Viva Liverpudlia!
By DAVID CAIRNS
THE crux of the contemporary music question is the aptitude of the orchestras. Education must begin not with the public but with the players. If the new works which the public is ex- pected to listen to are not at least competently played, the battle is lost before it has begun. Why should people understand the rhythmic complexity of some new piece when the musicians only dimly understand it themselves? One reason for the success of Liverpool's Musica Viva series is the thorough preparation of the orchestra before each concert. The recent programme—Stravinsky's 'Dunbar- ton Oaks,' Elliott Carter's Variations for Orchestra and the second part of Nono's 'Y Su Sangre'—had been rehearsed (with the assistance of John Carewe) to a point at which the players, no longer picking their way through dangerous territory, could sit back and enjoy the ride.
But this by itself would not create the unique atmosphere which exists at Liverpool. It has come about simply, because the management has had the faith to take the public into a kind of in- formal. partnership. There is a real feeling of both sharing in a common enterprise.. The discussions in the foyer after each concert justify this faith. When Schoenberg's Variations were played in this series, some had half expected 'trouble'; but the reaction afterwards was not merely 'Why havp we never heard this work before?' but 'Why have we never heard this wonderful work before?' Last week one or two people were objecting to Stravinsky's neo-classical works of the late 1930s and 1940s not because they were 'modern' but because they were not modern enough. One man declared that Stravinsky had only recently begun to write good music again, and that the Nono piece, though he was hearing it for the first time, seemed to have an 'inevitability.' There may be a touch of avant-garde snobbery about some of this (though that was not my impression), but even if there is, no matter; contemporary music cannot be choosy about its allies, and so long as there is snobbery, let it at least be the snobbery of the present, not of the past. But the keenness and enthusiasm of the questions fired at Mr. Pritchard and his colleagues seems entirely genuine and un- affected. People are discovering that it is much more rewarding in the long run to make the effort to get to know the new and the strange. The Musica Viva audience numbers only about 400, and not many of them can find Nono 'inevitable' at first hearing (no more can I); buftheir influence is growing. Perhaps the most exciting achievement of Musica Viva is that works introduced there have been played at the ordinary symphony concerts, have had no discouraging effect on the box office, and have been accepted and even, as far as one can judge, welcomed by people as a whole. As Stravinsky has said, 'Boards of Direc- tors and managers must stop assuming that their limited educations and tastes are reliable gauges for an audience's.'
On the opening night of Parsifal the gallery made a brave show of applauding; but such sacrilege was quickly quenched. The house as a whole bore itself with the solemnity befitting a religious occasion of the highest order.
The irony of it was that on the stage and in the pit we were given a strictly interdenomina- tional Parsifal, a Parsifal for rationalists. The Grail scenes, the heart and stumbling-block of the work, looked dim and sounded dimmer; the off-stage chorus, placed too far back, was almost inaudible, while the on-stage chorus did little better with its thundered hymn in the first act and its dramatic question-and-answer in the last. The out-and-out Wagnerian, in fact, had no more pretext for thrilling with ritual fervour than the Nietzschean had for recoiling in disgust. At Covent Garden the work is purged of both the grossness and the ecstasy.
For one thing, neither the Kundry (Gerda Lam- mers) nor, to a lesser extent, the Amfortas (Eber- hard Waechter) is a heavy enough singer for the part. Waechter looked so nobly anguished and sang with such conscientious intelligence that one could. hardly cavil. Miss Lammers was more seriously miscast. She can hardly sing badly; but even in the first and third acts a good Elektra does not turn into a satisfactory Kundry on the strength of a few well-placed and powerfully executed screams, while in the second the lack of Wagnerian depth and sensuousness in the voice made it a foregone conclusion that Parsifal, even in Karl Liebl's rather half-hearted imper- sonation, would prove superior to the proffered temptations. Herr Liebl sang quite nicely without rising to the supreme moments of the role; his 'ErlOse, rette mich aus schuldbefleckten Hiinden' was notably feeble. As an actor he was indecisive, substituting an air of continuous well-meaning bewilderment for the gradual enlightenment of the redeeming innocent made wise through pity. In the scene with the Flowei Maidens, where he reminded me forcibly of Mr. Pears's David being teased by the apprentices, the Fool momentarily became an ass. In short, not a Parsifal, with all his virtues, that any sensible man can seriously believe in. Kempe conducted with that care for details, dynamic restraint and calm beauty of texture which sounds so convincing at the time that it is only in retrospect that one misses the 'vast orchestral atmosphere' of pain and cosmic weariness and the perfumed ceremonies of a too ancient order of knighthood.
But it is chiefly the production, and especially the designer's part in it, that makes this a Parsifal of uninspired, routine competence. Paul Walter's settings inhabit a limbo between the new Bay- reuth and the old methods of representation, and, if I have used the phrase before, I shall use it again. We may be a long way from the incoher- ence of Covent Garden's Tristan or the drab fragility of The Magic Flute; but the Grail scene at least, with its etiolated pillars and coldly monotonous cyclorama, is much too reminiscent of the Temple of Isis and Osiris for comfort. Instead of mystery we get mere absence of light, instead of purity an aseptic avoidance of colour, instead of the radiance of Nature on Good Fri- day morning a bit of Epping Forest on a dull day with no suspicion of a flower either depicted or suggested. Above all, in the Hall of the Grail, where the crimson of Amfortas's robe falls like a stain on the hygienic anonymity of the scene, the imagination and the senses are cruelly starved to achieve so beggarly a symbolism.
Jon Vickers will be singing Parsifal next week. At present the performance achieves due splen- dour only in the Gurnemanz of Gottlob Frick, who outshines the great Weber himself by his wonderful ease and resonance in the conversa- tional parts of the work. I should add that the Flower Maidens sang excellently. About the work itself I shall write later.
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