Bayreuth Festival (3) - Lohengrin, 13 August 2012

Bayreuth Festspielhaus

King Henry the Fowler – Wilhelm Schwinghammer

Lohengrin – Klaus Florian Vogt
Elsa – Annette Dasch
Friedrich von Telramund – Thomas Johannes Mayer
Ortrud – Susan Maclean
King’s Herald – Samuel Youn
Brabantian Nobles – Stefan Heibach, Willem van der Heyden, Rainer Zaun, Christian Tschelebiew

Hans Neuenfels (director)

Reinhard von der Thannen (designs)
Franck Evin (lighting)
Björn Verloh (video)
Henry Arnold (dramaturgy)

Bayreuth Festival Chorus (chorus master: Eberhard Friedrich)

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra
Andris Nelsons (conductor)

I found much to admire last year in Hans Neuenfels’s production of Lohengrin, though equally voiced a few reservations. This time around, perhaps having overcome my initial surprise at the now-celebrated infestation of rats, I found little to quibble about at all. Indeed, the production seemed elevated almost to the level of a companionable yet still provocative classic. Direction appeared still tighter, and I did not feel there were many, if any, instances of working against Wagner’s score; indeed, subtle distinctions of movement, which I am not convinced were necessarily there last year, suggested commendable consonance. Where there was simply too much confusion in the previous evening’s Flying Dutchman, there could be little doubt that we were seeing what we were meant to see. At the heart of Neuenfels’s production, or at least my understanding of it, remains the experiment, into which Lohengrin first, unsuccessfully, tries to break, towards the end of the First Act Prelude. He eventually gains access, yet that initial failure is noteworthy: whoever is in control, it is not Lohengrin. Nor is it King Henry, who is dragged off-stage by the mysterious attendants – redolent perhaps of those enigmatic ‘authorities’ to whom Don Ottavio refers in Don Giovanni. Indeed, the king is clearly a flawed, even wounded, perhaps Amfortas-like character: an intriguing and utterly convincing conception. Interestingly, two instances of characters throwing off the shackles of supervision are Ortrud and Lohengrin, arguably when both are at the height of their powers during the second act. So no authority is absolute, perhaps, though whatever this is – Fate? The near-omnipotent surveillance of late capitalism? The illusion of the Gesamtkunstwerk? – manages to reassert itself, before bringing forth the fragile infant figure of Gottfried from within an egg. (Incidentally, I cannot now imagine why I found that problematical last year, so it is time to recant.)  One of the most telling aspects of the staging is the impatience, at moments shading from frustration into anger, that Lohengrin experiences with respect to Elsa. Neither of these characters is a saint.

Andris Nelsons’s conducting had progressed by leaps and bounds; it certainly proved more coherent than either Philippe Jordan’s account of Parsifal or, perhaps more surprisingly, Christian Thielemann’s sometimes brilliant yet sometimes flawed conducting of The Flying Dutchman. The orchestral sound was aptly golden, more redolent of Vienna than anywhere further north. Ebb and flow were splendidly judged throughout, with none of the mannerisms that intruded from time to time in 2011. At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, Eberhard Friedrich’s chorus was magnificent: absolutely crucial in this work, of course; the chorus members’ acting as part of the pliable, threatening mass was equally exemplary.

Klaus Florian Vogt would seem to have been born to play Lohengrin. The unheimlich quality of his voice meshes perfectly both with role and production. What a relief it is not to have to endure a strained or downright unpleasant tenor in this repertoire, even if I thought there were just a few occasions this year when he might have been guilty of coasting towards slight blandness. That said, there were many instances not only of unearthly beauty but of fine dynamic shading and phrasing. Moreover, Vogt looks the part, which one can hardly say of Johan Botha, the most recent Lohengrin at Covent Garden. Annette Dasch may not have been the most memorable of Elsas, but she offered an attentive, varied assumption, far more secure than Astrid Weber, whom I heard as a late replacement for Dasch last year. Thomas Johannes Mayer was an excellent Telramund, both forthright and sensitive. If Susan Maclean paled somewhat in comparison with Petra Lang’s Ortrud in 2011, Maclean’s tone lacking refulgence, she nevertheless did as much to compensate with stage presence as she could. (The final scene seemed overdone, though that may well have been a matter of direction: here, Ortrud seemed less drunk with power than merely drunk.) Samuel Youn was on better form as the Herald than he had been as the Dutchman the night before, though intonational problems reared their head again. The splendidly named Wilhelm Schwinghammer was an excellent King Henry; it is a fine achievement to sing strongly and yet convincingly play the role of a weak man, as opposed to acting weakly.

This production is now available on DVD, filmed last year. Though I have not actually seen the DVD, my experiences this year and in 2011 render me reasonably certain that I can, indeed should, offer a firm recommendation.

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.

Parsifal, Oper Leipzig, 4 April 2009

Images copyright Andreas Birkigt (N.B. there were no images available for the current cast, so Petra Lang will be seen in place of Susan Maclean as Kundry)

Leipzig Opera House

Parsifal – Stefan Vinke
Gurnemanz – James Moellenhoff
Klingsor – Jürgen Kurth
Kundry – Susan Maclean
Amfortas – Tuomas Pursio
Titurel – Roman Astakhov
First Knight of the Grail – Tommasso Randazzo
Second Knight of the Grial – Roman Astakhov
Esquires – Viktorija Kaminskaite, Jean Broekhuizen, Timothy Fallon, and Tiberius Simu
Alto solo – Geneviève King
Flowermaidens – Ainhoa Garmendia, Jennifer Porto, Kathrin Göring, Viktorija Kaminskaite, Ines Reintzsch and Geneviève King

Roland Aeschlimann (director, designs)
Susanne Raschig (costumes)
Lucinda Childs (movement)
Ilka Weiss (assistance with designs and movement)
Lukas Kaltenbäck (lighting)

Chorus and Supplementary Chorus of the Leipzig Opera (chorus master: Sören Eckhoff)
Children’s Choir of the Leipzig Opera (chorus mistress: Sophie Bauer)
Ladies of the Leipzig Opera Youth Choir
Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra
Ulf Schirmer (conductor)

All told, this was an impressive Parsifal, a revival of Roland Aeschlimann’s 2006 production for Leipzig, shared with Geneva and Nice. Aeschlimann’s designs tread a careful and often revealing line between abstraction and representation. Colour plays an important role, both in demarcating locations – perhaps not in themselves always of the greatest importance, though distinction between them is – and in the dramatic transformations that occur within particular scenes. Gurnemanz’s forest is evoked without being fetishised; after the risible telegraph pole approach of Klaus Michael Grüber’s lamentable production for Covent Garden, one has to be grateful for the smallest of mercies. Thankfully, this production’s virtues extend beyond that.

I was initially a little nonplussed by what seemed to be the Grail. Amfortas uncovers whatever it is, to hold up a sheet which, by a trick of lighting – and ‘trick’ seems to be the operative word – presents a Turin Shroud-like vision of Christ. So far, so Feuerbachian, I thought, but do we not need something a little more substantial – in more than one sense – to explain the sustenance afforded to Monsalvat’s community, in decline but not yet dead? However, as the Eucharistic – if that is what it be – mystery progresses, something else is revealed, to which all turn and which clearly replenishes the community, though the precise or even imprecise nature of this far-away object, which we spy through what appears to be a tunnel to another dimension, remains unclear. What is very clear, however, is that it too is revivified by the workings of grace via Parsifal, gaining lustre and perhaps confidence, certainly becoming – visually – more multi-faceted. Aeschlimann may or may not subscribe to the Christian terms in which Wagner couches his drama but that does not appear to matter. This is a far more fruitful, open-ended approach than many, which fits moreover both with Wagner’s own intellectual approach and with the mysterious, oracle-like nature of his musical drama. For it was clear from listening and watching that Aeschlimann knows the score and not just the words; events on stage coincided with musical events. This ought to be a matter of course, yet so often is anything but.

There is also a highly visible spear on stage throughout the second act, reminding us of what is at stake, as if we could have forgotten the highly visible – and highly disturbing – wound of Amfortas and the scar of Klingsor’s hideous self-mutilation, both born of impure lust, sexual and power-related, if the two can indeed be separated. Moreover, the characters actually appear to be directed, another of those things which ought to go without saying yet is a rarer occurrence upon the contemporary opera stage than one might even reasonably hope. I liked Kundry’s uncovering of the snow to reveal the moribund community as Good Friday worked its spell – perhaps a homage to Ruth Berghaus’s celebrated Frankfurt production, in which Parsifal and Kundry rolled back grey canvases to reveal green meadows, yet more ambiguous, less strident in its desacralisation. It was far from clear that this was really an act without grace; it might well just have been a symbolisation of something far more mysterious. It is not always necessary to spell everything out.

There is no dove at the conclusion, which is no great loss for all but the most Old Bayreuthian of Parsifalians, although Stefan Herheim in his magnificent, all-encompassing 2008 production for Bayreuth managed to include it without bathos – or rather with a non-mocking mediated irony. More worrying for me was the absence of the sign of the Cross at the end of the second act. It is not that I think this must take place. However, if it does not, then it seems to me that there ought to be something, even if a polemical absence, in its stead. Otherwise, as here, Parsifal sings of something that simply is not there and it all just seems a little embarrassing – and meaningless. Such insensitivity to the text is the order of the day for many productions but is a rare exception in this production.

The Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra was on excellent form, save for a few too many fluffs from the horns. It was not a virtuoso performance, such as we might hear from the Berlin Philharmonic in this repertoire. Rather, it illuminated the score from within, with evocative woodwind, baleful liturgical brass, and marvellously yet understatedly rich in string tone. (If only one could have said the same about the preceding night’s St Matthew Passion.) Ulf Schirmer impressed as conductor. Again, his was not a reading that drew attention to itself, yet line was maintained throughout. If without quite the staggering inevitability of Bernard Haitink at Covent Garden, Schirmer did not compare unfavourably with Daniel Barenboim last month in Berlin. There was a highly dramatic conclusion to the second act, contrasting strongly and appositely with the ‘liturgical’ first and third acts, not that the distinction was – or should be – absolute. Moreover, he subtly drew attention to the links – whether outright quotation or something more allusive – with Wagner’s preceding dramas. Anyone can hear the Lohengrin quotation upon Parsifal’s shooting of the swan – and, one would hope, the Nietzschean ‘voluptuousness of Hell’ evoked by use of the Tristan-chord. Yet connections with the Ring-dramas, Die Meistersinger, and earlier works too are there to be made – and they were.

In this, Schirmer appeared to be in accord with his director and with his Parsifal. This was the first time I had heard Stefan Vinke, but I hope that it will not be the last. His is a true Heldentenor. We all have our favourite voices from the past and it can be unduly tempting to dwell upon them; but Vinke put me in mind of Jess Thomas. Thomas was perhaps no one’s favourite Siegfried or Parsifal, yet when one thinks of what we have heard since, he has evidently been underrated. Certainly one could hear Siegfried in Vinke’s voice and, moreover, one could understand through his interpretation how much of Wagner’s previous hero remained in the first act of Parsifal. The dramatic point is that Wagner’s erstwhile rebel without a consciousness has failed and therefore the problems he has raised must be revisited; something else must be attempted. For the relative obnoxiousness of Vinke’s Parsifal – and one assumes Aeschlimann’s too – would be transformed by the workings of grace into something quite different. Not that the journey was easy: I liked his near-succumbing to Kundry’s temptations for a second time.

Susan Maclean seemed to grow into her role as the temptress. Succeeding Petra Lang cannot have been easy but, as time went on, Maclean, throughout a fine actress, also became increasingly impressive vocally. The successful contrast between her character(s) in the outer acts and the second act showed that ideas, occasionally adopted, of having two singers as Kundry should probably remain filed under the heading ‘interesting’. Tuomas Pursio was an outstanding Amfortas, my still-fresh memories of Hanno Müller-Brachmann last month notwithstanding. Not only was every word of the text clearly audible; not only was every note rendered meaningful; one could readily sense the charisma of this flawed leader, who too often can seem a merely Nietzschean sick-bed caricature of décadence. Charisma and intelligence of response also represented the twin hallmarks of James Moellenhoff’s Gurnemanz. Gurnemanz should never seem like an old bore – and never does in a decent performance. Here, however, we sensed a charismatic leadership quality that helps explain why so many, whether squires or Kundry, will heed him. Jürgen Kurth was a less impressive Klingsor, seeming somewhat underpowered by contrast.

This production was not perfect; surely none has ever been. Yet it accomplished the most important thing any performance could, namely to fill me once again with wonder at the towering greatness of Wagner’s miraculous work. I did not necessarily feel that any of its difficulties had been resolved, but I felt challenged by their being posed anew.