In fact, waiting through those long fermatas, I thought back to the feel of the old Met auditorium at my own first live Parsifals in the mid-’50s, conducted by Fritz Stiedry. You may have noticed that the April dates of the 1938 post-tour Wagner performances coincided with the Christian Holy Week. McMillan’s article recounts the history of Good Friday matinees of the opera, beginning in 1907, and of the borrowing of the Bayreuth practice of forbidding applause and curtain calls following the first and third (“sacred”) acts. In an earlier article (see Parsifal Lite and the Afterlife, 3/9/18) I described my own marination as a secular youth in liberal Protestantism, plus certain readings, as preparation for the reception of this work. But I should add a note concerning the atmosphere of those Good Friday matinees, when the tradition was still in full force. It was reverent and church-like, with the attention and obedient patience of the true believers setting (indeed, enforcing) the tone for everyone, even the skeptical and bewildered—exactly as at a service. A long service, with unusually heavy emotional content. If a misinformed person ventured to clap at the conclusion of Act 1, he or she was shushed on the instant, and by the end of the opera had learned the lesson. Those silences were pregnant with not only the dramatic expectation created by our great rhetorician, but with the subtly audible constrained shiftings and exhalations, the muffled coughs and throat clearings, of a mainstream megachurch congregation, if such has ever existed. People still pay attention, or conceal their inattention, at performances of Parsifal, opera being opera and Wagner being Wagner. But that was a uniquely intense experience, magnified in Act 3 by the awareness that Good Friday reigned both inside and outside the theatre. Mostly inside, though, and the intensity was followed by a matchingly celebrative sense of relief and release upon discharge into the relatively fresh air and late-afternoon light of West 40th Street, with its oblivious semi-holiday passersby and lazy automotive traffic.

In the ’38 performance, some of the jagged quality persists as the action gets under way, and not in an entirely positive way. Even with the arrivals of Kundry, Amfortas, and Parsifal, Gurnemanz must essentially carry the fifty-minute opening scene, especially on a recording, whereon the physical presences of the others command none of our attention. His extended narrations of Kundry’s nature, of Amfortas’ grievous transgression and the story of the Holy Spear, soak up far more singing time than that of all other characters combined, and though they are masterfully set, they have not the built-in emotional valence of Wotan’s lengthy confessions to his beloved, trusted daughter in Die Walküre. Gurnemanz is narrating only to the queries of the young knights and esquires, and the performer must search out the character’s life-or-death investment in the tales to avoid a purely expositional recitation. And he must sound awfully good, with a voice of easy, authoritative presence and timbral variety. Emmanuel List, bringing with him a high European resume, had joined the Met in 1933, and with Michael Bohnen already gone and Ludwig Hofmann just departed (with the last performance of the home season—no tour for him), now found himself the company’s leading German-language bass, with the  workload already described. He had the right sort of voice for Gurnemanz, a large true bass of deep set and craggy timbre that suited at least one important aspect of the role. But he starts poorly, the tone rough, wobbly, and impervious to efforts at shading, and without much sense of a clear rhetorical direction for the narratives. He steadies himself at Parsifal’s entrance (at “Unerhörtes Werk,” to be precise), and sings well in Act 3, though without all the benign warmth one would welcome in that music. From the outset, we have also become aware of a goes-with-the-territory problem that afflicts all the Met broadcasts of the period, and most of all with scores whose orchestral writing goes well beyond the purely accompanimental mode: with big voices closely miked, the orchestral commentary recedes in relation to them, and in passages like the narratives, the sustainment and direction it should provide is not fully present; at moments, it wanders along faintly under the declamation. The opera house experience, and with it a stronger sense of Bodanzky’s guidance, surely had a more coherent voice/orchestra balance.