Brief Bayreuth Parsifal Postscript

(Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 5:47 AM Eastern on 4 Aug. See below)

I left the live streaming audio feed of the Bayreuth Festival Götterdämmerung today after Act I to listen to the streaming audio rebroadcast of the Festival's opening Parsifal performance, this time armed with my trusty Grado Lab headphones hoping that with their help I'd be able to hear what was inaudible or only barely audible in the orchestra when I listened to the live feed on 25 July without them (because I didn't know they could be used with my setup).

And I wasn't disappointed on that ground. I could now hear everything in the orchestra in proper balance. Unhappily, that hearing didn't provide me reason to alter one tittle my original assessment of Boulez's reading of this score although I had fingers crossed it would. I'd remarked in that assessment that Boulez's realization of this luminous score had all the nuance and subtlety of a hockey puck, the sort of reading that would have caused Wagner to label him a hopeless "quadruped," and indeed that was my impression this hearing as well. Boulez's four-square reading, at accelerated tempi that often ignored blatantly Wagner's own tempo indications, made for a realization of this most subtle of Wagner's scores that was little more than perfunctory, strewn with sharp-edged accents throughout, and with a sonority from the brass that was brassy to the point of crudity, all of it inimical to the diaphanous texture of the orchestral writing in this opera.

I finally gave up on the Parsifal rebroadcast immediately after the so-called "transformation music" of Act I to return to the live audio feed of the Götterdämmerung from Bayreuth as Boulez's butchery of that sublime episode brought me to the limits of my patience. With the orchestra fighting him every bar of the way, at least at the beginning, Boulez rushed the transformation music so fast he managed to achieve the singular distinction of transforming the transformation episode — one of the most sublime episodes in all of opera — into nothing more than a quotidian interval of scene-change music; typically, uninspired music put into a score by an opera composer primarily to give the stage crew the time necessary to change the set for the next scene. (Technically, the "transformation music" is scene-change music, but, Oh!, to what transcendent use did Wagner put the necessity.)

I've always maintained that Boulez couldn't realize a Wagner score properly if his life depended on it, but I now think I was wrong about that. In a clarifying moment of insight approaching epiphany, I now see that it's not that Boulez can't realize a Wagner score as it should be realized, but simply that he hates Wagner, and is exacting revenge on him for so long having ensorcelled, and like a demon possessed, Western composers, thereby influencing, either positively or negatively, all Western music after him.

Yes. That's the at-bottom real answer to this business. I'm sure of it.

Oh, BTW, and in the interests of full disclosure, the critical press, for the most part, thought Boulez did a real swell job on the podium for this Parsifal.

Go figure.

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Update (5:47 AM Eastern on 4 Aug): Alex Ross of The Rest Is Noise comments, and provides as well some closing thoughts on the Bayreuth experience, and on Bayreuth, Wagner, and Hitler.