John Arden is the most restlessly experimental of all our
new young playwrights, and The Happy Haven sees him surfacing in Audenland a good many miles away from the Germanic claustro- phobia of Serjeant Musgrave's Dance br the British claustrophilia of Live: Like Pigs. The central dilemma of all three plays remains the baiic conundrum of our age—who knows what is good for whom? And, in the denouement of each, we see the irony and futility of our solu-
Opera
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By DAVID LAST week at Covent Garden during the inter- vals of Parsifa/ the usual arguments raged. The commentators may go on insisting that the 'thesis' of a piece of music is the one thing that does not concern us as musicians. But Wagner was root and branch a dramatic coma poser; the germ of a work was often some specific non-musical experience, and the 'truth' of his music is directly linked with the truth of the dramatic conception. It is not necessary for us to believe as rational beings in the assumption behind Monsalvat and Klingsor and the knights of the Grail in order to accept Parsifal. What we' are able to scrutinise the hymn which the is essential is Wagner's total belief in it as a
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Wagner Knights
A Passage to India unfortunately -still retains in its pukka sahib scenes both the unconvincing actors and the rough-and-tumble direction which made them caricatures in Oxford. In addition, Dilys Hamlet, the Wedgwood Garbo, has now been burdened with a too-knowing interpretation of the Kensington miss whb discovers that her Indian trip is really a horrifying journey into her own interior. But Zia Mohyeddin remains a brilliant Dr. Aziz—a playful, hungry puppy dog who does not know his own strength and his own weakness. And the dialogue, despite some clumsy transpositions of thoughts into speech, has a grace and strength not often found on the stage today.
CAIRNS dramatist. In that sense the religious question is, after all, relevant, and 'Christianity' the crux of Parsifal. It is this total belief which,•in the light of the music itself, seems to me doubtful. THE SPECTATOR, APRIL 29, 1960 of Parsifal was outside Wagner's personal exper- ience and therefore beyond even his heroic grasp.
Then there is the curious characterlessness (by Wagner's own standards) of much of the other music of Parsifal, and the lack, to my ears, of a uniquely particular world of sound such as Wagner invented elsewhere. In the discovery of characteristic motivs Parsifal is well below the level of The Ring—and this has nothing to do with its being a different kind of work, a hieratic presentation of successive states of affairs and not a drama of action and character. The music is continually reminding us of other bits of Wagner. Kundry's Herzeleide narrative in Act 2 is Tristan-and-water (which still makes it beautiful). We have heard the Dresden Amen before. Even the supremely Parsifalian motiv of Suffering is, with its falling fifth and rising dotted figure, simply the Day motiv in Tristan. Even in the closing bars of the Good Friday Music, with their wonderful sense of resignation and fulfil- ment, you cannot ignore the clear echoes of the Siegfried Idyll (the augmented fifth) and Tann- hiiiiser, which are echoes of mood as well as of notation. Not all of the similarities are super- ficial.
If one strips off the protective layers of pseudo- Wagnerian mystique and audience mumbojumbo one must surely admit that the pressure of ideas and flow of purely musical genius is intermittent. The usual explanation is that Wagner was, if not an ailing dotard, a spent force after the stupen- dous outpourings of Meistersinger and Goner- dihninerung. But the best of Parsifal, like the marvellous evocation of Parsifal's weary quest in the Prelude to Act 3. is the work of an artist still in the full flood of his powers. When something in the drama spoke directly to him, to his experi- ence, the music answered. But the dramatic ethos as a whole never completely took hold of him. Redemption and renunciation are recurring themes in Wagner, but never before in this form. Redemption partly through renunciation of the flesh proved too great a pill to swallow.
There remains much—the intense mood of compassion ('fellow-suffering, the fountain-head of my.art') in Amfortas's music, the overwhelm- ing sense of mortality and impending physical dissolution in those great silences which are such a feature of Parsifal, the consummate craftsman- ship of the orchestral writing, and. the superb quality of the whole of the first forty minutes of Act 3. But by setting out to pierce to the core of religious mystery and to depict a hero in a state of complete renunciation and purity; and at the same time attempting a symbolic and ritualistic opera in which the interest is shifted from charac- ter and individual psychology in action so as to lay most of the burden on the abstract dramatic idea, Wagner was undertaking the heaviest task of his life, heavier even than The Ring: and he could achieve no more than a noble failure.
SPECTATOR INDEX
The full alphabetical index of contents and contributors to Volume 203 of the 'Spectator' (July-December, 1959) is now available. Orders and remittance of 5s. per copy should be sent to: THE SALES MANAGER, 'SPECTATOR' LTD., 99 GOWER STREET, LONDON, WCI
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