Parsifal
Sincere, serious and beautiful: Glyndebourne’s Parsifal reviewed
‘Here time becomes space,’ says Gurnemanz in Act One of Parsifal, and true enough, the end of the new Glyndebourne…
Forget me not
No surprise: the greatest musical experience of my life was Parsifal at Bayreuth in 1962. I thought at the time…
Small wonders
It has been a reasonably good week for peripatetic opera-loving female-underwear fetishists. In La bohème at Covent Garden Musetta slipped…
Ave, Maria
Anyone who thinks that an artist’s life is irrelevant to their artistic achievement, and for that matter anyone who thinks…
Boulez est mort
Pierre Boulez, who died last week at the age of 90, would have been the last person, one hopes, to…
In two minds
There are some operas, as there are some people, that it is impossible to establish a settled relationship with, and…
Lost boys
In Beryl Bainbridge’s novel An Awfully Big Adventure the producer Meredith Potter issues a doughty injunction on the subject of…
Power of ritual
This week, I have been mostly listening to Parsifal. Not the St Matthew Passion, which is my usual Passiontide fare.…
Underpowered Wagner
Debussy’s description of the music of Parsifal as being ‘lit up from behind’ is famous; less so is Wagner’s own…
Elder’s evening
The Proms season of Wagner operas — pity they didn’t do them all; Die Meistersinger would have been specially welcome,…
