Number 202: July 2011 - Wagner Society of England

PARSIFAL IN PRAGUE
Performance on 27th March 2011 reviewed by Paul Dawson-Bowling
Parsifal at the National Theatre in Prague (courtesy of our splendid sister
organisation, The Music Club of London) was a marvellous experience. The production
was both beautiful and illuminating, set apparently in a South East Asian context of
Chinoiserie (or was it of Japanoiserie?) in deference to the Far-East influences in the
work. It is to be played again in Spring 2012, and I strongly recommend that anyone who
can should get cheap flights to Prague and tickets for the revival.
John Fiore, an American, was the magician on the podium, directing an orchestra
more modest than Wagner specified, with only four double-basses and ten first violins,
although the wind and brass were in full muster and the sound completely filled the
National Theatre of Prague. This theatre is a real gem but not a large gem, and the
musicians spilled out of the pit with the two harps taking up one of the boxes flanking the
enclosure. A very positive point was the orchestra’s general positioning. The double
basses were lined up at the back giving plenty of foundation to the sound, and the four
horns were on the extreme left behind the woodwind, balanced by the heavy brass on the
right. The result was both sumptuous and luminous, and apart from a single raspberry
from the first trumpet in the prelude, the playing was of the highest class.
John Fiore’s shaping of the work’s arching spans was masterly. Often he drew forth
no more than a soft current of sound, and this allowed the score’s ineffable beauties to tell
with their proper economy; but there was nothing economical about his way with the first
transformation scene. It registered its full gravity, and he had completely the measure of
the mighty orchestral expansion that follows just after the voices fall silent, and of
Wagner’s extraordinary amalgam here of majesty and crisis. The two great climaxes
where the Grail theme comes in C major were both played up to tempo and were
emotionally overwhelming. To achieve the difficult effect which Wagner demanded with
his direction to the brass, “Stark auszuhalten” tied across four full bars, a passage where
they often run out of breath and lose power, Fiore put in an unobtrusive breath-pause
midway through the crucial long-held note, so that they could maintain full intensity. The
chorus, properly located at different levels off-stage, was magical. Magical too was the
Good Friday spell, while the second transformation was colossal as the finale was
musically numinous.
The production had one strange feature in that it dispensed with the Grail, just like
Lehnhoff’s recent gruesome travesty at the ENO in London. The Holy Grail has become
a universal emblem signifying an elusive but infinitely precious ideal (in medicine people
speak of the Holy Grail of cancer treatment and we hear of the Holy Grail of no children
living in poverty) and it is in fact such an archetypal symbol and so popular, that to miss
a trick and leave it out of Parsifal takes something away from the experience. Otherwise
the production told the story so directly that anyone knowing it and looking at a
photograph taken at any point of would have had no difficulty in recognising what was
being performed.
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