Glyndebourne’s Parsifal was a dark and glorious experience ...Middle East

Glyndebourne always kicks off its summer season with something to tickle our fancy on the first night, and on the second night something to make us think.

This year’s starter was a revival of Annabel Arden’s witty production of Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia. Its choreography may be overblown, but it’s a splendid feast of comic coloratura. This is thanks to Cecilia Molinari as the love-interest, to the raw energy of German Olvera in the title role, and to the sweet-toned Jonah Hoskins as Count Almaviva. 

Night two brought a production by the Dutch director Jetske Mijnssen of Wagner’s Parsifal, an opera whose tangled plot draws on medieval German mythology. Wagner described this work as his ‘farewell to the world’, decreeing that it should be performed like a sacred ritual, but critics and scholars will never agree on its meaning.

Some claim it’s a piece of overt anti-Semitism. Others argue that it has to be a Christian tract, since the Holy Grail containing Christ’s blood – and the Spear which pierced his side – are the relics on which the action turns. Sexual lust and its chaste renunciation are the polarities between which each of its three main characters are trapped.

Nothing adds up neatly in the weirdly dysfunctional family which Mijnssen creates here: the suicidal femme-fatale Kundry, the naive young Parsifal looking for truth, and king Amfortas cursed with an injury which never stops leaking blood (his punishment for an unspecified moral crime). Each longs for a ‘redemption’ which does miraculously come.

One great strength of this production is the way each soloist finds ways to make their character pulsatingly real. Audun Iversen’s Amfortas makes a haunting invalid, a mixture of querulous complaint and heart-rending pathos, while tenor Daniel Johansson brings wide-eyed innocence to the title role.

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The German mezzo Kristina Stanek’s Kundry may be short on the wildness the text demands – why didn’t Mijnssen look at the book? But her alternative self as a desperate waif is subtly projected. The cast is firmly grounded thanks to two majestic basses – John Tomlinson as the ghostly patriarch, and John Relyea as the warmly ever-present narrator.

With a bunch of oddballs like this, and a drama encompassing landscapes of many kinds, no setting could ever seem ‘right’, and Mijnssen has opted for provincial Russia in Chekhov’s day – not an obvious fit.

But no matter: under the direction of Robin Ticciati, singers and orchestra combine to produce a definitively resplendent account of this glorious music. As Wagner himself put it, ‘here time turns into space’. At four and a half hours this is a very long opera, and it proceeds with the slow gravity of a religious ritual, but I wasn’t bored for a moment.

Until June 24

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