Arts
Bad joke on Wagner
Rodney Manes
Parsifal (Covent Garden) Lulu (BBQ 2) That the Royal Opera's new Parsifal is a fiasco is not in itself important. Anyone can make mistakes, but opera house economics being what they are this is a mistake on rather a grand scale; the prospect of revival, for instance, is one too horrible even for the Garden management, I piously hope, to contemplate. So how on earth did it happen, or once started why was it not stopped? Is there anything to be learned? In the course of my work for Another (but monthly) Magazine I spoke to Terry Hands, the producer, on the telephone before rehearsals started and asked him What he thought of the work. He said he could only answer off the record, and being hopelessly old-fashioned I forebore even to take notes of his reply and cannot recall exactly why he disliked the libretto so intensely, but I remember suspecting that he might have drunk too deeply at the tainted spring of Robert Gutman, who in his Peculiar biography of Wagner sees beastly blond homosexual stormtroopers in Parsifal — a notion that this author, like others Who see racism and sexism in the opera, might well discuss quietly with a good doctor before rushing into print. From one of those devastatingly revealing previews by Tom Sutcliffe in the Guardian we learn that Mr Hands had neither seen, read nor heard Parsifal before accepting the job, indeed had never seen a Wagner opera. All well and good, but if this was revealed to mere Journalists it must have been to the management as well, so why in hell's name was he engaged to produce what must be the most philosophically complex opera in the repertory? Some more questions. In an opera whose sound -picture is so precisely calculated, how could a conductor of Sir Georg Solti's eminence have allowed Mr Hands to place on-stage a section of the chorus that Wagner requires to be off-stage? Or permit him to raise the curtain in the middle of a Musical paragraph in the prelude, only to reveal Farrah's hideous and alas permanent ,set of mangey grey columns, and then distract us from the rest of the paragraph with Pointless lighting cues? Patiently, more or less, one put up with the horrors of the first act — the property swan jerking across on Wires (twice) and being ceremoniously clumped on the prompt box with a clatter of Plastic feathers; the barely competent shambles of the Knights' entry with some at a slow march, some quick and too many out Of step; the masking of Amfortas from part °f the stalls; the pointless solecism of Titurel's appearance on-stage — in the hope that the long duet of the second act would draw the best from a prize-winning straight-theatre director. Not so: unbelievably this whole scene was destroyed by a bevy of black extras. Previously they had bumped and ground amidst the Flower Maidens in picturesque disarray; people talk about racism in Wagner, but the idea that only black girls may expose their busts seems to me a peculiarly odious example of the same sin. However, off they nipped only to return dressed as mauve petunias in order to wriggle meaninglessly throughout this crucial scene. Was there no one at Covent Garden to see what was going on at rehearsal and put a stop to it?
Not that an excess of flesh was confined to these lovelies, so the staging escapes charges of sexism as well. Our indulgence was craved for Peter Hofmann (Parsifal), who had caught a cold. I'm not altogether surprised, since he had to stand around in a draughty old opera house in extravagant décolleté, not to mention decullete. The effect of the Karfreitagszauber was not enhanced by the poor man nervously pulling down the front of the exiguous white shift to which he had wilfully be reduced; no one thought to tell him that the back was rucked up and he was displaying a hefty rump to the surprised audience. One was certainly forced to admire his cheek. Neither was Yvonne Minton helped by her costumes, looking like a recently ravished Indian sqaw in the first act, resplendent in gold lame culottes in the second, while in the third her penitent's habit barely concealed the sqaw's leather boots. Hitchcock might see the joke, Wagner perhaps not.
I must refrain from detailed description of the two amazing flying dildoes and what they got up to when Gurnemanz and Parsifal went into an interesting osteopathic clinch: this is, after all, a family magazine. But the complete funking of the spear effect (Klingsor simply handed it over to Parsifal) should not go unrecorded, nor should the closing moments, ii which the arrival of our hero in a powder-blue dressing gown was capped by the descent of a mechanical dove apologetically twitching its wings on the end of a wire. That seemed to sum up Mr Hands's views on Parsifal. He is perfectly entitled to express them, but not, perhaps, in the context of an expensive new production at Covent Garden. Neither producer nor designer took a curtain call. Tragically this farrago could not help but affect the music. Solti's first act was disappointingly bland; he warmed up later but the competition was too much even for him. There was some wonderfully sonorous sing mg from Kurt Moll, but there is more to Gumemanz than he revealed on this occasion. Mr Hofmann looked understandably bewildered and at times rather grumpy. His cold could not disguise his beguiling musicianship. Miss Minton was defeated by circumstances beyond her control. Norman Bailey (Amfortas), like the rest of the knights in a fearful red setter wig, was in woolly voice. Franz Mazura, a powerful Klingsor; had apparently (Guardian again) missed most of the rehearsals. Hmmmmm.
To judge from the television broadcast, the reported horrors of the Boulez-Chereau Lulu have been exaggerated. Chereau also either blithely ignores or embroiders upon composers' directions, but does so with such consistency of purpose and technical bravura as to disarm criticism, on this occasion at least, though the goings-on in the public lavatory (vice attic) of the restored finale might have stopped even the late Joe Orton in his tracks. The first of the two newly realised scenes may add little to the opera as we already know it, but the second is stunning, not least in its juxtaposition of Berg's adagio and the expressionistically farcical text. M Chereau was well served by the exceptionally intelligent performances of Teresa Stratas (Lulu), Franz Mazura (Scholl), and Kenneth Riegel (Alwa), indeed by the whole of the cast, and Boulez's conducting was surprisingly fullblooded.
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