Die Feen, Oper Leipzig, 20 April 2013

Images: Tom Schulze
Igor Durlovski (Fairy King)

Leipzig Opera House

Fairy King, Voice of Groma – Igor Durlovski

Ada – Christiane Libor
Zemina – Viktoria Kaminskaite
Farzana – Jean Broiekhuizen
Arindal – Arnold Bezuyen
Lora – Eun Yee You
Morald – Detlef Roth
Drolla – Jennifer Porto
Gernot – Milcho Borovinov
Gunther – Guy Mannheim
Harald – Roland Schubert
Messenger – Tae Hee Kwon
Children of Ada and Arindal – Lukas Gosch, Leon Heilmann

Renaud Doucet (director)

André Barbe (designs)
Guy Simard (lighting)
Marita Müller (dramaturgy)

 

Chorus of Oper Leipzig (chorus master: Alessandro Zuppardo)

Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra
Ulf Schirmer (conductor)
 

What is it about London buses or, in this case, buses in London and Leipzig? Hot on the heels of the Chelsea Opera Group’s concert performance of Die Feen last month, a fully-staged production has followed from Oper Leipzig. (In fact, its premiere took place in February, but this was my opportunity to see it.) The COG’s performance was a valiant effort, and boasted some fine singing, but was sadly let down by an apparently under-rehearsed orchestra. Leipzig did its greatest son proud, in a production and performance that made the case beyond any doubt, reasonable or otherwise, that Die Feen deserves a regular place in the repertory. It is not Parsifal, of course, yet what is? The Bayreuth ‘canon’ has done a great deal of harm, yet there is no reason why reparations should not be made, and in this of all years.

 

Since the Munich premiere in 1888, a production that received numerous repeat performances, stagings and concert performances have been sporadic. Angelo Neumann staged the work in Prague in 1893, as part of his cycle to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of Wagner’s birth and the tenth of his death. The first Leipzig performance took place in 1938, conducted by Paul Schmitz and directed by Hans Schüler, with designs by Max Elten, forming part of another cycle, in this case the Geburtstadt’s celebrations for Wagner’s 125^th birthday. In more recent years, especially celebrated was Wolfgang Sawallisch’s 1983 cycle of the complete operas; other stagings have been proffered by Munich (Gärtnerplatz, 1989), Kaiserslautern and Würzburg (2005), and the Châtelet (2009, on period instruments). Though the present production is offered in collaboration with the Bayreuth Festival, Bayreuth’s performance of Die Feen is, somewhat oddly, and unlike those of Das Liebesverbot and Rienzi, to be in concert. (None of the performances will belong to the Festival proper, but will instead take place in July, in the Statdhalle.)

 

So Leipzig may well be the only opportunity we have; it should be seized by anyone who can. As Wagner himself, far from ashamed of his first completed opera, put it in Mein Leben:

While I had written [the incomplete, preceding] Die Hochzeit without operatic embellishments and treated the material in the darkest vein, this time I festooned the subject with the most manifold variety: beside the principal pair of lovers I depicted a more ordinary couple and even introduced a coarse and comical third pair, which belonged to the operatic convention of servants and ladies’ maids. As to the poetic diction and the verses themselves, I was almost intentionally careless about them. I was not nourishing my former hopes of making a name as a poet; I had really become a ‘musician’ and a ‘composer’ and wanted simply to write a decent libretto, for I now realised nobody else could do this for me, inasmuch as an opera book is something unique unto itself and cannot be easily brought off by poets and literati.

 

Ada (Christiane Libor), Arindal (Arnold Bezuyen)

 

Renaud Doucet has a background in dance, though by now he has directed a good number of opera productions too. On this basis, I should happily see more, metatheatricality worn lightly, humorously, yet tellingly. Following a Saturday evening family meal, a father tunes in to a live broadcast of Die Feen from Oper Leipzig. The rest of the family departs, leaving him in peace to listen. (A nice touch is his turning up the volume for the Overture as the conductor does similarly in the pit.) Music becomes the key to the work as a whole; it enlists his emotions, transforms his understanding. In something of a modern fairy-tale, his living room becomes the performance space, not entirely unlike The Nutcracker, or indeed, closer to home, the tales of ETA Hoffmann. Romantic, pseudo-Nazarene mediævalism, Wagner’s (relative) youth, and our own time come together, in a (Midsummer Night’s?) dream-like mélange that prompts rather than answers our questions. What might seem a counterpart to all-too-comfortable Biedermeier home life soon has its tensions exposed: though the paterfamilias – and he is at best a weak example of the type – welcomes back his wife at the end of the broadcast, and leaves Ada to the fairies, beret-clad Wagner included, will he tire of his quotidian existence and hanker again after the immortality of that other world, that to which, as Arindal, he had exceptionally been admitted?

 

Wagner’s subsequent intellectual journey, via Feuerbach’s Thoughts on Death and Immortality, complicates the notion further. It is fitting, then, that Romanticism is both embraced and kept at a distance. (There is more than a little Romanticism in Feuerbach’s writings and indeed in Schopenhauer’s too.) At the time of writing, it was, especially in its German manifestation, at the time a somewhat problematical notion. (One might ask, in Goethian fashion, whether it has ever not been.) In the context of Metternichian repression, Heine and Young Germany suspected and attacked its reactionary tendencies, yet its progressive – a loaded word, but let us have that pass just for the moment – seeds were far from fruitless yet, especially in the musical world. The celebratory final scene, in some senses perhaps an early presentiment of the Festwiese scene from Die Meistersinger, is thus neither presented nor received straightforwardly. As ever with Wagner, we are left with more questions than we started with.

 

Ulf Schirmer’s conducting of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra proved well-judged. Influences were apparent, Weber and Marschner especially but far from exclusively, but so, as in the staging, were hints – and sometimes rather more than hints – of what was to come. A phrase here or there might be ever so slightly underlined, or so I fancied, to alert one to a similarity with a phrase in Lohengrin, and indeed beyond. More importantly, the straining even at this stage towards through-composition was readily apparent, without entirely undermining the ‘number’ structure of this Romantic opera. Wagner without a great, or at least a very good, orchestra really is a waste of everyone’s time; the dark, ‘German’ sonorities of the Gewandhaus Orchestra suited Die Feen to a tee. What a relief it was to hear that this great orchestra’s traditions have not been traduced by ill-advised forays into pseudo-authenticity at the hands of the bewilderingly fêted Riccardo Chailly.

 

The cast was strong too. Early Wagner, like early Mozart or early Beethoven, does not take kindly to condescension; there was not a hint of that here. First among equals was Christiane Libor’s stunning Ada, her insane, Abscheulicher-squared aria fully realising Wagner’s Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient-inspired vision. Arnold Bezuyen, quite understandably, tired a little at one point as Arindal, but otherwise impressed with a fine combination of heft and tone. Detlef Roth was everyone one might have hoped for as Morald, words and vocal line in properly Wagnerian, even musico-dramatic, tandem. Jennifer Porto and Milcho Borovinov delighted as Drolla and Gunther, their buffa duet cut in the COG concert performance yet triumphantly vindicated by its inclusion here, even though one could readily tell that it marked for Wagner more or less the end of a line, give or take a Liebesverbot. Only Eun Yee You’s Lora was a little disappointed, outclassed by COG’s wonderful Elisabeth Meister; the voice simply did not seem big enough and tuning was more than occasionally awry. Choral singing was of a consistently high standard throughout, as was direction of the chorus on stage.

 

London desperately needs a first-class performance of this wonderful work. If none of our companies can marshal the resources for a new production – and frankly, it is a matter of priorities; there is no reason why it should not be done – then I strongly urge bringing this staging here. Let us hope, also, for a DVD release. In the meantime, if at all possible, a visit to Leipzig approaches the mandatory for anyone with an interest in Wagner.

Bayreuth Festival (1) - Parsifal, 11 August 2012

Bayreuth Festspielhaus

Amfortas – Detlef Roth

Titurel – Diógenes Randes
Gurnemanz – Kwangchul Youn
Parsifal – Burkhard Fritz
Klingsor – Thomas Jesatko
Kundry – Susan Maclean
First Knight of the Grail – Arnold Bezuyen
Second Knight of the Grail – Christian Tschelebiew
First Squire – Julia Borchert
Second Squire – Ulrike Helzel
Third Squire – Clemens Bieber
Fourth Squire – Willem van der Heyden
Flowermaidens – Julia Borchert, Martina Rüping, Carola Guber, Christiane Kohl, Jutta Maria Böhnert, Ulrike Helzel
Contralto solo – Simone Schröder

Stefan Herheim (director)

Heike Scheele (set designs)
Gesine Völlm (costumes)
Ulrich Niepel (lighting)
Alexander Meier-Dörzenbach (dramaturgy)
Momme Hinrichs, Torge Møller (video)

Bayreuth Festival Chorus (chorus master: Eberhard Friedrich)

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra
Philippe Jordan (conductor)

I had not seen this coming. As a veteran – if hardly by hard- or even medium-core Bayreuth standards – of two previous performances of Stefan Herheim’s production of Parsifal (2008 and 2011), I found myself nevertheless quite taken aback by how much, especially during the first act, I fancied I was seeing for the first time. Some of it I suspect I was, for not only does the Bayreuth Festival pride itself upon its Werkstatt (workshop) concept, in which productions will develop from year to year, Herheim’s questing, dialectical directorial approach especially lends itself to such reinvention – as, of course, does Wagner’s dramaturgy and compositional method, not the least of his legacies for twentieth- and twenty-first-century serialism. Convinced as I was that there had been a shift of emphasis, at least, looking back upon other early reports, I suspect that this was at least as much a matter of my approaching the staging differently, for whatever reasons, partly relative familiarity no doubt, but perhaps not just that. Herheim’s multi-layered, almost geological, method is not dissimilar to Wagner’s own, which helps explain the extraordinary ‘fit’ between the two artists. This production needs to be seen many times, and now, at last, it can be, since this very performance was being filmed for broadcast and DVD release. Yours truly might even be seen upon it, when the mirror is held up to the Festspielhaus audience; let us hope not.

The German historical-political and  Parsifal-reception levels of the production are by now celebrated. (I have written about them at some length in previous reports.) If anything, I felt them underplayed during the first act, though that may, as I said, have been more a matter of my personal reception. At any rate, what took me aback on this occasion was the depth of what I shall call the psychoanalytical level to the staging.  Indeed, such was the overwhelming experience of the latter that I started to feel in some respects a little disappointed, protective of my earlier experiences, almost a loyalist to what I imagined, rightly or wrongly, to have been Herheim I and II, rather as if I were an Old- or even New-Bayreuth loyalist, missing my Wieland Wagner, Hans Knappertsbusch, or earlier. Herheim III began to seem a meta-production, as much a re-imagining of its earlier incarnations as of Parsifal itself. Dreams and childhood come to the fore, also, just as intriguingly, religious experience and its psychopathology. (Remember Nietzsche and Thomas Mann?) The third scene in particular, with its priest, incense – Nietzsche’s accusation of Wagner bowing before the Cross re-examined – and, most shockingly, circumcision of the infant who may or may not ‘be’ a young Parsifal, offers almost as much food for thought as Wagner’s own Feuerbachian inversion of the elements. (That alone ought surely to disqualify the absurd custom, still observed in certain conservative circles, of pious refraining from applause.)

The violence of the deed of circumcision could hardly have been more topical, given the recent legal controversy over infant genital mutilation in Germany; and yet, it also pointed to something older, deep-seated, and of course very much part of the Rezeptionsgeschichte strand: the question of whether anti-Semitism is expressed in Wagner’s drama. Amfortas’s cry of pain – incidentally, or rather far from incidentally, he now seems far more central to the act, indeed to the drama as a whole, arguably more so even than Parsifal – jolted us from our complacent ‘knowledge’ of the work, and also pointed forward to Kundry’s scream of laughter. Christ, whatever Wagner may have hoped, must also have undergone the procedure. Detlef Roth’s commanding assumption of the role of Amfortas, still more impressive than in earlier years, undoubtedly assisted in this transformation of emphasis. What is the relationship between Amfortas and the young Parsifal, whom we see or think we see at various stages? Does the latter imagine the former, indeed the drama as a whole, in at least some sense? That is too easy an answer, and is complicated by the retelling of German history, but it is a questioning strand nevertheless. Notably, Gurnemanz addresses the boy Parsifal at the end of the act. Even the video despatch of young men to war (the Great War) seems as much a product of twisted familial relations – consider the inculcation of patriotism in English as well as German schools – as of great power politics.

Kundry as governess – as well, earlier and later, as Herzeleide – adds a creepy, nursery, Turn of the Screw-like aspect to the story, especially when, therafter, the grown Parsifal possesses her on the bed that is both setting for and generative of so much of the action. It is there, of course, that the child is born, literally centre stage, the delivery itself a powerful moment, as well as intricately linked to the various stages of childhood, adolescence, adulthood, dotage, and death, both personal and political, we witness enacted. The enactment on stage of Amfortas’s wounding during Gurnemanz’s narration at first seems a little too literal, but psychoanalytical implications and consequences, some mentioned above, soon manifest themselves, so that one realises that such development and consideration of such development are actually a good part of the point. The late-nineteenth-century (Mann’s ‘bad nineteenth-century?’) setting suggests, amongst other things, a family saga: Buddenbrooks spiced with Nietzsche.

Much of that, however, was, at least for me, called into question by the second act, in which the political reasserted itself with a vengeance. The delicious representation of the Flowermaidens as orderlies and flappers – is that not just what they are? – retains its dramatic power, as well as firmly putting us in the inter-war period. (I say firmly, but of course, time passes as the act does.) And yet, a reminder that the various levels of interpretation are anything but distinct is offered by a greater keenness of manipulation when it comes to Kundry’s acts: above all, what she tells Parsifal. She is in turn being manipulated by Klingsor, of course, but perhaps so many of us are understandably now influenced by feminist readings, that we feel uncomplicatedly sympathetic. It is salutary to be reminded that this rose of Hell – the rose very much part of the staging’s imagery – has, despite her plight, agency of her own. That is surely more feminist than to consider her purely as a victim. And the similarity of costume between her and Klingsor, both in Weimar cross-dressing travesty, reinforces the need both have for each other, the Hegelian master-slave dialectic reimagined. The final scene remains electric, the unfurling of swastikas and coming of Bayreuth’s and Germany’s darkest years truly shocking. Judging by the disgruntled noises from some members of the audience – it should hardly surprise that ‘conservative’ critics of searching productions would feel discomfited by a reminder of their ideological kinship – it remains an absolute necessity too. An interval walk around the outdoor exhibition of Verstummte Stimmen (the ‘silenced voices’ of Jews ill-treated by the Festival) reinforced the point: rightist ‘Wagnerians’ are not merely deluded; they are and always have been extremely dangerous. (Ironically, the only figure treated unjustly is Wagner himself, in which the questionable claim that anti-Semitism is expressed in the dramas is trotted out uncritically.) I could not help but think of the ongoing controversy concerning Amélie Hohmann’s refusal to release correspondence between Winifred Wagner and Hitler. Whatever one might think of Katharina Wagner as director, at least she seems willing to open up the festival to necessary historical criticism.

Which leads me into the third act, with Herheim’s attack upon – or rather, display, which allows the audience to attack – the disingenuous New Bayreuth plea, signed by Wieland and Wolfgang, and displayed on stage, as Wagner himself is hidden behind Parsifal’s childhood wall, that politics be banished from the Green Hill. (It actually speaks well of Wolfgang, whatever one may think of many of his acts, that he permitted this criticism to be staged; he was always, however, a friend to directors, even if he lacked directorial ability himself.) The post-war period is initially one of devastation, and improves little, if at all, whatever the mendacious ideology of the Wirtschaftswunder. Perhaps the point of ultimate hope comes when a star briefly appears in the sky, wonderfully touching, though what does it signify? The coming of a (false) messiah? A simple, childlike pleasure? Nothing that can be put into words? It certainly rings truer than the gaudy coloured lights that seem to signal Parsifal’s descent into the realm of the (lifestyle?) guru. If anything, politics seem to stand still more starkly at the heart of the final scene. Parsifal is Lohengrin’s father, though the extent to which that is a red herring may be debated. Here, however, the problematical nature of charismatic leadership seems to follow on closely, especially from Hans Neuenfels’s production, which I shall see again soon, as well of course from the precedent of Siegfried. It is noteworthy that Parsifal is not one of the trio we see at the end, presumably hastening us to an uncertain future; instead, we find ourselves in the hands of Gurnemanz, Kundry – no, she does not expire – and a young boy. Or is he Parsifal, and has the whole drama been a dream, or in the case of its German historical setting, the ultimate nightmare? There is certainly no solace to be had from the despicable bickering politicians of the Bundestag, the Federal Republic’s flag draping Titurel’s coffin, yet Parsifal seems to have offered at best a dead-end, maybe even a touch of snake oil. (From Carole Caplin to Blair?) Amfortas, like Siegfried, seems to have gained in dignity through death. Nihilism, as Nietzsche would doubtless have had it, or Wagner’s lifelong anarchism, as I would?

Musical performances are more mixed in quality, though as I have already mentioned, Roth’s Amfortas has continued to grow in strength. Kwangchul Youn, whom I have previously found a little dull, exhibited a far stronger musico-dramatic presence, and an intriguingly ambiguous one. Who is this narrator, and is he to be trusted? Susan Maclean was perhaps a little too wild on the vocal side. It could hardly be said that her Kundry is beautiful of voice, and a little more refulgence would not at times have gone amiss, but there can be no doubting the dramatic commitment of her portrayal. Thomas Jesatko’s Klingsor is by now perhaps leaning a little too much towards camp: his first ‘furchtbarer Not’ sounded a little too caricatured to chill. Again, however, this is very much a stage assumption that one is unlikely to forget. (Perhaps it is just that I have become too accustomed to it.) Burkhard Fritz’s Parsifal marked a great improvement upon last year’s metallic Simon O’Neill. It may not be the most profound account one will hear, but his tone is secure and possessed of considerable mellifluence. One could hear pretty much all of his words too, which was certainly not the case with his Kundry. Smaller parts were cast from strength. Not only Diógenes Randes’s unearthly Titurel but even the knights and squires shone, and that was not just a matter of perceptive direction from Herheim with respect to their presentation as individuals drawn from the mass to be briefly highlighted. Choral singing, under Eberhard’s direction, was as excellent as we have come to expect, but that achievement should never be overlooked.

The only significant drawback related to Philippe Jordan’s conducting. I have heard much worse in Wagner – and alas must do so regularly in London – but this seemed a work-in-progress in a less happy sense than Herheim’s production, particularly when considered in contrast to Daniele Gatti’s work in previous years. Jordan lacked a sense of ritual, crucial to the first and third acts. That is not a matter of speed, but of steadiness, of feeling and communicating the inner pulse. Jordan seemed less an equal partner to Herheim, as Gatti certainly had done, than provider of a sound-track (ironically, given his father’s appearance on Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s film.) There was some interesting highlighting, alla Barenboim, of woodwind lines, though brass, especially during the opening Prelude, could occasionally be a little shaky. In general, though, the orchestral playing itself was superb. The interpretation seemed, however, as though it needed time and experience to settle. For instance, intriguingly Karajan-like steely moments seemed to bear little relation to the rest of what we heard. I hope, again, that I am not becoming too wedded to a particular interpretation, in this case Gatti’s; I do not think I am, given the variety of accounts, both recorded and in the theatre, I have admired.  But it is necessary to remain on one’s guard.

This, I have little doubt, will prove one of the most necessary opera DVDs since the release on the new medium of the Boulez-Chéreau Ring. If only the casting had been a little more consistent, and if only Gatti had still been conducting. And yet, perhaps one message of this increasingly unsettling staging is that the search for perfection is not only chimerical but catastrophic.

First interval, third call, with apologies for the unsteadiness of hand...

Bayreuth Festival (4) - Parsifal, 3 August 2011

Festspielhaus, Bayreuth

Amfortas – Detlef Roth
Titurel – Diógenes Randes
Gurnemanz – Kwangchul Youn
Parsifal – Simon O’Neill
Klingsor – Thomas Jesatko
Kundry – Susan Maclean
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 – Willem van der Heyden
Flowermaidens – Julia Borchert, Martina Rüping, Carola Guber, Christiane Kohl, Jutta Maria Böhnert, Ulrike Helzel
Contralto solo – Simone Schröder

Stefan Herheim (director)
Heike Scheele (set designs)
Gesine Cöllm (costumes)
Ulrich Niepel (lighting)
Alexander Meier-Dörzenbach (dramaturgy)
Momme Hinrichs, Torge Møller (video)

Bayreuth Festival Chorus (chorus master: Eberhard Friedrich)

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra

Daniele Gatti (conductor)

Should one cross the same river twice? Could Stefan Herheim’s – and Daniele Gatti’s – Parsifal possibly match up now to my first-time experience in 2008? (See also Per-Erik Skramstrad’s review from the same festival.) As with the Boulez-Chéreau ‘Centenary’ Ring, one of the few opera DVDs I find persistently engrossing, the answers are ‘yes’ – and triumphantly so. It appears almost mandatory to voice a cavil, and I have a small one, so shall get it out of the way now: there are sections of the stage direction that have been relatively simplified. In most cases, that tends to be good: a removal of clutter helped Keith Warner’s Royal Opera House Ring upon its second outing. Yet there was no clutter in Herheim’s Parsifal. Complexity, yes, but this is a complex, in many respects quite Hegelian, work, with an equally complex history; Herheim’s genius, not a word I use lightly, was and is to tell the story of both, and that includes the score, the director’s musicianship and belief in music’s redemptive power no more in doubt than his stagecraft. The first half of the third act now looks for the most part surprisingly ‘traditional’, not that it did not incorporate and develop tradition, but I slightly regret the thinning out. (Some commentators thought first time around that too much was going on, that Herheim should have concentrated on but a single line; that seemed to me to miss the whole point of his production.)

I do not intend to give a full account of the production, since that would doubtless try readers’ patience beyond endurance, and much can already be read in the two accounts I mentioned above (mine and Per-Erik’s). What I should like principally to do is to talk about some points that especially captured my intention on this particular occasion. However, it is worth briefly mentioning the broad thrust, or rather thrusts. We witness, not so much in parallel, but inextricably interlinked, as faithful a telling of Parsifal as one is ever likely to find – at least for anyone interested in Wagner’s meaning and dialectical thinking rather than fetishisation of incidental matters of costume – and a perceptive retelling of the course of German history from the time of the first performance until the present.

The metamophosis of the first-act’s Wahnfried into Siena Cathedral and back again is subtle and yet telling enough; but note that the pillars of both remain, transformed, in the field hospital of the Flowermaidens, as directed by Klingsor as Cabaret Master of Ceremonies. (Transvestite show-business is an obvious career path for the self-castrated, not unlike the castrati of old.) Herheim’s turning the mirror on the audience not a gimmick, but an invitation, indeed an incitement, to question everything we have thought. ‘Educating Parsifal’ is also ‘educating Parsifal’, and is also ‘educating us’, not in a didactic fashion but as part of a drama in which we would be fools not to participate. (Some such fools booed; another, astonishingly, asked during an overheard interval rant, ‘Why can’t it be like the Met?’) As Tristan tells King Marke, 'das kann ich dir nicht sagen; und was du frägst, das kannst du nie erfahren.' In the almost overwhelming emotional context Herheim has developed, as opposed to the abstraction of a mere act of reporting, it would be an unimaginative soul indeed who did not accept the mirror’s invitation. Identities are blurred, or better enhanced, by the play conducted not only between these two stories but also between characters: Parsifal, at various stages from baby to old man, with Amfortas – compassion or fellow-suffering (the German, Schopenhauerian Mitleid, suffering with) indeed; or Kundry and Herzeleide, whose childbirth and troubled, necessarily incestuous relationship – is any act of parenting not? – with Parsifal is worked out with Parsifal’s own education and reversion. Wagner’s anticipations of Freud have never seemed so clear as in the second-act congress with Herzeleide-Kundry. The visual motif, both on stage and on film, of Kundry as Rose of Hell – Klingsor’s ‘Urteufelin, Höllenrose!’ – guides that educative process, taking Parsifal beyond Tristan’s Nietzschean ‘voluptuousness of Hell’ and renewing in itself in the malevolence of Wagner’s Bergian chromaticism. The near-identity of Kundry and Parsifal, Christ-like, albeit Amfortas-Christ-like, at the beginning of the third act, brings us as close as we come, or indeed Wagner comes, to Christianity: helping the stricken, after the Sermon of the Mount. And those stricken in this context are the female victims of war and its aftermath, that is of one of the most violent struggles yet thrown up by the accumulation of capital and, as Adorno and Horkheimer would have it, the dialectic of Enlightenment. This is, as Per-Erik Skramstad has pointed out, a definite hommage to Götz Friedrich’s Tannhäuser : Herheim studied with Friedrich, another rare example of the musician-director.

One might have expected the electricity to wane in the second-time viewing of such coups de théâtre as the unfurling of swastikas at the destruction of Klingsor’s castle – and of Weimar – as a brown-shirted boy, perhaps Parsifal reincarnated or perhaps not, implies, incorrectly as it would turn out, that tomorrow will belong to him. Not at all: if anything, the electricity was enhanced by expectation. (We do not, after all, stop listening to Parsifal once we know what happens next in the plot.) The families gathered around beforehand for departure make their point chillingly. I could not help but think of the chasm between Herheim’s intelligence and the dreadful ‘Holocaust as entertainment’, The Producers without comedy, of Terry Gilliam’s recent Damnation of Faust. Gilliam boasted of his ignorance of Berlioz’s life and thought; Herheim, from the tying of individual movement to Wagner’s phrasing, to the broadest conceptual sweep, shows his understanding of Wagner and his reception.

Amfortas – and the Federal Republic – on trial in the Bundstag remains a potent, terrifying image following the Third Act Transformation Music. The opening of Titurel’s coffin, draped in the flag, elicits mass revulsion not only on stage but, more importantly, in the audience. (There are musical reasons for that too, to which I shall return.) The monochrome contrast, moreover, with the warmth of Ulrich Niepel’s springtime lighting for the Good Friday Music, tells its own story. Christian charity has been replaced by politics, just as the Wagner brothers’ (Wieland and Wolfgang) post-war request, that political discussion desist on the Green Hill, shown here during the Transformation Music without comment, could not have been more of a political act had they too emblazoned the stage with swastikas. The video wall built up during this scene around Wagner’s image – perhaps also an echo of Wieland’s Bayreuth wall, on whose other side lay his mother, Winifred? – is the very same wall constructed every day by those who, after Otto Schenk, wish only to see fairy-tales of knights and dragons, wilfully deaf to the words and music of Richard Wagner.

Some have complained that Daniele Gatti’s masterly pacing, slow by the clock for those who care about such things, worked against the dramatic urgency of Herheim’s staging. My experience was quite the opposite. By giving time for the drama to unfold, whilst never – I repeat never – failing to maintain the line of Wagner’s melos, Gatti presented the orchestra very much in Wagner’s Opera and Drama image of the Greek Chorus. Moreover, there was nothing unvaried about his approach. There was violence, and a nasty violence at that, in the Flowermaidens’ Music, stage images of Weimar cabaret turned sour enhanced, indeed seemingly built upon, an integrated understanding of Wagner’s harmony and colouring that foretold Schoenberg’s Golden Calf Orgy (Moses und Aron). On the other hand, the luxuriant decadence – or Nietzschean décadence? – of Kundry’s seduction spoke of Berg and Mahler. It is surely no coincidence what a fine conductor of Mahler and the Second Viennese School Gatti has proved himself to be. I mentioned above the revulsion on stage as Amfortas opened Titurel’s coffin. That was as nothing compared to the Mahlerian, indeed Schoenbergian (think of the Five Orchestral Pieces, op.16) horror Gatti screwed up in the pit. This was an exemplary collaboration between conductor and director.

What of the singers? Simon O’Neill’s Parsifal was a grave disappointment. Such is the strength of Herheim’s production – and Gatti’s conducting – that the meaning absent from O’Neill’s delivery of the text could in general be supplied elsewhere, but there was nowhere to hide when it came to the unpleasant, thin yet shouted tone production. (It was nowhere near as bad as John Treleaven’s unbearable Siegfried and Tristan, but seemed to be moving in that direction.) Christopher Ventris was superior in every respect in 2008. Susan Maclean, by contrast, was a revelatory Kundry. I have admired Maclean in the same role before, in Leipzig (twice). Here she showed the difference between a dutiful, for the most part well-sung, yet hardly seductive, portrayal (Mihoko Fujimura last time around) and one that truly engaged with the production as living musical drama. This Kundry repelled and seduced, shrieked and consoled, provoked and served. The production might have been made for her. Thomas Jesatko remained an excellent Klingsor, revelling in his kinky sleights of hand. The agonies of Detlef Roth’s Amfortas were searingly portrayed: his was a performance that made one feel not only the unsparing nature of Amfortas’s wound, but the lyrical, almost Schubertian possibilities of a future that never came. We need to believe that Amfortas’s life could have been different, and we did. Sad to say, Kwangchul Youn’s Gurnemanz proved at best variable, wideness of vibrato and occasional hoarseness never compensated for by the outsize personality artists such as Sir John Tomlinson can still bring to the role. The Flowermaidens, however, were excellent: I am sure that we shall hear more of many of them. And the choral singing was superlative, as weighty and clear as in Tannhäuser and Lohengrin: congratulations once again to the Bayreuth Festival Chorus and Eberhard Friedrich. This was not a perfect cast, then, though one could hardly have asked for more from Maclean, Jesatko, and Roth, nor from the chorus. But crucially, nothing detracted from the overwhelming force of Herheim’s and Gatti’s vision. There was no doubt, moreover, about the final redemption: it was of, for, and through Wagner’s miraculous score, ‘lit from behind’. Even if one thought Parsifal stood in no need of redemption, one realised that work and audience had been blessed.

Four requests:

1. Bayreuth: to release this production on DVD. It is a milestone not only in the staging of Parsifal but of opera tout court.

2. Stefan Herheim: to stage Die Frau ohne Schatten and Die Soldaten, works crying out for such musico-dramatic attention.

3. The Royal Opera (with apologies to readers, should this sound unduly parochial): to engage Herheim and Gatti to present a Wagner work at Covent Garden. (And no, Les Vêpres siciliennes, in which Herheim is posed to make his London debut, will not do.)

4. Bayreuth: to persuade Herheim to direct its next-but-one Ring.

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.