Sublime? Ridiculous? - You choose
A bit of a change from Wednesday’s Mikado – Glyndebourne’s Parsifal.
This was the opera that John Christie wanted to open his new opera House in his family home of Glyndebourne in 1934 – and its first performance there was eventually managed in 2025!
It’s not a production that Wagner (or particularly his wife Cosima, tender of the flame), would have recognised.
Set in what appears to be a large, gloomy, country house in (broadly) 1882 (the date of its first production) it eschews the magical and totemic apparatus of the Grail and the Spear under a pall of Catholicism and humanism.
The Knights of the Grail become grey attendants, the flower maidens drab governesses. Lit almost completely from behind, shadows are cast downstage and the apron is in gloom.
The original’s antisemitism is swept away (and not a bad thing, I should add).
Only the second act offers movement and action, the first and third might have been offered as a concert performance (other than a very moving foot washing between Parsifal and Kundry – where the sensuality of Act 2 becomes chastely tender in Act 3). But the direction (Acts 1 and 3) did encourage the thought that maybe they could all get a move on.
I’m afraid that Titurel’s burial could only be described as portentous; hardly alleviated by a surprising snow storm (we already know that it is now spring) actually inside the house and over Amfortas’s bed!
But the music! Robin Ticciati with the London Philharmonic Orchestra squeezes the most he can from the score, (no hit tunes there, but immensely moving) and Daniel Johansson (Gurnemanz); and Kristina Stanek (Kundry) are particularly notable, as is, in a smaller way, the indomitable Sir John Tomlinson as Titurel.
In many ways Parsifal has always been problematic, an attempt by Wagner to hang a set of somewhat weird ideas onto a vehicle (Christian mysticism and Arthurian legend) which he was far less comfortable with than Norse and Germanic myth.
What was done was done well (I didn’t mind the escape from armoured knights and semi-pagan totem worship) – but was it worth doing?