Parsifal: The Search for the Grail, dir. Tony Palmer, 26 July 2010

Purcell Room, Southbank Centre

I started by thinking that this marked a slight improvement upon The Wagner Family, Tony Palmer’s appalling recent film for The South Bank Show. I was soon disabused: for one thing, it was actually made in 1998; more importantly, it managed to be more distorting, more disingenuous, even more poorly put together. Whatever Palmer’s strengths as a film-maker may once have been – despite a large number of errors, his Wagner biopic with Richard Burton is often quite compelling dramatically – he no longer seems to possess them. In a tedious, irrelevant self-justification at the opening of the film, he told us how well he knew Plácido Domingo and how ghastly the BBC was, despite its recent agreement to screen ten of his films. The BBC has indeed a great deal to answer for in terms of its populism, but it is not clear to me that it will be redeemed by screening material such as this. An old-fashioned documentary would have been a hundred times more enlightening.

Still, if Palmer’s rambling introduction were tedious and irrelevant, so was the film itself, to which one should add pernicious, ramshackle, recycled, and a host of other none too complimentary adjectives. At the heart, such as it is, of the film are an outline of the drama from Domingo, delightfully accented, with some additional commentary in which the tenor, Miss World-like, outlines his hopes for world peace, and excerpts from Palmer’s production of Parsifal for the Mariinsky Theatre, with Domingo in the title role, conducted by Valery Gergiev. Domingo sings well, if hardly idiomatically. Some of the other singers sing less well, if hardly idiomatically. Gergiev is better when he made the score sound like Tchaikovsky, worse when he drives it too hard, Solti-lite, worse still when he distends phrases for no apparent reason. The Mariinksy – or Kirov, I think, at this time – brass lack something in refinement and the choral contribution is redolent of the Red Army Choir. We hear quite a lot of the Flowermaidens’ music; it seems interminable and could hardly be less erotic. One prominent maiden looks and sounds distinctly mature. Violeta Urmana’s Kundry impressed me in London; she is done no favours here, however, not least on account of the staging.

For Palmer’s production, from what one can see of it, resembles a parody of ‘traditional’ Eastern European operatic presentations. One of his ‘experts’, Robert Gutman, about whom more, sadly, below, bemoans the alleged fact that some audiences think Wagner’s dramas to be mere mediæval pageants. Perhaps they do; I cannot say that I have ever met anyone who thought such a thing. This is what they receive here, however. Palmer’s animus against Bayreuth belies the fact that that festival has engaged directors from whose table he is not worthy so much as to gather the crumbs. Stefan Herheim’s present production of Parsifal, for instance, is not only far and away the best I have seen of the work in question; I do not think I have seen a superior production of anything. For some reason, or perhaps none, the St Petersburg production sometimes morphs into film footage of actors in a hazy setting some might think redolent of soft porn (without the porn). Perhaps this has something to do with Domingo’s puzzling emphasis upon the ‘magic lake’, perhaps not.

So far, so bad. There is, alas, much worse that must be mentioned, though I shall limit myself. Considerable attention is paid to Karen Armstrong, described as a ‘New Testament scholar’. An ex-nun who has made a media career out of attacking institutional religion and claiming that the basic message of all religions is the same, Armstrong waffles on about how some people preferred the certainty (?!) of the Grail to the challenges of mysticism. No effort, however strained, is made to connect her contributions to Parsifal. There are a couple of clips showing Wolfgang Wagner giving a tour of the Festspielhaus. Again, these are curiously disconnected from anything else, leading one to suspect that they may not have been originally intended for this film at all. It is certainly difficult to imagine Wolfgang lending his approval to such an enterprise. To fill in some time, lengthy excerpts are played, without mention of their provenance, from Palmer’s early Wagner film. No explanation is given as to why we should see quite so much material, or indeed any, of Ludwig II or of the Dresden revolt; nor is any mention made that much of the music from these clips is not from Parsifal at all. Further padding is provided by irrelevant scenes from Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Indiana Jones.

A cheap trick Palmer plays more than once is simply to sound excerpts from Parsifal against visual footage from the Third Reich; at least the latter is well choreographed, but what does this prove? Absolutely nothing. Enter Robert Gutman. I had thought he might by now have gone the way of Titurel, but apparently not. The film’s sole ‘Wagner scholar’ – someone might consider him such, I suppose, since he just about edges this side of ‘Wagner and UFOs’ – he proceeds to rant against the evil of Parsifal, completely unchallenged, just as he does in The Wagner Family: further recycling. Gutman’s claims concerning the drama are merely preposterous assertions. No argument is given as to how this pacifist work is actually an incitement to genocide. Gutman however appears so much like a bad parody of a Bond villain, cackling and rubbing his hands with glee – surely a strange reaction to so wicked a work? – that no one could possibly take him seriously.

Believe it or not, there is still worse to come. We have apparently reached the end, but suddenly we move to a strange woman with a nose piercing, singing a pop song about what it would be like if there were a God. Pictures of Rwandan genocide accompany, or rather overwhelm, her excruciating wailings. Horrendous it is, of course, to see such images, but the implication that they have something somehow to do with Parsifal brings offence to a new level. Joachim Köhler seemed to have set the bar high in his Wagner’s Hitler – not, the reader will note, Hitler’s Wagner – in which a monocausal explanation of the Second World War, namely Richard Wagner, is advanced. Palmer here manages to go further. We then return to the final bars of Parsifal.

Not a word is said concerning Wagner’s music in all of this: a strange conception of a music drama. No opposing voices are heard in what is ultimately an embarrassingly poor parody – that word again, I know – of a Nazi propaganda film. At least Goebbels had some skill in the dark arts. Palmer makes Michael Moore seem a model of balance without either his good cause or his (relatively) interesting method of filmic construction. One would rarely watch a Ken Russell film out of concern for historical accuracy; next to this, one would. And one would go to Russell every time were one interested in some degree of dramatic flow and coherence. Perhaps the most obvious question arising is this: why should Palmer involve himself in a production of Parsifal at all, if this is what he thinks of it? If I, perish the thought, considered it to be an incitement to genocide, then I doubt that I should busy myself by foisting pseudo-mediævalist kitsch representations of it upon St Petersburg. Production and film display profound, or rather shallow, dishonesty; the latter alternately elicits seething rage and mere boredom.

Parsifal, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 6 March 2009

Amfortas – Hanno Müller-Brachmann
Titurel – Andeas Bauer
Gurnemanz – Matti Salminen
Parsifal – Plácido Domingo
Klinsgor – Christof Fischesser
Kundry – Waltraud Meier
Flowemaidens – Anna Prohaska, Julia Baumeister, Constance Heller, Anna Samuil, Carola Höhn, Louise Callinan
Knights of the Grail – Paul O’Neill, Fernando Javier Radó
Squires – Anna Prohaska, Louise Callinan, Florian Hoffmann, Peter Menzel

Bernd Eichinger (director)
Jens Kilian (designs)
fettFilm (video)
Andrea Schmidt-Futterer (costumes)

Staatskapelle Berlin
Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus master: Eberhard Friedrich)
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

Perhaps expectations were always going to be too great for a Berlin Parsifal, conducted by Daniel Barenboim, with a cast to include Plácido Domingo, Waltraud Meier, René Pape, and Hanno Müller-Brachmann. Fate dealt a blow, in that René Pape was unable to sing, yet he was replaced by Matti Salminen, testament surely to the standing both of Barenboim and the Staatsoper Unter den Linden. There were many good things about this performance, yet it did not really live up to the height of my expectations, partly on account of a production that not only failed to make sense but often distracted from the music.

Meier was her usual excellent self, here given a far better opportunity to display her strengths than in the Paris Opéra’s Tristan, when I had last seen her. One could not only hear but see that she meant every word, even every stage movement. The three very different Kundrys of the three acts were both differentiated and yet recognisably incarnations of the same character, perhaps Wagner’s most intriguing of all. Müller-Brachmann was – and this is high praise indeed – an equally astonishing Amfortas. One felt his anguish almost as if it were one’s own; moreover, one understood why it had to be. Not only was every word audible and meaningful; it related intimately to the musical text, as did that to the words. Christoph Fischesser was an excellent Klingsor: malevolent yet no cartoon villain. His presentation of the text, musical and verbal, allowed one once again to understand why he had taken that truly fateful step of his. The smaller roles were well taken, not least the doubling up as Flowermaiden and Squire from rising young star, Anna Prohaska, recent recipient of the TheaterGemeinde Berlin’s Daphne-Preis. Her diction, like that of most of her colleagues, was as impressive as her command of line.

The circumstances of Salminen’s participation made his task difficult. For the most part, he and his unmistakeable voice rose ably to the challenge. His diction was, if anything, almost too pronounced, but if a fault that be, it surely errs in the right direction. There were quite a few instances, however, of uncertain intonation, partly a result of an extremely wide vibrato. I was surprised also by the relative thinness – certainly relative to several other performances I have attended at the Staatsoper – of the choral sound. The choral contribution was not bad but nor did it constitute the jewel that it has often proved.

The true musical disappointment, I am sad to say, was Domingo’s Parsifal. When I have heard him as Siegmund, most recently for the Royal Opera, I have been greatly impressed. Here, however, it sounded as though detractors of his Wagner performances might have been right along. Given that I, not a native speaker, was constantly troubled by his pronunciation, then Germans most certainly should have been. More seriously, he seemed to have forgotten more than a little of the text, both verbal and musical. At one point, he simply gave up on a line, whilst there were plentiful instances of mangled syntax – it sounded as though the spear were to melt rather than to heal Amfortas’s wound – accompanied by all too audible interventions from the prompter. To begin with, I thought the latter was a deranged member of the audience, so loud were her contributions. Moreover, Domingo, for the first time in my experience, both looked and sounded old. One simply could not believe that this was Wagner’s ‘pure fool’. Salminen, hardly at the outset of his career, seemed a youthful Gurnemanz by comparison: a strange and troubling inversion.

Barenboim was on very good form. There were occasional instances, notably in the third act, when I thought that transitions were a little disruptive. The absolute inevitability of everything in, for instance, Bernard Haitink’s Covent Garden performance was not quite attained, but Barenboim was not so very far off; for in general, this was a commanding traversal of a score he knows so well. Unlike many conductors, unthinkingly praised in some quarters for ‘consideration towards the singers’, Barenboim knows that the real drama lies at least as much in Wagner’s Greek Chorus, the orchestra, as on stage; if the singers cannot cope with Wagner’s orchestra, then they have no business singing Wagner. Not only does the drama lie therein; it is here that that drama is bound together through the density, both complex and yet possessed of a mediated immediacy, of the motivic connections and transformations. For this truly to work, one needs a great orchestra. Barenboim’s Staatskapelle Berlin did not disappoint. The depth and richness of its string tone present an object lesson to any orchestra, anywhere. One heard with pleasure, and sometimes with horror, a great deal of woodwind detail that can sometimes be submerged, and the brass provided an especially valuable contribution to the baleful ritual of a dying community.

However, Bernd Eichinger’s production seems to me fundamentally misconceived. Eichinger thinks of the work as an essay in time-travelling. So far as I can tell, this arises from a misunderstanding of Gurnemanz’s celebrated line, ‘Here space becomes time’, a line with philosophical roots in Schopenhauer, and beyond him, Kant. I assume that Kundry’s reincarnations are also involved in the misconception. It might have worked, I suppose, even if it were not what Wagner was thinking of. Yet even on its own terms, Eichinger’s Konzept is confused. The action moves from one time and location to another, rather as if Wagner had scripted a few episodes of Doctor Who. Some are more sharply defined than others, which come across as more of a mishmash. Andrea Schmidt-Futterer’s often bizarre costumes did not help in this respect. Many of the settings seemed merely arbitrary. There seemed no especial reason why images of the Industrial Revolution should accompany Kundry’s kiss, nor why Gurnemanz, in Act III, should awaken as a tramp on a park-bench in what appears to be mid-twentieth-century Manhattan. More problematic, however, is the fact that sometimes the characters perform against a mere scenic backdrop, whilst other instances, such as the mildly futuristic final scene, have them interact with what appears to be a real time and place. That scene appears to take place after some variety of bombing – seen on film – and is populated, for some reason, by a slightly menacing gang of bikers (the chorus).

It is not that the production does not have its isolated moments. The master-slave dialectic between Klingsor and Kundry presents a chilling, dramatically credible opening to a second act that then fails to live up to such promise. Whilst I could not quite work out intellectually why Amfortas tears out his heart for the knights to consume during the previous act – perhaps, I wondered, a violent twist to a Feuerbachian understanding of the elements in Holy Communion – there is a disturbing, powerful quality to what we see; it does not, however, seem to have any connection with anything else. Likewise, the contributions of fettFilm are in themselves of a typically high quality; it is a pity that they are not married to a more convincingly thought through production. This is a far cry from the astonishing achievement of Stefan Herheim’s Bayreuth production last year. The good news, however, is that Herheim will be producing a new Lohengrin at the Staatsoper next month, conducted by Barenboim. I shall report back.

Die Walküre, Royal Opera, 19 October 2007

Royal Opera House

Siegmund – Plácido Domingo
Sieglinde – Eva-Maria Westbroek
Hunding – Stephen Milling
Wotan – John Tomlinson
Brünnhilde – Susan Bullock
Fricka – Rosalind Plowright
Gerhilde – Geraldine McGreevy
Ortlinde – Elaine McKrill
Waltraute – Claire Powell
Schwertleite – Rebecca de Pont Davies
Helmwige – Iréne Theorin
Siegrune – Sarah Castle
Grimgerde – Claire Shearer
Rossweisse – Elizabeth Sikora

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Antonio Pappano (conductor)

Keith Warner (director)
Stefano Lazaridis (designer)
Marie-Jeanne Lecca (costumes)
Wolfgang Göbbel (lighting)

This performance, like that of Das Rheingold, was almost unrecognisable from the first run, when the cycle was being mounted one drama at a time. I have just looked back at my notes from 2005, and see that I considered the first act to have been considerably worse than the second and third. On this occasion, I should say that it was less strong, but nevertheless it stood far removed from the catastrophe, which, despite reasonable singing, had previously ensued, the scene set all too well by a storm-Prelude that almost fell apart, followed by the most sluggish, formless reading I had ever heard of this wonderful act. On this occasion, the Prelude now really sounded like a storm, with the strings in particular shining, as they would throughout. The string chamber music, narrating the early stages of recognition for the Volsung twins, was beguiling indeed. There was a much greater sense of coherence, although there remained certain awkward corners. Antonio Pappano now seems far more willing to take the lead, as a Wagner conductor must, rather than to follow the singers as a mere accompanist. If the architecture is not all quite standing as it should yet, it is mostly there, which certainly could not have been said the first time around. It was a pity that the direction of the act’s tumultuous conclusion rather held fire, seeming a little unsure of where it was going. A few days previously, I had seen the same passage from the Boulez-Chéreau DVD; that torrid reading had known its direction all too well, the curtain coming down only just in time.

The three on-stage characters of the first act were sharply portrayed. The baritonal heft of Plácido Domingo’s tenor is just right for Siegmund. If anything, it seems to have become more pronounced since I last heard him assume the role, at Bayreuth in 2000. He took a little time truly to hit his stride, but this is all relative. He can sing and act both musically and heroically, and he always does; there is never anything approaching a weak moment. Moreover, for all the complaints one sometimes hears about his German, his diction was superb: I could hear every word he sang, which was not always the case elsewhere. Eva-Maria Westbroek did not fall into the trap of depicting Sieglinde as too passive a vessel. Hers was also a thoroughly musical portrayal throughout, and her eagerness to learn more about her mysterious guest was palpable. Stephen Milling’s Hunding was duly brutal, a representative of the bourgeois society Wagner wished revolution, in the guise of Siegmund, to sweep away forever. I thought his stage whisper – perhaps suggested by the director? – a mistake, however, both musically and dramatically. Whilst there was not much sense of the broader environment in which this act took place, the production worked well enough, and was certainly not intrusive.

Act II of Die Walküre is one of the sternest Wagnerian tests. Bernard Haitink, Pappano’s predecessor at Covent Garden, was well-nigh peerless here, but if Haitink’s profound symphonic understanding was an impossible act to follow, there was for the most part a good sense of direction. The orchestra, moreover, sounded generally in very good health, generally providing a true Wagner sound, despite the slightly disconcerting number of errors from woodwind and brass. John Tomlinson rose magnificently to the occasion. Projection of every word and every note had clearly been deeply considered, and the whole was very much more than the sum of its considerable parts. Here was a searing portrayal of Wotan’s predicament: ‘In my own fetters am I caught: – I, most unfree of all men!’ The protector of the laws has attempted to circumvent, or to pervert, those laws in the name of freedom, whilst continuing to wish to retain his legal authority. Yet Tomlinson brought home to us that this is very much a human as well as a political tragedy, which will result in Wotan being forced to sacrifice his cherished offspring. Rosalind Plowright was less impressive as Fricka than she had been in Das Rheingold. Her voice was sometimes rather thin and colourless, though she looked every inch the part of custom’s upholder, clad in duly Victorian costume. Susan Bullock, the (very) last-minute replacement for Lisa Gasteen, sounded a little impersonal at first, though never dramatically at sea, which, given the circumstances, would have been quite understandable. There was a certain Nilsson-like steel earlier on, which for me works better with Isolde than Brünnhilde. However, in retrospect, Bullock appeared to have been intimating the profound transformation in Brünnhilde’s condition, as she takes the upward path from divinity to humanity. In Feuerbach’s words, ‘If you recognise that there are sins in God, you will be free of them.’ This certainly seems to have been a guiding principle of Keith Warner’s production, an idea emerging far more clearly during this cycle than previously.

The Todesverkundigung (‘Annunciation of Death’) scene was quite moving indeed. Bullock and Domingo rose magnificently to the occasion, and Pappano handled the musico-dramatic progression very well. Here there could be no doubt as to Siegmund’s heroism, a heroism all the more impressive than that of Siegfried, for it is founded upon bravery rather than fearlessness. It is this that makes Siegmund’s rejection of Valhalla exceptional, since he does so in full knowledge that the best he can hope for is nothingness. Warner had the upward ladder (leading, I assume, towards the hereafter) snap at this point, rendering scenically explicit the anti-theological point. In the words of Feuerbach’s Thoughts on Death and Immortality:

And if the whole world wished to be divine, and to go to heaven –
which I cannot believe,
for there still are some brave men –
I would stay outside,
I would not go in.

There could then equally be no doubt as to the beginning of Brünnhilde’s conversion. So moved was she by Siegmund’s love for his sister-bride that there truly seemed that she could do no other than defy Wotan – or at least defy his stated decision. Tomlinson was almost overwhelmingly powerful in the consequent expression of anger and guilt, as he smashed Siegmund’s sword and then slew Hunding, Fricka’s slave. Having Fricka observe this denouement, chillingly satisfied in her victory over adulterous spontaneity, heightened the drama.

The third act was also excellent, although there were once again a few too many orchestral blemishes for comfort. They jarred all the more, especially during the Magic Fire Music, given the generally high level of orchestral performance; once again, the slips were be the province not of the strings, but of the woodwind and to a lesser extent the brass. The Magic Fire Music was also hindered a little by uncertain shaping from the conductor, which resulted in occasional disruption to the music’s flow and a few very odd balances. Nevertheless, Pappano despatched the rest of the act with considerable aplomb. After a peculiar directorial opening to the Ride of the Valkyries – strobe lighting mixed with ineffectively ritualistic moves – the scenic realisation settled down, albeit without any particular insights. (The fire at the end was, admittedly, rather impressive.) The Valkyries all sounded in fine voice, both individually and in combination. Sieglinde’s farewell was nothing less than magnificent, Westbroek once again emphasising her love-inspired heroism, which can often fall by the male-dominated wayside. And the confrontation and reconciliation between Wotan and Brünnhilde was quite something. Tomlinson searingly expressed Wotan’s anguish, born of the clash between the treacherous bonds of Wotan’s world of contracts and domination, and the power of love that Das Rheingold had so forcefully denied. Bullock came increasingly to personify that love, which Die Walküre had seen blossom and yet which had also been so viciously defeated. This was a heartfelt farewell indeed.