The latest on Opera as Opera: The print run is starting as I write, and a final production schedule (of three weeks or less, I’m told) should be forthcoming this very day. If you’re reading this, you’ll be among the first to be told.

As I get back to this blog-within-a blog devoted to exploring all the ways in which today’s young singers start their formal training in a quite different state-of-being than that of earlier generations, I pause to contemplate the next item on the docket and am struck anew by the apparent futility of discussing any single factor independent of a thousand others, and by the tension between working insights and cultural overview.

In my last post, I described the present vocal condition of two of our most gifted artists in largely technical terms—a natural emphasis for an author involved with singing from both a practical pedagogic viewpoint and a theoretical one. The most extended and thoughtful response I received came from a  correspondent who’s been reading along pretty much since Osborne on Opera‘s inception, obviously interested in what I have to say, yet also, perhaps, a trifle impatient with my attempts to analyze cause. This correspondent hears all the things I’m describing, but believes they are largely symptoms of a more general sociocultural malaise. After citing the impact of the internationalization of performance on the directness of communication through words, he goes on to outline—quite accurately, I should say—the cultural breakdown of Western civilization (a breakdown broad enough and deep enough, I think, to merit “civilizational” status) through the horrendous half-century of the two World Wars. Referring to W. H. Auden’s perception of opera as an expression of liberal humanism (W.H.A: “Every high C accurately struck demolishes the theory that we are the irresponsible puppets of fate or chance.”), he proposes that ” . . . something was finally dismantled in the human spirit by W.W. II,” and that liberal humanism is, effectively, dead.^(I)

I second all my reader’s arguments, and elaborate on them in my book. Indeed, I believe an awareness of this overarching reality hangs over opera’s own view of itself and its function in society. It is revealed in the grasping after some new thing to sing about (and how to sing about it) among our composers and librettists, in the way performers think about themselves and their careers, and in the otherwise inexplicable expressions of some of our most intellectually sophisticated directors. (It is absolutely unavoidable and right for the latter, as citizen-artists, to have the awareness, and absolutely wrong for them to turn it into the basis for adversarial critique while interpreting masterworks grounded in the now presumably lost sensibility.)

Breaking News:  Opera as Opera is now in production, and release date will be announced momentarily. 

I’m not interested in stars. Don’t care about divas and divos, the fashion shoot, the change of gown after intermission, the watch endorsements, the awards, the Pavlovian standing ovations. In fact, I recoil at it all, and need to steady my critical self to guard against penalizing the talented men and women caught up in, lending themselves to, embracing or resisting (and how am I to know how much of which?) these confessions of decadence. I am, however, deeply and daily interested in the nature and progress of talent, in its response to celebrity, and in its survival—in the things that, back in space and time, gave birth to the stars. Often, the fabrications of stardom reach their peak just as the supernova is about to turn into a red dwarf. We who have invested some of our spiritual capital, our resources of thankfulness, in sightings of rare brilliance live in oft-taught apprehension of such transits, and in hope of their postponement.

In opera, the progress of talent is inextricable from the progress of voice—it’s in the nature of a given instrument, its limitations, and how it is used over time. For voice is as voice does. So both its artistic consummation and its longevity depend not solely on good or bad fortune, but on accurate assessment of that instrument, those limitations, and that usage. In other words, on a stubborn cleaving to realities amid the fabrications. Here in New York, we have just had intriguing demonstrations of evolving realities from the two singers who, above all others, we might choose as ideal exemplars of the consummation/survival progression in our present operatic world. Anna Netrebko and Jonas Kaufmann have both given us some of those sightings of rare brilliance. Both have, to this point, endured in spite of course settings that standard wisdom would warn against, and as of the moment there is no sign that either will fight shy of looming perils: they are together projected for Turandot at the Salzburg Easter Festival in 2021, presumably at the behest of impresaria Cecilia Bartoli, whose own judgment in such matters I discussed in relation to Norma (see my post of Nov. 24, 2017).

Poor sense about role selection takes two forms. In the first, the singer takes on a role unsuited in range or calibre or temperament to his or her voice, but deploys good sense and relatively impregnable technique to play within bounds; professionals and connoisseurs may question and admonish, but the singer stays safe, and only the audience is penalized. In the second, the artist makes the same miscalculation but the technique proves something short of impregnable. Then audience and singer both suffer. This second form is, regrettably, the more common of the two. But the first does occur. Netrebko herself (to cite an example I can attest to from live experience) gave us her Lady Macbeth and seemed to incur no immediate consequences. Kaufmann, whose earliest professional tracing I know of is the much-viewed  “Un aura amorosa” from the Piccola Scala in 1998 (light-voiced and uneventful), has now run his trial half-marathon as Tristan, and his instrument is still functional. (See the post of April 26, whose evaluation I’ll let stand as far as it goes. But I go further, below.) And Netrebko, whom I first heard almost exactly twenty years ago in the lyric-coloratura writing of Glinka’s Lyudmilla, has taken her leap as Tosca.

Please take a look at the new “Opera as Opera” page on my website, and watch for further announcements very soon for publication details! 

Toward the end of a season in which I’ve devoted most of my attention to operas of the canon in repertory revivals, it’s been good to see an uptick on the performance thermometer of two Verdi operas, Il Trovatore and Luisa Miller. The scheduling of these works, especially in holdover productions, will never make news, and these days may get us a good scolding from the relevance scouts. But evenings like these are still the bread-and-butter experience—indeed the desired experience—of a large portion of the opera audience, and how far they rise above the grind-it-out level, season-in, season-out, is one determinant of a repertory institution’s survival prospects. It also happens that while the casting of both operas had some happy spots, the overall impression it conveyed of the state of big-opera vocality was sufficiently concordant with observations I’ve made throughout the year to give us grounds for some generalizations on that central topic.

Some of the improvement over the last efforts I’d seen with these pieces (in the same productions) was in the pit. In Il Trovatore (the performance of Jan. 30), the orchestra played with more consistent spark and alertness for Marco Armiliato than it had for Riccardo Frizza on the last go-round, or than it had earlier in this season for Carlo Rizzi in Norma or Emmanuel Villaume in Thaïs. There were several lacunae at points marked as fermatas over empty bars (i.e., dramatic pauses that didn’t hold), but since these all involved the Leonora, Jennifer Rowley, and she had stepped into the role when Maria Agresta cancelled the run, I decided to put them down to insufficient rehearsal and a soprano with a lot else on her mind. ^(I) Otherwise, while this Troubadour could at times have used more romantic shading, it at least chugged along with enough pep and precision to give basic satisfaction. It didn’t sound tired.

The Luisa, too (on April 18), had more orchestral presence, more thrust and parry, than Gianandrea Noseda had given it a few seasons back, and I was happy to thereby revise upward my estimation of Bertrand de Billy, whom I’d formerly heard live only in French operas (Carmen, sprightly and underfed;  Faust, somewhat better; but with Roméo, back to the Comique Syndrome). Luisa, with its superb, taut sinfonia and its intermittently inspired, easily derailed progression of scenes, needs a good pulling-together, and de Billy obliged. Thus, given the superb playing mechanics of the Met orchestra, both these works had sturdy repertory underpinnings.

I should have foreseen the inescapable: just as Italo Montemezzi’s once-exalted, now commonly disrespected L’Amore dei tre re came wafting in on wings of wishfulness fanned by its few surviving cultist followers, and landed, for the first time in more than 35 years, in a production by the New York City Opera at the Rose Theatre, the Fates decreed that it open on the night following a  concert presentation of Act 2 of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde by the BSO at Carnegie Hall, which had blown into town on a gale of expectation surrounding Jonas Kaufmann’s first stab at a big chunk of the male title role. For Montemezzi’s compact melodrama has always been tagged as one of “Tristan’s Children” (the title of the germane chapter in Alan Mallach’s fine “Autumn of Italian Opera”), setting it thereby to an Oedipal struggle that no work can reasonably hope to win.

Yet it was the champions of this opera, including musicians and critics of high standing, who themselves first labelled it an “Italian Tristan,” and the moniker is understandable, however overblown. Dramatically, L’Amore posits the Tristan situation with one variant—the princess who is the female partner of the meant-for-each-other couple is unwillingly married to the scion of the conquering tribe’s First Family, not his father (L’Amore) or uncle (Tristan). It is the most thoroughly through-written score of any Italian opera written up to that time that I can think of, and though its vocal line is often rewarding and always singable, its music is for long stretches driven by the orchestra, with some use of Leitmotivic devices. Its plot turns around a long Act 2 erotic encounter that carries the lovers into an otherworldly state on cushions of chromatic musical language marked by richly orchestrated interludes and the call of a distant voice. The old “king” (a baron, but the difference is academic) is in this case actually, not metaphorically, blind. And this last calls to mind another opera wherein a sightless old king is father to a foreign princess’s husband, and to which Montemezzi’s has often been compared—Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande.

When I reviewed the release of the RCA Victor recording of L’Amore, ^(I) I wrote that “The parallels with Maeterlinck’s Pélleas are either uncanny or just plain canny.” Note that I was referring to Maeterlinck’s Pelléas, not Debussy’s, because I was comparing it with Montemezzi’s source, a play by Sem Benelli, and one of the parallels I was talking about is that both Montemezzi and Debussy set their plays directly into sung form with little or no “opera-izing” alteration, a procedure only then becoming at all common. Concerning the plot-and-character likenesses, I said: “We have a beautiful young princess, living in a grim castle with kings of another race, married to one and watched by the aged father. Her true love is a young man of her own temperament; there is a sense of shared childhood between them. In a central position is a scene showing the princess in a tower, with her lover imploring from below; at the denouement, with the antagonist poised to surprise the lovers in a violent manner, the young man cries ‘Your mouth, your mouth!’ In the final scene, the princess lies abed, surrounded first by mourners of the realm, then by the surviving kings.” These similarities easily clear the Funny Coincidences bar, and the synchronicities line up, as well. (Play/opera premieres: Pelléas 1892/1902; L’Amore 1910/1913. Maeterlinck was by the latter date at the height of his considerable standing, and while Benelli is commonly considered a sort of poor man’s d’Annunzio, I’d nominate Maeterlinck as a likely strong second influence.)

Long ago and far away, which is to say in the ’60s and over on the Upper East Side, there was a benevolent organization called the SPCCG—Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Charles Gounod. It was founded by Patrick J. Smith (author of The Tenth Muse, editor and publisher of The Musical Newsletter, editor of Opera News, etc.) and a few of his friends. The Society established an award for good services rendered to the eponymous cause, and if memory serves did actually bestow this award on one or two occasions. I was a little miffed at never being designated a recipient, having on several occasions come to the defense of Faust‘s already-beleaguered reputation, and having said nice things about Mireille as well. But such are the slights we must learn to ignore.

The SPCCG was essentially a waggish, donnish enterprise of a sort whose cultural moment has no doubt passed. But beneath this tone was the entirely valid perception that the long-venerated works of this master were being critically condescended to because of a failure to distinguish between the deficiencies of performance and those of the works themselves. And things have not improved for C.G. over the intervening decades. Indeed, a correspondent recently wrote me about a conversation with the artistic director of an important American opera company who stated flatly that Faust should not be done anymore, because we no longer believe in that sort of salvation, the Devil, and all the rest that goes with that. In its last two productions at the Met, the opera could not be located amid the depredations of its directors (Andrei Serban and Des McAnuff)—D.O.A. before even approaching the matters of conducting and singing.

When we’ll see Faust again, and how, is a matter of pure, dark speculation. Meanwhile, though, Gounod’s other big hit, Roméo et Juliette, is returning to the Met repertory. It’s not on my list of must-sees this year, but I’ve been making some notes, rather in the SPCCG spirit, about both the piece and its presentation, as revealed in the present Met production and the one that preceded it. Looking back over these sets of notes, I’m struck by how similar their observations are, despite changes up and down the line in physical production, musical direction, and casting. And for some time I’ve been intrigued by the fact that regardless of textual decisions, some means are always found to throw Act I under the bus. One reason for the oft-heard complaint that Roméo is nothing but a series of lyrical love duets, and thus comes off as a pressed flower of an opera, is that everything else in the work, of which there is quite a lot, is curtailed either by redaction or in the execution. So, especially in a time when we are unlikely to experience Romantic transcendence in those duets, we might ask what it is that Act I is meant to accomplish, and what light that might throw on the rest of the opera.

First, for anyone who might be confused by recent experience: Roméo, as laid out in its score, is a five-act grand opera. The acts are closed forms; each ends with a decisive “button,” thus implying an intermission to follow. With the cuts in Act IV that were formerly standard (Juliette’s Potion aria and the Epithalamium, in addition to the permanently exiled ballet), it was easy to run Acts IV and V together, leaving only three intermissions. Now, with those numbers restored in whole or in part, the entire show is granted but a single intermission, which chops the score in two in the middle of Act III. So when I speak of “Act I,” I refer to what is now the first of three scenes in the very lengthy stretch before the intermission. This is the scene at Capulet’s ball, and it’s not short, preceded as it is by the overture and choral Prologue. It contains five numbers, but that’s somewhat deceptive, since the first takes in everything before Mercutio’s Queen Mab ballad. In terms of audience experience, the act comprises four important solos (Juliette’s brief but showy introduction, Capulet’s song in praise of youth and dance, Queen Mab, and Juliette’s Waltz Song) and one duet (the madrigal “Ange adorable” at the lovers’ first meeting). These episodes are bracketed by choral and dance music and joined by very concise sections of recitative, originally conceived as spoken dialogue but never so presented, even in the premiere production (1867) at the Théâtre Lyrique. The atmosphere is festive. Tempo indications are prevailingly on the quick side, and triple meters predominate.

Owing to the crunch-time pressure of work on the proofs of Opera as Opera/The State of the Art, I must delay my next post for one week, till Friday, April 13. I’ll be paying some close attention then to Act 1 (the actual Act 1, as indicated by the score) of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette—how the now-customary cuts undermine its function, and how the performed remainder is being staged, sung, and conducted. As with my earlier remarks on Massenet’s Thaïs, there will be reference to what sorts of voices were heard in the opera’s heyday, and how radically that affects the way we receive this work. Also to come over the next few weeks: two Verdi revivals (Trovatore and Luisa Miller); Montemezzi’s (potentially) gripping L’Amore dei tre re; and recent local exploits of Jonas Kaufmann and Anna Netrebko—always dependent, of course, on the real-life materialization of same.

Meanwhile, we are nearing the time when a firm publication date and specifics about ordering can be announced for the above-mentioned book, which is to the best of my knowledge the one-and-only effort to date to attempt a comprehensive evaluation of all aspects of operatic performance over the past couple of decades, and thus of where our artform stands in today’s society. All the considerations dealt with here in bi-weekly chunks, and more, are taken up at greater length, and in the context of some unifying themes, in this book. More detailed description will be forthcoming shortly.

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In my first “Before the First Lesson” post (Oct. 27, 2017), I set as the context for this series the fact that despite an unprecedentedly crowded field of unprecedentedly large-bodied candidates entering an unprecedentedly extensive system of formal higher education in music and opera, we have little to show for it by way of voices capable of satisfying the demands of the greatest roles in the greatest works. I further stipulated that these entries would consider some of the environmental, sociocultural, and technological factors that influence vocal development (or lack thereof) in advance of training. And I followed the lead of New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in presenting the first of these factors, the heavy and pernicious presence of the chemicals known as endocrine disruptors, with their scary and vocally intriguing effects on sexual maturation and obesity. ^(I)

In the second of the series (Dec. 22, 2017), I wrote about some of the ways our “technologically determined secondary aural environment” governs the largely unconscious modeling of the ear-voice loop that now conditions the vocal upbringing of everyone save for rare off-the-grid souls, who are unlikely to include many budding Tristans or Aïdas. In that discussion, I touched on two aspects of what I’ve decided to call the Digital Covenant (see below): the fragmentation of attention and the tyranny of the Now, with their concomitant losses of orientation and context. These are perhaps the components of the digital culture most commonly cited as problematic by educators and cultural commentators concerned with how minds are being structured and personalities formed. Today I’d like to enter some preliminary thoughts on a subject I see discussed less often, and that is the effects of our digitized life on emotional development. In a way, these thoughts follow a thread I’ve been tugging at since my first posts, concerning the unique intensity and, at times, the apparent waywardness of the emotional bond we form with musical and dramatic happenings. (See, especially, my article of Feb. 2, “How Are We Moved, and Why Do We Like it?” But, as I say, it’s a thread.) Until now, I’ve spoken about the receiving end of the bond—the taking in of emotionally directed events, our response to them, and our incorporation of reception and response into our storehouse of memory and expectation. What about the conditions on the sending end, with the artists themselves, who after all begin as receptors, too? Might the recent shifts in the ways we all mediate the world (especially with regard to relationships) also be mediating (I was going to write “stunting”) the ability to mobilize emotional, visceral energies—or even the recognition of the necessity to do so?—among potential creators and interpreters of the most emotional and visceral of the arts? Obviously, if I didn’t have a suspicion that the answer could be “yes,” I wouldn’t be addressing the question.

Richard Wagner said what could well have been his last word, as Verdi was soon to do, with a comedy that brought the story of the outsider protagonist couple (the underlying narrative of Romantic opera, and thus of most of our active canon) to an unaccustomed happy end, and incorporated it into the world of the bourgeois quotidian. Instead, after Die Meistersinger, he not only turned back to his native habitat of myth and legend, but to a species of musicodramatic realization that really has only one other specimen—his own Tristan und Isolde. In my post of Feb. 9, I mentioned that in his study of ten great dramas, The Idea of a Theatre, Francis Fergusson named Tristan a “drama of passion,” distinct from all other kinds. To be sure, “passion” is the emotional condition that besets most premodern dramatic characters, and with which we are meant to empathize, even to celebrate and declare a “right.” But passion as a ruling, immersive force, to which we are asked to give ourselves over unreservedly and beyond reasoning as the very purpose of the artistic experience, and which only music has the power to impose upon us, is unique to Tristan and Parsifal. Or, perhaps I should say, those are the only two works that truly achieve that aim, for anyone willing or eager to undergo it. Parsifal returned to the Metropolitan Opera’s repertory this season in the production directed by François Girard, first seen in 2013. Then, it was conducted by Daniele Gatti; now, it is led by the company’s Music Director Designate, Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

As always, we can talk about performance or about production, or the relationship between the two. And we can talk either about what’s there, or what’s missing. When we talk about what’s missing (which all criticism must come to), we inevitably speak of our own expectations, and those depend in great part upon the route we have taken into the work, and what we’ve found there in the past. I’ll be speaking about all these things here. But since I know many readers will be interested first in performance and in what was there (how was it?), as with any other opera that pops up of a Tuesday evening, I’ll begin with that.

This was the lightest Parsifal cast I’ve ever seen or heard, nosing out the 2013 contingent. The only exception was the Kundry, Evelyn Herlitzius. She commands an upper range of cold, focused power. This, allied with an often gripping intensity of vocal and physical action, allowed the latter part of Act 2, climaxing with the great cries of “Irre! Irre!” to build with a fair measure of its desperation, and put her in second place in the lightness derby to Katerina Dalayman of the 2013 cast. Lower down, though, Herlitzius’ voice lacks the presence and color, the complexity, and often simply the supported steadiness needed earlier in the act, from the first call of Parsifal’s name through “Ich sah das Kind‘ to the “ersten Kuss.” She’s an interesting artist, and I’d like to say I would welcome seeing her in other roles, but it’s hard to know which.

Verdi and Wagner are the two great opera composers that suffer especially grievously in our current performance climate. All opera labors, but the mightiest the most. The insidious combination of spavined vocalities, openly or underhandedly adversarial production practices, and musical renderings that with rare exceptions emerge as “lightened,” “clarified,” and/or mechanical, serve to reduce these two most regularly to the status of pitiful giants. In my Traviata and Forza del destino posts I have had some occasion to deal with Verdi. Trovatore and Luisa Miller will receive attention soon. Wagner, though, has simply not presented himself in our New York season to date. Even now, he’s just edging in, with a Met revival of Parsifal and single acts (the most surefire ones, and the cheapest to present) of Die Walküre and, in April, Tristan und Isolde, in concert format.

In a faint echo of the commercial symbiosis that once took place between record releases and live events, the conductor and Sieglinde of the Walküre Act I (Jaap van Zweden and Heidi Melton) are also those of the complete Ring underway from Naxos (the Siegfried has just been issued), while the Siegfried of that cycle is our Siegmund. Further, the Wotan of the Naxos Ring, Matthias Goerne, has just appeared at Carnegie Hall in the role that has earned him his greatest prominence—that of champion of the profundities of the German art song— and has been announced as the New York Philharmonic’s artist-in-residence for next season, when Mr. Van Zweden takes over the orchestra. Goerne being first to stand in the docket, I’ll begin with him and elements of the Naxos recording.

My earlier experience of Goerne was limited to a single Papageno, back in 1998. It wasn’t quite at the level of the best I’ve seen (Hermann Prey or, in an Americanized context, Theodor Uppman) or heard (Prey again, Fischer-Dieskau, Gerhard Hüsch), but it was nice (and no, Papageno is not a slam-dunk). I did mark a peculiarity in his rendering of the spoken dialogue. For that, he adopted a high-set adjustment—higher in pitch, in fact, than most of his sung notes—shallow and mouthy in timbre. It reminded me somewhat of Peter Lorre’s default speech mode, or more specifically of a tone taken by the eminent actor and director Gustaf Gründgens in some of his snakily seductive speeches as Goethe’s Mephistopheles, and so produced an effect oddly creepy for the character. I wondered if there were some culture-code signal in this usage that I was missing, or if Goerne simply thought that this unnaturally high placement would carry well in the big house. In any case, it did lodge in the memory. I’ve had no further occasion to see Goerne in opera, noting only at a distance and with some surprise the roles he has more recently undertaken, and have been remiss in catching up with him in recital till the evening of February 6.

I have heard and seen grumblings about an over-seriousness in Goerne’s recital programming and presentation. These get no support from me. One reason I find myself at the recital hall with reduced frequency is that the programming (when one can find out about it in advance in any detail) seems designed to avoid a dreaded “heaviness,” and the presentational mode is one of casual friending, often of a patent insincerity. The world of the Lied is richer and deeper than that, and if you’re not going to go there, neither am I. On this occasion, Goerne was offering the four songs of Berg’s Opus 2, the complete Schumann Dichterliebe, Wolf’s three Michelangelo settings and three of Shostakovich’s as well, and finally the Vier ernste Gesänge of Brahms. From beginning to end, substantial nourishment for heart and mind. What less could you want? And let me stipulate: Goerne has a sturdy, reliable voice. He’s entirely in command of his material. His intonation is excellent, and at least in this material, the tone is never spread or tremulous. He’s clearly dedicated and sincere. His collaborator on this occasion was the acclaimed young Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov, this recital being one of the events he is “curating” as Carnegie Hall’s artist-in-residence. All these good things notwithstanding, I found Goerne a strange performer, and this a strange evening. In such cases, I think it can be informative to search for technical causes. It’s part of my ongoing attempt to pin down what’s gone on with classical singing over the past half-century, a search that’s best conducted among the most gifted and successful, since their talent always consists in part of compensating for whatever weaknesses may be present. But before that, a note on self-presentation, which actually creates the first impression.

In my very first working post (“Traviata 1,” Aug. 4, 2017), I confessed that despite my dislike—on grounds not only of taste, but of artistic principle—of  Willy Decker’s production, there were moments in the Act 2 finale and the final scene when I found myself moved. I also had to admit that while I am often moved by these same passages, even in poorish performances, and attribute this mostly to the power of Verdi’s music to override the failings of his interpreters (and, on this occasion, the generally sour, resistant mood the production had put me in), I couldn’t indulge myself in denial: there had to be something in the production and performance that at least contributed to my emotional response. I was also aware that whenever I attend or listen to a performance of La Traviata, I am hoping for something like this response at these junctures; that although the emotion is of deep sadness, evoked by representations of cruelty, shattered love, and mortality itself, I enjoy having it and am disappointed when I don’t; and finally that this enjoyment or disappointment is a starting-point (though that only) for critical evaluation. I intended to pursue this subject in “Traviata 2,” but did not. Now’s a good time.

I was talking recently with a friend about François Girard’s production of Parsifal, which is returning to the Met this season. It’s another representation I object to on principle, whether I’m moved or not. And I’m always moved by Parsifal, because at certain places the music invariably overtakes all other considerations. In that sense, being moved has nothing to do with my opinion, so I concede the former and hold to the latter. But my friend was moved, specifically, by certain production choices. One was that in Girard’s auteurial universe, Kundry gets to be the officiant at the end. Wagner says she doesn’t, but Girard says she does, and since it’s Girard’s show, he holds the high cards. My friend felt that this choice contradicted only the letter, not the spirit, of Wagner’s apparently nullified law, and was moved to see Kundry dispensing the nourishing radiance. “She has to be redeemed!”, he said.

There’s a thread here, about women in the realm of the Grail, which I may take up after I’ve been to this year’s Parsifal revival. And one can’t very well be in the business of invalidating someone else’s emotional responses. For my money, Kundry should stay on the floor,  because her redemption inheres simply in being released from the centuries, eons, of agony to which she has been condemned for a blasphemy, and the only release is through death. There is plenty to explore in this notion; we don’t have to agree with it or like it. But it belonged to RW, and like another W, he’s the Decider in this pretty basic matter, according to my code of artistic ethics. (Which of the principal characters completes the work’s central action is well beyond the “Joe averts her gaze and frowns” level of stage direction, I would think.) Nonetheless, this little disagreement serves to remind me that I, too, was moved, as always, at the end of this Parsifal, this despite the fact that Kundry was having her mini-Resurrection. Further: this “being moved” was similar to, but not the same as, the “being moved” of La Traviata. Deeper? Not really, but different. Less personal, more “universal.” And while La Traviata is a tragedy of a peculiarly operatic sort, Parsifal, though marinated in tragic juices, isn’t. It’s a drama of redemption that shares the Christian dream of redeeming the world. That makes it one of a handful of outliers on the edge of the Romantic metanarrative.