of undermining, childish petulance – a silly act with a bearskin, whilst Brünnhilde sings – proved a truer instance of what we surely should have seen more of earlier on. This was, by any standards, a commanding performance, sadly let down by Janowski during that crucial monologue. Tanja Ariane Baumgartner’s Fricka was probably the most chilling of the three assumptions I have seen and heard, as merciless in her instrumental reason as with her whip. And Catherine Foster’s enthusiastic, even lovable Brünnhilde was just the ticket for the character at this stage in her development. One felt with her as well as for her; we wish her well in her transition to humanity, such as it might be. The Valkyries were truly outstanding; one might have taken dictation, such were the individuality and clarity, within bounds, of their contribution. Almost all of them, I felt, might readily have been singing ‘larger’ roles; of course, Nadine Weissman is.

 

Perhaps, then, my expectations were unfeasibly high after the previous night’s Vorabend. And in a way, necessary contrast was provided here, at least on stage. Was it always quite the right sort of contrast, though? It may yet be that, reading back Siegfried and even Götterdämmerung into the staging here, more will emerge. Let us hope, though, that Janowski will be on final act form.

 

Bayreuth Festival (2) - Die Walküre, 21 August 2016

Bayreuth Festspielhaus

Siegmund – Christopher Ventris

Hunding – Georg Zeppenfeld
Wotan – John Lundgren
Sieglinde – Heidi Melton
Brünnhilde – Catherine Foster
Fricka – Sarah Connolly
Gerhilde – Caroline Wenborne
Ortlinde – Dara Hobbs
Waltraute – Stephanie Houtzeel
Schwetleite – Nadine Weissmann
Helmwige – Christiane Kohl
Siegrune – Mareike Morr
Grimgerde – Weibe Lehmkuhl
Rossweiße – Alexandra Petersamer
 

Frank Castorf (director)

Aleksandar Denić (set designs)
Adriana Braga Peretski (costumes)
Rainer Kasper (lighting)
Andreas Deinert, Jens Crull (video)
 

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra

Marek Janowski (conductor)

Again, one’s memory can readily play tricks, but I think I can say with a good degree of certainty that this Walküre, like its Rheingold predecessor, marked a considerable improvement upon the performance I saw two years ago. How much of that relates to revision of Frank Castorf’s staging and how much to individual (and indeed ensemble) performances onstage, I am not entirely sure. Perhaps that is as it should be, for a performance without a little mystery – if not necessarily the mystification that might be seen as the ‘bad nineteenth-century’ part of Wagner’s, still more Wagnerian, aesthetics – will generally be found lacking.

It certainly, I think, made a difference having Christopher Ventris as Siegmund. In 2014, although Johan Botha could certainly sing the role – not something to be taken for granted, naming no names – his inability to act was a problem one could not simply ignore. Now, with Ventris at least Botha’s vocal equal, albeit very different in tone, but also a committed stage actor, the first act and the end of the second looked up completely. There are many different ways to sing Siegmund, and Ventris’s, perhaps inevitably, comes closer to the sound we expect from a Parsifal; his is not a baritonal tenor.  Nor need it be; this beautifully, though never just beautifully sung, performance, equally attentive to words and music, was quite beyond reproach. I was tempted to ask why we seemingly never hear Ventris in Britain any more, but why should we? Germany surely has much more to offer him.

 

Heidi Melton, on much better form, or rather much more consistent form, than as Isolde recently at ENO, offered a heartfelt reading of Sieglinde. Occasional intonational wobbles counted for little or nothing when set against such palpable sincerity and range. Much the same might be said of Catherine Foster’s Brünnhilde. Foster has always struck me as a very likeable artist, not at all inappropriate for Wotan’s wayward girl. Occasional waywardness was much in keeping with her character; the tenderness of her farewell – suggesting perhaps that Brünnhilde understood a little more than usual the finality of her sentence – was touching and dramatically productive indeed. John Lundgren’s Wotan was dark of tone, commanding of presence, highly attentive – crucial in this of all roles – to the marriage of words and music. His shaping of Wotan’s second act monologue, his communication of its verbal and musical contours, their interaction with each other and with the orchestra, was excellent. A sense of chill, of reserve, seemed very much part of the interpretation, and varied according to circumstances.

 

Georg Zeppenfeld’s Hunding proved outstanding: dark, although not so dark as one often hears of tone, dark of intent, yet not without charm. The return of video in the second half of the first act gave him a great deal more to do than would generally the case; his acting offstage, both before and after drugging, offered an important additional standpoint upon the action below. Sarah Connolly’s return as Fricka lived up to its Rheingold promise. There was no doubting her fury and righteous indignation. An excellent band of Valkyries worked together extremely well. Not unlike the Rhinemaidens the night before, their ensemble and solo work was equally distinguished; they, again, had much more to do, given close camera attention, than usual. Such was not a problem; it was, instead, an opportunity.

 

Where I felt that opportunity was slightly missed was in Castorf’s conception itself. By the time we reached the third act, perhaps especially its first part, I could not help but wonder whether he had somewhat lost interest. It was a feeling much less strong than last time, but what earlier exerts considerable post-Brechtian force – the alienation of the world of Aleksandar Denić’s wondrous set designs and their tale of striking oil in Azerbaijan, 1942, from suspect, one presumes, ‘Romantic’ Lenz and Liebe – comes at some points to seem arbitrary again. Or at least it did to me; I may well have been missing the point. The first act in particular, as I said, benefited from Ventris’s Siegmund. Lengthy stretches of almost nothing happening at all onstage are, mercifully, no longer with us. What seemed to betoken contempt for the work, or stretches thereof, in 2014, no longer does. However, even at the end of the third act, when things pick up again dramatically, I wondered whether there was a little too much of Wotan and Brünnhilde not listening to each other, not even being in the same place. The case is at least arguable, though; maybe I need a more thoroughgoing purge of my Romanticism.

 

Earlier on, the tension and indeed interplay work better. The trip back seventy years or so in time from the present-day (Wifi is available at the Golden Motel) does not bother me. Wagner plays with time, in any case, as is witnessed by the confrontation of his dual, Genesis-like creation myths (those of Alberich in Rheingold and Wotan in Götterdämmerung), with the march of dramatic time, both as experienced by us and, we presume, by the characters. He does not play with it as Castorf does, but Castorf’s play has us think: always a good and necessary thing in Wagner, whatever his preposterous ‘protectors’ might claim. I wish, as I think I did before, that more still might have been done with such disjuncture, but there we are. More to the point, however, we come to think of Rheingold all the more in retrospect as distant pre-history. That world of gods and giants is not identical to that of the succeeding three dramas, although there is, of course, much complex interconnection and interaction. We have seen, to a certain extent, where things might lead.

 

However, we also come to see that we are on different historical, even ideological trajectory. ‘Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Texas anymore.’ It is not just location, though; it is the shift to the Eastern bloc, as once we called it. Russian and Azerbaijani scripts, Pravda, even hints at socialist realism: are we perhaps giving Marx and Wagner a try, taking them at, if not their own word, then a sceptical yet not despising deconstruction thereof? If the world of the Golden Motel is so bad, then show us what you can do? Is Wagner, then, being found wanting by Castorf? Up to a point, I think, for it is difficult, on some level, to avoid the conclusion that the ‘real’ action is that of the oil strikes rather than that of Siegmund and Sieglinde? Unreliable narration nevertheless continues to make its point, although less so – a pity, I think – than in Das Rheingold.

 

Where Castorf really scores, though, at least for me, is in the return of the gods to this world. Adopting local dress, customs, commercial practices, and indeed leading the latter, the gods do what we have always thought they did when they assumed human form. One might think as much here of Greek myth as Teutonic – as, of course, did Wagner. Do they, or does capital, reinstate Fate? Or is the opposition false? We are led to ask such questions, difficult to resolve, perhaps incapable of resolution. Wotan’s loss of his 'local' beard (seen first on film towards the end of the first act, as the god drinks his vodka) comes to seem akin to dropping of a mask. We behold him, as, unforgettably, Hunding does, in all his godlike terror. And we also recall, with Wagner, student of Feuerbach, that we have made him, as we have our other gods of capital, law, ‘love’, and so on.

 

Marek Janowski and the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra seemed to me on surer form than the previous evening (not that they were bad then). There were still some odd orchestral balances: the clarinet line again, albeit to a considerably lesser extent. Perhaps the issue was more acoustical than intentional. More generally, though, Janowski’s emphasis on the woodwind in particular was balanced by a greater willingness to let the strings play out. He was more flexible of tempo too, usually to excellent effect. If the results remain more conventionally of the ‘opera’ world than its ‘musico-dramatic’ sibling or rival, increased command of the melos, the ebb and flow, worked very much to the drama’s benefit. We cannot always hear Daniel Barenboim, and there is much to be said for the marriage of general competence to a desire to bring out overlooked aspects of a work.

Tannhäuser, Opéra national de Paris, 29 October 2011

Opéra Bastille

Hermann, Landgrave of Thuringia – Christof Fischesser
Tannhäuser – Christopher Ventris
Wolfram von Eschenbach – Stéphane Degout
Walther von der Vogelweide – Stanislas de Barbeyrac
Biterolf – Tomasz Konieczny
Heinrich der Schreiber – Eric Huchet
Reimar von Zweter – Wojtek Smilek
Elisabeth – Nina Stemme
Venus – Sophie Koch

Robert Carsen (director, lighting)
Paul Steinberg (set designs)
Constance Hoffman (costumes)
Peter van Praet (lighting)
Philippe Giraudeau (choreography)

Maîtrise des Hauts-de-Seine
Chorus and Orchestra of the Opéra national de Paris
Sir Mark Elder (conductor)


My visit to Paris took in two German operas with special association for the city and indeed for the Opéra. Lulu, the previous night, received its first full performance at the Palais Garnier. The case of Tannhäuser is, to put it mildly, less unambiguously positive, though one should recall that, whatever the disgraceful scenes at the Salle Le Peletier, it is to Paris that we owe Wagner’s revisions, which render the work a still more fascinating proposition than in its ‘Dresden version’. As is usual for performances of the ‘Paris version’, Wagner’s further modifications for Vienna were followed here, but the crucial work on the opening two scenes had already been accomplished.

Whichever version or conflation is selected, there will remain a problematical element to the work: that is part of its enduring attraction, though it has troubled some, the composer included. Cosima famously recounted on 23 January 1883, just twenty days before Wagner’s death, ‘He says he still owes the world a Tannhäuser.’ Sir Mark Elder seemed most at ease with the new music for the Venusberg, the first act certainly the strongest so far as the conducting was concerned. Perhaps it was his recent experience of conducting Götterdämmerung with the Hallé that led him perceptively to highlight the intimations of that work, Gutrune’s music in particular: both looking forward, then, but also in its harmony recalling – arguably quoting – the opéra comique of Auber, still honoured across town from the Bastille, on the façade of the Palais Garnier. An estimable performance was to be heard throughout from the Paris Opéra Orchestra, the strings golden in almost Viennese style and the woodwind quite delightful, especially during the often lugubrious third act.

If the first act, however, could be heard more or less in a single span, with a nod to its necessary disjunctures, the second and third acts offered more of a bumpy ride in terms of overall direction. There may be a case for bringing to the fore Wagner’s debt to grand opéra, not least in Paris, but the Arrival of the Guests sounded less akin to Rienzi or even to Meyerbeer than to excessively-driven early Verdi. (Is it not in any case more interesting to look to the potential of Wagner’s musical drama than to reduce it to certain murkier aspects of its origins?) There were, moreover, glaring discrepancies between pit, stage, and off-stage brass. Wherever the fault lay, the responsibility is the conductor’s – especially by the final performance of a run. The (marked) tempo change near the end of the act, shortly before we hear the pilgrims, was excessive, coming as a jolt rather than an intensification, the hurtling onward that ensued chaotic in its fraying ensemble. Line frayed too in the third act, though Elder was commendably alert to its wandering hints of Parsifal. There will always remain tensions between the various musico-dramatic components of the work, but they register more meaningfully if a greater, or at least more successful, attempt is made to engender unity – or ‘totality’, as Adorno would doubtless have accused. Such was certainly the case in the Venusberg, the ‘new’ Tristan-esque music sounding involuntarily – that, at any rate was the impression – as a restless critique of Wagner’s earlier thoughts, musical and ‘dramatic’, however false the distinction. Last year at Covent Garden, however, Semyon Bychkov proved more successful in permitting the material to enact its own self-critique, rather than harrying it in the unduly interventionist, sometimes reductionist, fashion Elder favoured here.

There was much to admire vocally. Christopher Ventris, already an accomplished Parsifal in Bayreuth, Paris, London, and elsewhere, showed no evident strain as Tannhäuser. The role is difficult for a number of reasons, not least its lack of a personal voice, Tannhäuser tending more to adapt to the situations in which he finds himself. Ventris proved successful in that respect and many others, shaping Wagner’s lines with sensitivity and projecting them with strength. Sophie Koch was quite magnificent as Venus: probably the best I have ever heard: tonally (and physically) alluring, sweetly seductive and increasingly unhinged, dramatically truthful at no cost to the vocal line, taking full advantage of the greater scope the Paris version offered her. Kundry, rightly, did not seem far away. Nina Stemme, making her Paris Opéra debut, presented a sterling, untiring Elisabeth. Hers was for the most part an ‘old-school’ reading, eschewing the possibility, explored more recently by artists such as Eva-Maria Westbroek (for Bychkov), of a more evidently tempted – and tempting – character. If Elisabeth can probably be more interesting than this, the role is unlikely to be sung with more detailed attention to the text. After a somewhat uncertain start, Stéphane Degout grew into Wolfram’s part: it is doubtless unreasonable to expect anyone to match or even to approach the astounding Lieder-reading of Christian Gerhaher (for Bychkov), though I felt the lack of something that might elevate the character into something more than a stock character and plot device. There were, though, no real weaknesses in the cast, save for an apparently uncredited Shepherd, whose music soon passed into strange bitonal realms. Mention should be accorded to the sweet-toned, intelligently-voiced Walther of Stanislas de Barbeyrac: on this evidence, we are likely to hear much more from him.

What, then, of Robert Carsen’s production, first seen in 2007, now receiving its first revival? (A quarter of a century, incidentally, had passed between the previous production and this, a haunting similarity with this perplexingly unfashionable work’s absence from the London stage.) At its heart lies the substitution, predating that of Katharina Wagner’s Meistersinger, of portraiture for song. Tannhäuser is a painter; the work that bears his name progresses from a host of attempts to paint Venus to the final hanging of his picture in a gallery of celebrated female nudes. (You name it, from Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, predictably, to Manet and Picasso, it is most likely present in reproduction.) It is strongly implied, through a final joint pose, that the final image draws upon both Venus and Elisabeth, though we never actually see Tannhäuser’s Meisterwerk, so that must remain supposition. Substitution of painting for music does no grave harm; perhaps it is intended to appeal to a city especially noted for its sympathy towards the visual arts. Nor, however, does it seem especially warranted: after all, the multitudinous references to song make more sense when actually dealing with Minnesänger. The Konzept is nevertheless carried through coherently and Personenregie is intelligently accomplished: two welcome contrasts with the Meistersinger bei Katharina.

There are moments, though, when Carsen appears to resort to ‘effect without cause’, Wagner’s celebrated accusation against Meyerbeer, which Nietzsche would then unconvincingly turn upon his antagonist. The appearance of Elisabeth in the amphitheatre at the beginning of the second act certainly startles: at a distance of five or six feet from me, I initially thought Stemme was a disruptive member of the audience. (There were certainly many of those too: in a nod to the Jockey Club’s revenge, barely a bar of the third act went uninterrupted by the bronchially assertive, the Song to the Evening Star almost obliterated.) Other characters followed suit, a practice for which there seemed no obvious justification. Occasional subsequent forays in and out of the stalls retained that sense of the arbitrary, heightening irritation. I wonder, too, whether it will some day be possible to see the guests arrive without an invasion of champagne flutes. Elisabeth’s trench coat is another slightly wearisome cliché. Carsen’s is a lively enough production, then, if not entirely innocent of veering towards the merely fashionable; yet it falls considerably short of this director at his dazzling best, for instance, the more convincing theatrical extravaganzas of his Salzburg Rosenkavalier and Munich Ariadne auf Naxos. Perhaps that was the point, a nod to the problematic nature of the drama, but, as with the score, critique proves more convincing if it emerges from within, rather than being imposed from without.

Bayreuth Festival: Parsifal, 6 August 2008

Festspielhaus, Bayreuth

Amfortas – Detlef Roth
Titurel – Diógenes Randes
Gurnemanz – Kwangchul Youn
Parsifal – Christopher Ventris
Klingsor – Thomas Jesatko
Kundry – Mihoko Fujimura
First Knight of the Grail – Arnold Bezuyen
Second Knight of the Grail – Friedemann Röhlig
First Squire – Julia Borchert
Second Squire – Ulrike Helzel
Third Squire – Clemens Bieber
Fourth Squire – Timothy Oliver
Flowermaidens – Julia Borchert, Martina Rüping, Carola Guber, Anna Korondi, Jutta Böhnert, Ulrike Helzel
Contralto solo – Simone Schröder

Stefan Herheim (director)
Heike Scheele (designs)
Gesine Cöllm (costumes)
Alexander Meier-Dörzenbach (dramaturgy)

Orchestra and Chorus of the Bayreuth Festival (chorus master: Eberhard Friedrich)
Daniele Gatti (conductor)

This was an outstanding production. I had greatly admired Stefan Herheim’s Salzburg Entführung, so my expectations were high; they were nevertheless surpassed. Herheim trod a difficult tightrope between presentation of his guiding Konzept – the history of Parsifal as a work and the world in which it has developed from the time of its first performance to that of its most recent – and recounting of the immanent story of Parsifal. Two stories ran not so much in parallel as with mutual influence, yet without inflicting harm upon one another and without the slightest sense of contrivance. Herheim, in other words, never fell from his rope into those treacherous depths that have previously swallowed so many directors and their ideas, be they good, bad, or indifferent. ­­­­

We began in the Second Reich. So intensely dialectical and wondrously multi-layered – and yet not confusing – was Herheim’s direction that we witnessed and heard –we are dealing with a musician here, unlike many, perhaps most opera directors – the early days of post-Wagner Wahnfried, the sickly, semi-incestuous goings-on of an impeccably haut bourgeois family and its nursery, that extraordinary phase of Nietzschean, Renanesque, and of course Parsifalian Christianity, the era of the oft-present Imperial eagle, and the terrifying march to war. Never have I experienced such a rightly ominous tone to the outward march of the replenished – but replenished by and for what? – Grail knights as here, both musically and courtesy of the early ‘patriotic’ military film. The realm in which time became space had led us towards 1914. It should be stressed, we missed none of the drama we should have expected from a performance of Parsifal. And so, we began in a field hospital for the second act, for once actually seeing the renegade knights, Sir Ferris and all, of whom Klingsor tells. The Flower-ordinaries tended to them in every way they knew how: a most effective tactic on the part of Klingsor as Master of Ceremonies. For we also saw Weimar, with the Moorish castle’s owner suggestive in white tie and fishnets of Emcee himself. Cabaret’s trajectory reached its ultimate conclusion with the end of this act, a moment for which the phrase coup de théâtre might have been invented. The coming of the Third Reich was signalled by the castle’s destruction and the advent not only of stormtroopers and a brown-shirted, tomorrow-belonging-to-him little boy, but of swastikas too. Rarely have I experienced such a truly electric moment in the theatre. There were boos of course, from those afraid and challenged – they tended to be of conspicuously bürgerlich appearance – but there was louder applause for Bayreuth’s belated yet brave attempt at coming to terms with its history. Self-laceration may have become tedious in some segments of German society, but the knives have been far less evident anywhere near the Green Hill.

The final act opened in the garden of a bombed Wahnfried. Parsifal’s coming and Good Friday offered the possibility of a reanimation, not just natural but social: a tall order, as we realised when a procession of the starved post-war population of Berlin passed across the stage. Yet Parsifal had at least enabled water to trickle forth again from the garden’s fountain. Amfortas’s trial – in every sense – brought us from Nuremberg to the present-day Bundestag, whilst in no way detracting from the very particular agony of this very particular drama. And who says that one can peak too early? A coup de théâtre just as brave as that of the evocation of 1933 was once again presented with a video projection of the young Wagner brothers’ – that is, Wieland's and Wolfgang's – request at the 1951 reopening, that political discussion be banished from New Bayreuth. An image of Wagner himself was bricked up. All power to Wolfgang Wagner for permitting this! Whatever the doubts concerning his own productions – and let us be honest: we have all seen far worse – his record in attracting new directors to Bayreuth has been more than commendable. Reactionaries, or at least conservatives, should have taken heart from the proportion of Wagner’s stage directions followed, sometimes to the letter, but at least to the spirit. How long, for instance, is it since a production of Parsifal ended with the white dove hovering over the hero’s head? Here, of course, the message was ambiguous. Clearly related to the eagle we had seen so many times before – and to the swan of the first act – there might be hope but there might yet be more of the same or worse. I have recently been perhaps a little too fond of quoting Horace’s ‘Mutato nomine, de te fabula narratur’ (‘Change but the name, and the tale is told of you’) with reference to opera (and specifically to Ariadne auf Naxos), but it seems tailor-made for the video-projections in which we faced ourselves and the orchestra – a Bayreuth first in looking beneath the covered pit. We both braced ourselves and questioned the alleged ‘openness’ (hints of Norman Foster’s Reichstag dome) of the new dispensation. I have missed a great deal, even from my own recollection, and there was doubtless much that I did not comprehend or even notice on a first encounter, but this ought at least to begin to suggest the scale of Herheim’s and the rest of the production team’s achievement. (However complicated the partial and full scenic transformations, everything ran like clockwork, unlike Covent Garden’s recent revival disaster with Ariadne.)

Daniele Gatti’s reading of the score rarely drew attention to itself but contributed to the unfolding dramas in exemplary fashion. It was, I suspect, a slow reading, measured by the clock, although I have never understood why some people worry about such matters. Knappertsbusch and Boulez both have a great deal to tell us; there is no need to take sides, except against those incapable of making the score resound and cohere. The richness of the Bayreuth orchestra was ever apparent, but never more so than when it finally had our full attention, during the unstaged Prelude to Act III. That evocation of hard-won passing of time can rarely have seemed more apt than in the circumstances of this production. The gradual unfolding of the score’s phrases and paragraphs was faultless. Each act was possessed both of its own character and of an array of variegation and cross-reference. And the bells sounded better than I can recall hearing them anywhere (except of course on the most venerable of old Bayreuth recordings). If only Antonio Pappano would desist from conducting Wagner in London, Gatti would be just the man to help us out, working on the assumption that Bernard Haitink’s return visits are likely to be few at best.

Christopher Ventris was an excellent Parsifal. This may be less impossible a role than Siegfried or Tristan, but even so, it is a tough challenge, to which Ventris rose with aplomb, both musically and in stage terms. Indeed, all of the cast, with the partial exception of Mihoko Fujimura’s Kundry, excelled in acting terms. She, sadly, was no seductress, but she bought into the rest of her role and sang well enough, if somewhat short of unforgettably, throughout. (I could not help but wonder what Waltraud Meier would have made of this opportunity.) Her diction could sometimes be questionable too. Kwangchul Youn lacked the authority of a great Gurnemanz but he proved attentive to the text, excepting one noticeable bout of poor intonation. I have heard more malevolent Klingsors than Thomas Jesatko, but there was nothing really to complain of in a well-acted performance. Detlef Roth, however, was a triumphant Amfortas. To say that he proved himself an extremely fine singing-actor is not to detract from his considerable achievements were his singing and acting to be considered separately; it is simply to state that such a separation would be false and that the whole was still greater than the sum of the parts. The same could be said of the superb Bayreuth Festival Chorus. And the same could be said of the entire production, which, whatever my odd reservation concerning the casting, should come to be regarded as a defining moment in the history of the Bayreuth Festival and indeed in that of the staging of Wagner’s music dramas.