WAGNER: Parsifal: Prelude and Good Friday Spell
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Eugen Jochum, cond. DG, recorded December 1957
by Ken
We first heard the Prelude and opening of Act I of Parsifal in a March 2010 post called "Wagner, master of musical motion, Part 2," in which I wrote: "Our subject this week, you'll recall, is "musical motion," how performers find -- or don't -- what makes a piece of music move forward from the inside, how they re-create it with real energy and purpose instead of just grinding out one damned note after another."
The Jochum studio recording of the frequent concert coupling of the Parsifal Prelude and "Good Friday Spell" (from Act III), by no means a speedy performance, seems to me a shining example of the "re-created with real energy and purpose" kind.
IN 2010, OUR PRINCIPAL WAGNER TESTING GROUND . . .
. . . was Tristan und Isolde: first the Prelude and opening of Act I (the Young Sailor's song and the shipboard Isolde's aggrieved response to what she takes to be a mocking reference to an "Irish maid"), and then the Prelude and opening of Act III (the gentle Shepherd's questioning of Kurwenal, ever watchful over his comatose master, Tristan).
Eventually, though, we got around to the Prelude and opening of Act I of Parsifal. In that post we heard three wonderful and noticeably different performances: two from what I described as my favorite Parsifal recordings, the 1962 Knappertsbusch-Bayreuth-Philips and the Jordan-Erato, and a third that I rate pretty darned close: the 1971 Jochum-Bayreuth broadcast, perhaps separated by nothing more than the comparatively mediocre broadcast-mono sound. Here they are again, this time with on-site texts:
WAGNER: Parsifal: Prelude and Act I opening
Prelude
Act I
In the domain of the Grail: Forest, shady and solemn but not gloomy. Rocky soil. A clearing in the center. On the left a path rises to the castle. The background slopes down in the center to a deep-set forest lake.
Daybreak. GURNEMANZ (elderly but vigorous) and two youthful ESQUIRES are lying asleep under a tree. From the left, as if from the castle, sounds a solemn reveille on trombones.
GURNEMANZ [waking and rousing the ESQUIRES]:
Ho there! You guardians of the woods,
or rather guardians of sleep,
at least wake at morn!
[The two esquires leap up.]
Do you hear the call? Give thanks to God
that you are called to hear it!
[He sinks to his knees with the ESQUIRES and joins them in silent morning prayer; as the trombones cease they slowly rise.]
Now up, my children! See to the bath.
It is time to await the King there.
I see the heralds already approaching
in advance of the litter bearing him.
[Two knights enter.]
Greetings to you! How fares Amfortas today?
Right early does he seek the bath:
I assume the healing herb that Gawain
won for him by craft and daring
has brought him some relief?
2nd KNIGHT: You assume this, you who know all?
His pain soon returned
even more searingly:
sleepless from his grievous infirmity,
he eagerly bade us prepare the bath.
GURNEMANZ [sadly bowing his head]:
We are fools to hope for relief
when only recovery can relieve him!
Search and hunt far and wide through the world
for every simple, every potion,
there is but one thing can help him --
only one man!
2nd KNIGHT: Tell us who he is!
GURNEMANZ [evasively]: See to the bath!
[The two ESQUIRES, who have returned to the background, look off right.]
2nd ESQUIRE: See there, the wild rider!
1st ESQUIRE: Hey! How the mane of her devil's mare is flying!
2nd KNIGHT: Ha! Is Kundry there?
1st KNIGHT: She must be bringing momentous news!
2nd ESQUIRE: The mare is staggering.
1st ESQUIRE: Has she flown through the air?
2nd ESQUIRE: She is crawling over the ground.
1st ESQUIRE: And her mane is sweeping the moss.
[They all eagerly look off right.]
2nd ESQUIRE: The wild woman has flung herself off.
[KUNDRY rushes in, almost staggering. She is in wild garb, her skirts tucked up by a snakeskin girdle with long hanging cords; her black hair is loose and dishevelled, her complexion deep ruddy-brown, her eyes dark and piercing, sometimes flashing widly, more often lifeless and staring. She hurries to GURNEMANZ and presses on him a small crystal phial.]
KUNDRY: Here! Take this! Balsam.
GURNEMANZ: From where have you brought this?
KUNDRY: From farther away than you can imagine.
Should the balsam not help,
then Arabia hides
nothing more to heal him.
Ask no further. I am weary.
[She throws herself on the ground. A train of esquires and knights appears from the left, carrying and escorting the litter on which lies AMFORTAS. GURNEMANZ has at once turned from KUNDRY to the approaching company.]
GURNEMANZ [as the train appears]:
He is coming, they are bringing him along.
Alas! How it grieves my heart
to see the Liege Lord of a conquering race
in the pride and flower of his manhood
fall a slave to his sickness!
[To the ESQUIRES] Carefully! Hear! the king groans.
[The ESQUIRES halt and set the litter down.]
-- English translation mostly by Lionel Salter
Hans Hotter (bs-b), Gurnemanz; Gerd Nienstedt (bs-b), 2nd Knight; Sona Cervena (s) and Ursula Boese (c), 1st and 2nd Esquires; Niels Møller (t), 1st Knight; Irene Dalis (ms), Kundry; Bayreuth Festival Orchestra, Hans Knappertsbusch, cond. Philips, recorded live, 1962
Robert Lloyd (bs), Gurnemanz; Gilles Cachemaille (b), 2nd Knight; Tamara Herz (s) and Hanna Schaer (ms), 1st and 2nd Esquires; Paul Frey (t), 1st Knight; Yvonne Minton (ms), Kundry; Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte Carlo, Armin Jordan, cond. Erato, recorded July 1981
Franz Crass (bs), Gurnemanz; Heinz Feldhoff (b), 2nd Knight; Elisabeth Schwarzenberg (s) and Sieglinde Wagner (ms), 1st and 2nd Esquires; Heribert Steinbach (t), 1st Knight; Janis Martin (s), Kundry; Bayreuth Festival Orchestra, Eugen Jochum, cond. Live performance, July 24, 1971 (mono)
"MOVEMENT" ISN'T THE SAME AS SPEED
Musical movement, I tried to stress in the 2010 post, has hardly anything to do with speed. It's not only possible but easy as pie for both fast and slow performances to have hardly any sense of actual musical movement. The Prelude to Parsifal is in any case unarguably slow music. As you'll note above, Wagner doesn't mince words: "Sehr langsam," he marks it - "Very slow."
But that's not his only marking. In addition to slurring the whole of that subtly syncopated six-bar opening phrase, making it, in effect, a single breath, he marks the string parts (first and second violins and cellos) "sehr ausdrucksvoll" -- "expressively, demonstratively, eloquently, articulately" (as an adverb) or "expressive, full of expression, showing feeling or emotion, meaningful" (as an adjective); plus there's a crescendo-and-diminuendo -- swelling and unswellng of volume. It seems hardly likely that he meant the first clarinet, first bassoon, and later-entering English horn to play in-expressively.
These are all valuable clues for the musicians as to how the music is meant to move -- or, better still, clues as to what inside the music makes it move.And before that first statement of this mysterious figure has a chance to die out, in come the first flute, the second and third clarinets, and the violas -- even softer (pp) than the opening (p) -- with that shimmering figure backed bypp second and third clarinets and bassoons, second, third, and fourth horns, all three trombones, and (softer still: ppp) a timpani roll.
And we're only just getting to the second score page! There is, in other words, an enormous amount happening musically here, and in the succeeding phrases that carry on the patterns laid out here. And a great deal more is going to happen as the Prelude moves forward for some 12-14 minutes, at which point instead of concluding it segues directly into the opening of Act I.
There may seem to be a fair amount of musical repetition in the music, but there really isn't any. There may seem to be pauses in the music, but again there really aren't -- in a good performance, the silences have as much momentum as the rest.
One of the fascinations for me of the 1971 Jochum-Bayreuth performance is that portions of the cast -- including the Gurnemanz, Franz Crass -- was carried over from the year before, the last year of Pierre Boulez's four-season Bayreuth Parsifal run, when DG made an in-house live recording, which I've never much cared for. I've always wanted to somehow put the two performances together, and I thought this chunk of the opera might be worth juxtaposing, in part because it has always struck me that the Gurnemanz of Crass, an estimable singer, is almost transformed from 1970 to 1971 -- from almost going-through-the-motions to a different level of focus and intensity.
As it happens, I have finally managed, after many years, to gather my opera CDs together in something like proper order, and when I went to the shelf to pull off these performances, I was surprised to see that there were two Parisfals in chronological sequence between the 1970 and 1971 Bayreuth ones -- both also live performances. And I thought it might be interesting to toss them in as well.
WAGNER: Parsifal: Prelude and Act I opening
Prelude
In the domain of the Grail: Forest, shady and solemn but not gloomy. Rocky soil. A clearing in the center. On the left a path rises to the castle. The background slopes down in the center to a deep-set forest lake.
Daybreak. GURNEMANZ (elderly but vigorous) and two youthful ESQUIRES are lying asleep under a tree. From the left, as if from the castle, sounds a solemn reveille on trombones.
GURNEMANZ [waking and rousing the ESQUIRES]:
Ho there! You guardians of the woods,
or rather guardians of sleep,
at least wake at morn!
[The two esquires leap up.]
Do you hear the call? Give thanks to God
that you are called to hear it!
[He sinks to his knees with the ESQUIRES and joins them in silent morning prayer; as the trombones cease they slowly rise.]
Now up, my children! See to the bath.
It is time to await the King there.
I see the heralds already approaching
in advance of the litter bearing him.
[Two knights enter.]
Greetings to you! How fares Amfortas today?
Right early does he seek the bath:
I assume the healing herb that Gawain
won for him by craft and daring
has brought him some relief?
2nd KNIGHT: You assume this, you who know all?
His pain soon returned
even more searingly:
sleepless from his grievous infirmity,
he eagerly bade us prepare the bath.
GURNEMANZ [sadly bowing his head]:
We are fools to hope for relief
when only recovery can relieve him!
Search and hunt far and wide through the world
for every simple, every potion,
there is but one thing can help him -
only one man!
2nd KNIGHT: Tell us who he is!
GURNEMANZ [evasively]: See to the bath!
[The two ESQUIRES, who have returned to the background, look off right.]
2nd ESQUIRE: See there, the wild rider!
1st ESQUIRE: Hey! How the mane of her devil's mare is flying!
2nd KNIGHT: Ha! Is Kundry there?
1st KNIGHT: She must be bringing momentous news!
2nd ESQUIRE: The mare is staggering.
1st ESQUIRE: Has she flown through the air?
2nd ESQUIRE: She is crawling over the ground.
1st ESQUIRE: And her mane is sweeping the moss.
[They all eagerly look off right.]
2nd ESQUIRE: The wild woman has flung herself off.
[KUNDRY rushes in, almost staggering. She is in wild garb, her skirts tucked up by a snakeskin girdle with long hanging cords; her black hair is loose and dishevelled, her complexion deep ruddy-brown, her eyes dark and piercing, sometimes flashing widly, more often lifeless and staring. She hurries to GURNEMANZ and presses on him a small crystal phial.]
KUNDRY: Here! Take this! Balsam.
GURNEMANZ: From where have you brought this?
KUNDRY: From farther away than you can imagine.
Should the balsam not help,
then Arabia hides
nothing more to heal him. -
Ask no further. I am weary.
[She throws herself on the ground. A train of esquires and knights appears from the left, carrying and escorting the litter on which lies AMFORTAS. GURNEMANZ has at once turned from KUNDRY to the approaching company.]
GURNEMANZ [as the train appears]:
He is coming, they are bringing him along. -
Alas! How it grieves my heart
to see the Liege Lord of a conquering race
in the pride and flower of his manhood
fall a slave to his sickness!
[To the esquires] Carefully! Hear! the king groans.
[The ESQUIRES halt and set the litter down.
Franz Crass (bs), Gurnemanz; Bengt Rundgren (bs), 2nd Knight; Elisabeth Schwarzenberg (s) and Sieglinde Wagner (ms), 1st and 2nd Esquires; Hermin Esser (t), 2nd Knight; Gwyneth Jones (s), Kundry; Bayreuth Festival Orchestra, Pierre Boulez, cond. DG, recorded live, 1970
Cesare Siepi (bs), Gurnemanz; Rod MacWherter (b), 2nd Knight; Loretta di Franco (s) and Ivanka Myhal (ms), 1st and 2nd Esquires; Raymond Gibbs (t), 2nd Knight; Irene Dalis (ms), Kundry; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Leopold Ludwig, cond. Live performance, Apr. 3, 1971 (mono)
Louis Hendrikx (bs), Gurnemanz; Dennis Wicks (b), 2nd Knight; Nan Christie (s) and Delia Wallis (ms), 1st and 2nd Esquires; Edgar Evans (t), 2nd Knight; Amy Shuard (s), Kundry; Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Reginald Goodall, cond. Royal Opera Heritage Series, recorded live, May 8, 1971
Franz Crass (bs), Gurnemanz; Heinz Feldhoff (b), 2nd Knight; Elisabeth Schwarzenberg (s) and Sieglinde Wagner (ms), 1st and 2nd Esquires; Heribert Steinbach (t), 1st Knight; Janis Martin (s), Kundry; Bayreuth Festival Orchestra, Eugen Jochum, cond. Live performance, July 24, 1971 (mono)
ONE OF THESE PERFORMANCES . . .
. . . doesn't really seem to me to belong in the company of the others. Of course this is subjective (the performance that for me doesn't belong is for a friend of mine his favorite Parsifal), but it really does seem to me to reduce rather quickly to the one-damned-note-after-another category -- the Prelude, as an obvious example, rather slowly goes nowhere. Could this really be anyone's idea of "Ausdrucksvoll"? (And if there's any opera the Bayreuth orchestra of those years knew, it was Parsifal. From the festival's postwar reopening in 1951 it was in the repertory every summer through 1973. Oops, did I just give away that it's one of the two Bayreuth performances I'm talking about?)
I appreciate that the odd-performance-out will be defended as a "different approach." That isn't what I hear, though. What's more, there's a feeling in this performance that there isn't a lot of interaction between the singers and the conductor. They were all clearly in the Festspielhaus (yes, we are tallking about one of the two Bayreuth performances) on that same afternoon at the same time, and they started and finished together, but in between, the conductor doesn't seem to have much consideration for the cast, and that is, after all, one of an opera conductor's basic jobs, and it really doesn't seem to me to be getting done here.
I don't mean to pick on the conductor in question. Well, I guess I do, or I wouldn't have brought the whole thing up. Our mystery conductor was invited back to Bayreuth to conduct The Ring from 1976 to 1980, in what was then a highly controversial production, of which audio and video recordings were made, and even setting aside the production's "dramatic" aspect, I never much enjoyed the musical portion either. Yet I've seen that described as one of the conductor's great achievements. I've vowed to crack out my Laserdiscs and actually try to watch the thing, which at the time I was never able to watch for more than 10 or 15 minutes at a stretch. Maybe this time I'll get it.
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