Parsifal has anxiety, rage, near-madness — unfortunately the Royal Opera's version doesn't

Debussy’s description of the music of Parsifal as being ‘lit up from behind’ is famous; less so is Wagner’s own remark to Cosima that in his last music drama he was trying to get ‘the effect of clouds merging and separating’. The scoring of the music, especially in the outer acts, is so extraordinary that even people who are repelled by the subject matter of Parsifal, such as Nietzsche, are still overwhelmed by its beauty, which uniquely combines sensuousness and spirituality. It’s a beauty that has to cope with and contain a very great deal of pain, more even than Act III of Tristan.

Even the quasi-liturgical unison opening bars of the Prelude soon become, when harmonised, a warning of the suffering to come; while the closing section of the Prelude led Nietzsche to write to a friend that it had ‘a penetration of vision that cuts through the soul as if with a knife’, and even in the most serene passages of the score there are unexpected jagged edges, sudden sforzati, harmonic lurches that remind us that peacefulness and repose are never states we can be confident of resting in; while the two stretches of Transformation Music, the first in particular, take the expression of pain to its absolute limits, a final place which has no rival in any art.