On trial this month, Wagner’s Parsifal, conducted by Herbert von Karajan with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, released in 1981

The Trial

PROSECUTION

‘The recorded performance ends up with as many different character interpretations…as there are artists’

MIKE ASHMANis aGramophone critic and theatre director. His productions have included Wagner’sDer fliegende Holländer at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

THE EVIDENCE AGAINST

Your Editorial Honour, learned counsel for the Defence, and – lastly, but most importantly – ladies and gentlemen of the jury of our readers, we have before us today a recording of Wagner’s last opera. It was made at the start of 1980 in connection with – but not subsequent to (a significant point, this, members of the jury) – performances by Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic at “his” Salzburg Easter Festival. This recording took its place rapidly among the very top recommendations for Parsifal*. And why? Because a great conductor and orchestra take central roles, because the release was preceded by a Ring cycle and other Wagner works by the same performers, and (if your Honour will pardon a digression towards another composer) because Mr von Karajan was acknowledged as a Bruckner specialist and therefore a presumed expert in the handling of long, slow musical structures.

The Court will no doubt recall that it was from EMI’s master producer Walter Legge† that Mr von Karajan derived the practice of recording a work before performing it live, using the sessions as extra paid rehearsals for the concert. We submit that this practice is of less use in the field of opera than of symphonic works. In the studio – even if, as in this case, the conductor is himself the work’s eventual stage director – there are no elements of a dramatic event present. With only the advice and coaching of the

6 GRAMOPHONE MAY 2010

conductor (reportedly lengthy in the case of Miss Vejzovic, the Kundry) there are two dangers, both of them present here. The recorded performance ends up with as many different character interpretations – or lack of them – as there are artists. Or you have a situation – and here, ladies and gentlemen, I submit that Mr von Karajan takes a leaf from his predecessor Mr Furtwängler – where the conductor wishes to reserve the lion’s part of the dramatic work to himself and the orchestra, rather than in genuine dialogue with the singers.

Mr Moll, the Gurnemanz, has a beautiful voice, but it only serves the drama if one believes Wagner’s character to be as uninvolved in the action as the Evangelists in old Passion performances. Mr van Dam, the Amfortas here, is a singer with the proven ability to colour his voice to match the roles he interprets. But he is not allowed to do that here because Mr von Karajan has decided that the wounded Grail king is too noble a sufferer to give vocal expression to his pain. Such restrictions are not placed in the way of the solo Flowers – their sexual passes at Parsifal are of nightclub huskiness – or of Miss Vejzovic’s Kundry or Mr Hofmann’s Parsifal. The result, your Honour, ladies and gentlemen, is that Act 2 in Klingsor’s garden has an excess of dramatic life in comparison with the static neutral pageant of a first Grail scene and an over-ruminative Good Friday meadow that is Karajan’s orchestral thinking, not his soloists’ acting.

We must admit, my learned colleague,

that Mr von Karajan seems to have cast Kundry and Parsifal with dramatic reasons in view. You will hear a mezzo-soprano voice that does not sound beautiful or comfortable in the high-lying, psychologically stressed passages towards the end of Act 2, and a tenor who can sound like a simple man. We can also see an intention behind the record producers’ miking and placing of the multi- vocal layers of the Grail temple. But, in the huge church of their imagination, Verlaine’s “voix d’enfants chantant dans la coupole” sound like – forgive my use of idiom, your Honour – they are phoning in their performance from Mars.

To sum up then, your Honour, my learned adversary, members of the jury: it is the contention of the Prosecution that Mr von Karajan’s performance is fitful in its dramatic conviction, inconsistent in the performances its cast are allowed to give, and unfinished in its spatial geography.

*For example, it has long been one of the 100 Great Recordings in The Gramophone Classical Music Guide and it was voted Record of the Year in the 1981 Gramophone Awards.

†According to correspondence in the EMI

archives Legge tried for several years at the end of the 1950s to record Parsifal with Karajan, the Philharmonia, Nicolai Gedda and an ever- changing line-up of other soloists including Maria Callas.

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