Opera
The English National Opera has been the scene of an ideological purge. Wagner's last opera - the composer's "farewell to the world", the story, over five long and mystic hours, of the search for the Holy Grail, a rich post-Christian soup with dollops of Buddha and Schopenhauer swirled in - has been made acceptable for the modern age.
The work has been ecumenified. The cup in which the blood of Christ was caught, the Holy Grail, has been replaced by a non-denominational column of light; the "Race of Grail Knights" have been dressed as soldiers of the late T'ang; the seductive flower maidens have become witty Venus flytraps; the magician Klingsor is a samurai; the female lead, Kundry, the Rose of Hell, spends time as a cockroach. It is not as Wagner imagined.
Parsifal is a work of genius but, as all but the most unapologetic of its apologists admit, an ideological embarrassment. It demonstrates the purification of the Christian religion by removal of racial taint. Its last line suggests the saviour himself needs saving just as, in Wagner's writings, Christianity needs rescuing from its Jewish heritage. Shortly before completion of the opera, Wagner read aloud from the Comte de Gobineau's Essay on the Inequality of the Races prior to playing Parsifal's prelude to the work's author. The Jew - Wagner always favoured the singular - was "the demon of man's downfall", Wagner himself once wrote; the German race was "one of Manhood's primal branches".
Director, set designer, lighting designer, costume designer are German, and it is easy to see their cleaned-up Wagner as a contribution to the debate engulfing Germany once more. "Auschwitz should not be a way of intimidating ourselves . . . a moral clamp, nor even a form of duty," said the author Martin Walser last year, thus provoking the renewed argument over what to do with the nation's recent past - memorialise it in concrete, or finesse it and move on? The German debate is not far from the Wagner debate; and the debate about which was Hitler's favourite opera is not far from either. Parsifal presents an idealised German world, and ENO's version has the bombed-out, honourable, apocalyptic look of a production that believes itself in the right.
Only the theatrically dubious bits in Wagner's own scenario are not obviously German. The magic garden of the second act, he instructed, should be a paradise of "tropical vegetation", filled with lovelies in Arabian robes by whom the pure German Fool, Parsifal, might be trapped. The London Coliseum's revisionist version maintains this parody of the Islamic paradise, only shifting it further east and dressing the magician Klingsor not in Arab but in Asian garb. The opera is an "encounter of opposites, of western and eastern thought", says its director, Nikolaus Lehnhoff, using the familiar millennial cliche.
He had no choice, of course. Wagner's Bayreuth Parsifal, with its fork-bearded Race of Knights, sacred chalice glowing with ruby light, dove descending in dazzling radiance, is hardly possible on the contemporary stage. Even the composer's own reading of history precluded it, however much he wanted the opera protected in his own theatre as an eternal sacred rite. Art and religion, Wagner wrote in The Jewish in Music, must be dynamic and changing. It was, he declared, the downfall of Judaism (and of Jewish music) that it was neither: "never quickened through renewal of its substance". Wagner would not welcome a similar entombment for the products of his own mind.
The music is fantastic, superbly realised by the ENO, but with the constant undertow of Wagner's opinions, what can one do? "History has become a curse" in Parsifal, writes Lehnhoff. His production suggests that no stage event - not even one, say, at Shakespeare's Globe - can authentically repeat the productions of the past without perpetuating the mistakes.
By extension, perhaps, no history, national or otherwise, can be fixed in concrete. We must, as the disturbingly resonant final image of railway tracks suggests, move on. This Parsifal is a provocative, at times poetic, version, and it was sold out by the first night. That it proves a decorative reordering of the work, not a profound reimagining, is inevitable: the ideological substance is the opera. But it was worth trying, and the failure is honourable.
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