Subverting Wagner

Presumably Bernard Haitink took, or was administered, a huge overdose of Valium before he began conducting Parsifal at the Royal Opera last week. What else could explain this fairly experienced Wagnerian’s conducting so featureless an account of Wagner’s last, most subtle and all told perhaps greatest score? Even the opening bars, unaccompanied melody with telling inflections which prefigure what will happen to it later, gave the impression of being a first run-through by players who had been told just to perform the notes — the exact opposite of how it sounded six years ago, when Simon Rattle inflected virtually every note separately. And because there was no emphasis, colouring or the faintest hint of rubato, there was no tension. This was by a long way the least eventful performance of the prelude I have ever heard, here made over as ideal mood music for stressed passengers waiting for their flight to be called. With Haitink in command, a point was clearly being made, but what could it be?

Five and a half hours later I was still pondering the same question, without the hint of an answer. The only conjecture I can make is that Haitink, who is known to loathe the hegemony of modern directors, who feel entitled, or even required, to reverse all the composer’s stage directions and indeed his whole concept, insofar as they imagine they can divine what that is, decided for once to go along with Klaus Michael Gruber, and match his account of the score to what we saw on stage. For the most striking feature of the production is that, with some minute exceptions, no one does anything. Or, if they do, one wishes they hadn’t. In Act III, for instance, where we have the most moving episode in the whole of drama of anagnorisis, the recognition of one character by another after a long period of separation and suffering, Parsifal at last realises that he has succeeded in returning to the land of the Grail, which he has been hopelessly seeking for years.