As is well known, the founders of the Glyndebourne Festival in the 1930s originally envisaged it to be something of an English Bayreuth. In the event a smaller scale opera festival was established, such that no Wagner opera was performed on account of the considerable forces required, until recent decades. As the progenitor of country house opera in the UK in the first part of the 20th century, there’s an ostensible logic in its first presentation of Parsifal set within the context of a country house around that time. But Jetske Mijnssen’s production is fatally flawed in ignoring the profound metaphysics and philosophy of Wagner’s final opera – denoted by him a ‘sacred stage festival play’, which ought to give an indication of the gravity of the themes at stake. Instead, it’s rendered as a simple, domestic drama like an Ibsen or Chekhov play, but without the astute social commentary.
What, in the original scenario, can be interpreted as a cosmic battle between good and evil in the enmity between the Grail knights and Klingsor, here becomes a feud between the latter and the knights’ leader Amfortas, who is cast here as his brother, as alluded to by the quotation from the Book of Genesis in which God asks Cain where his (now murdered) brother Abel is. That connection between the two is also dramatised in a flashback to their youth during Gurnemanz’s Act One narration when Klingsor stabs Amfortas in a fit of jealous rage on seeing the latter embrace Kundry. With Klingsor having evidently been banished, Amfortas is the heir to Titurel, the aging paterfamilias who presides over an austere household where a strict, hypocritical religious observance is upheld with assistance from Gurnemanz as chaplain, although it is to Amfortas that the duty to perform the sacred rites has devolved. The servants take the place of the Grail knights, and Kundry is a ginger-haired housemaid, like a pre-Raphaelite temptress, whom they distrust and bully.
Amfortas is already shown on his deathbed during the Prelude, and his physical decline is manifest throughout the drama, largely bound to a wheelchair. It’s just about plausible that, as a purely medical fact, the wound caused by Klingsor has left a permanent impairment. But as the symbol for a deeper spiritual condition of affliction or guilt (which it clearly has to be from the original scenario) Mijnssen’s interpretation is neither convincing nor logical. Although we don’t see Amfortas pursue anything more shocking than a chaste embrace with Kundry, we might assume that they have committed an act of fornication which, in the context of the strict religious and moral code promoted by Titurel, brings shame to himself and the household. But it’s debatable whether it’s credible that even such a sin should fester and lead to Amfortas’s moral and physical decline over so many years, given that his and Titurel’s Christian religion already contains the notion of the forgiveness and expiation of sins, however imperfectly they practise it. The sheer desperation of Amfortas’s two laments attest to something far deeper and consequential than a one-off indiscretion. In the original legend that Wagner drew upon for his opera, the question which Parsifal or anybody who encounters Amfortas is expected to ask of him is “Lord, what ails you?” as the means to enlightenment. Wagner diagnoses that ailment as symbolic of a fundamental problem of the universal human condition, not just of one man in a particular time and place – the Schopenhauerian problem of endless desire and selfish wilfulness that can’t help but come into conflict with other individual humans, with the ethical predicaments or transgressions that result. Reducing that theme to a wholly private dimension makes us ask that question of Amfortas in crudely simplistic and literal terms and renders so much of the opera’s philosophical discourse irrelevant.
Parsifal is a guest at the compromised celebration of the love feast in Act One, not just a witness of it, though he disclaims participation in it. When he encounters Klingsor he manages to overcome his malevolence by wresting his dagger from him and brings him back to Amfortas to be reconciled as brothers. That move might just about function as a straightforward resolution of the tension between the individuals Amfortas and Klingsor, though it’s a sentimental gimmick barely even worthy of an average Sunday night television costume drama. But it’s a travesty of the infinitely wider moral and religious issues which Wagner intended to raise in this opera. He asks us to take seriously the phenomenon of religion and the hope of redemption, even if he takes issue with the content of organised religions, with their doctrines and rituals as they really exist. One can argue that Wagner fetishes the objects of the grail and spear, but they take on such potent, symbolic force in the drama that they have to stand in for something, to whatever extent that is synonymous with Parsifal’s enlightenment.
The import of that enlightenment is almost completely nullified here, however. It’s not clear how, in the moment of Parsifal’s erotic encounter with Kundry, this should cause him to understand the feud between Parsifal and Amfortas. Accepting that this is what he is supposed to understand, Parsifal becomes merely an agent of reconciliation between Amfortas and Klingsor as individuals, overcoming their particular enmity, but there’s no sense in which the enlightened Parsifal brings the revelation of a new ethical or religious principle (compassion in Wagner’s scheme) to any wider situation beyond that. If the salvation which Parsifal brings is limited to that simple act of reconciliation, it’s not clear, then, why Amfortas still must die (in Wagner’s scenario it’s Kundry who sinks lifeless at the end). Nor is it explained how Parsifal’s enlightenment solves the problem of Amfortas’s sexual guilt, if we are to assume that this, in a broader sense, is the cause of the latter’s decline and the shortcomings of the ethical system that has brought such psychological (and, by extension, physical) punishment to him. The characters are symbols of much larger principles than just their own personal histories, and it’s worth remembering that Wagner admired the Baroque allegorical dramas of Calderon, however much he rejected the Roman Catholic dogma of their contents. Here there is absolutely no sense that Parsifal ushers in a whole new moral or ethical order that supersedes the imperfect, ossified system of belief and behaviour that underpins the household of Titurel, and might renew social morality at large. Nothing less than that is Wagner’s colossal vision in this music drama. If Mijnssen wants to trace the downfall of a single troubled family – a Buddenbrooks in operatic form – then La forza del destino, say, would surely be a more suitable vehicle.
Fortunately, the musical performance salvages something of the mystery and transcendence of Wagner’s masterpiece. Robin Ticciati brings out a stoical account of the score with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. It doesn’t always probe the music’s greatest mystical depths – the Act Three Prelude is somewhat too casual, for example. But there is a luminosity in the yearning and suffering expressed elsewhere, and drama where there needs to be, especially in Act Two’s confrontation with Klingsor. And a notable amount of instrumental detail shines through, especially from the woodwind section (Debussy’s ‘lit from behind’ verdict often coming to the fore). The Glyndebourne Chorus offer fine and conspicuous contrast in the robustness of their contributions, as the Grail hall servants and Klingsor’s flower maidens.
Daniel Johansson is firmly engaged in the title role, with powerful, ardent singing that conveys the ‘holy fool’s’ tentative, but sincere steps towards knowledge and enlightenment, with something of the same vigorous tonal quality as a Jonas Kaufman for instance. Kristina Stanek is slightly uneven as Kundry, but she stands out at the extreme ends of the wider vocal register Wagner calls for in this role that brings out the fundamental character of this most fascinating and enigmatic figure in his operas. Ryan Speedo Green’s Klingsor is darkly, sinisterly eloquent without becoming a caricature of evil or menace.
John Relyea impresses with the calm and clearly articulated authority that he brings to the role of Gurnemanz, just as he did for Wotan in English National Opera’s Das Rheingold in 2023. Audun Iversen makes an equally strong impression at the other emotional end for his impassioned, agonised account of Amfortas, in which the vocal line is, nevertheless, distinct and persuasive. Veteran John Tomlinson understandably remains a warmly received fixture of the operatic stage, and his presence here throughout most of Act One still commands. But however dramatically apt is his barking at Amfortas as an impatient Titurel, the bulging notes of the voice are unmusical and jagged.
But music is only one half of Wagner’s last essay in ‘total art form’, and it can’t make up for the lack of metaphysics in the drama here: time doesn’t become space (to quote Gurnemanz from Act One, hinting at the work’s expansive, dialetical message), but instead Parsifal becomes reduced to Downton Abbey (without the humour). Having been in awe of this work for nigh on thirty years, this is the most unsatisfying production I’ve seen. Anybody encountering for the first time this sublime synthesis of philosophy dramatised in a uniquely, searingly beautiful score will very probably wonder what the hallowed place accorded it in the operatic canon is all about, when so facile an interpretation is made of it, all at odds with the actual temper of the text and music.
Further performances to 24 June
The post Glyndebourne Festival 2025 – Wagner’s Parsifal – Daniel Johansson, John Relyea, Audun Iversen & Kristina Stanek; directed by Jetske Mijnssen; conducted by Robin Ticciati appeared first on The Classical Source.
