· It had been 14 years since my last visit to Bayreuth. The festival had previously provided many happy memories: the Chéreau, Kupfer and Hall RINGs, the Ponnelle TRISTAN, the Kupfer FLIEGENDER HOLLÄNDER, Götz Friedrich's TANNHÄUSER and PARSIFAL. However, in 1994, the rather dull productions offering that year had made me wonder whether the great days of Bayreuth were over. That disillusion brought about a prolonged absence from the festival city. This year, then, was a test case. Had Bayreuth retrieved some of its former glory? The answer, I'm sorry to say, is largely in the negative: a truly dreadful MEISTERSINGER, a passionless TRISTAN, and a RING that was good only in parts (RHEINGOLD and SIEGFRIED); the exciting exception was the new production of PARSIFAL by thirty-eight year old Norwegian director, Stefan Herheim.

· Herheim conceived PARSIFAL as a child's dream, with all of the Freudian implications that suggests. Now if that description suggests that this was yet another production which rode rough-shod over the text and music, I must assure my readers that conceptually, visually and musically, this was an outstanding success; indeed it's been some time since goose-bumps arose on my skin as they did during this performance.

· In his elaboration of the sexual development of the male child during the pre-genital period (the oral, anal, and phallic stages), Freud describes how the child identifies with the father and directs his love towards the mother, the so-called Oedipus complex. In The Interpretation of Dreams, he suggests how the fate of Oedipus in Sophocles' play

moves us only because it might have been ours ----it is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that it is so. (1965:296)

· The passing of the Oedipus complex in the male child comes about when the child suspects that his incestuous love for the mother puts him in danger of being physically harmed by the father. Specifically, the boy fears that the father will remove the offending sex organ of the boy. Freud calls this "castration anxiety", and claims that this fear is confirmed when the boy sees the sexual anatomy of the female: the girl, lacking the protruding genitals of the boy, appears castrated to the boy.

· This brief discursion into Freud is necessary in that these concepts underlie Herheim's production. Crucial also is Freud's notion that our dreams rehearse, in our unconscious, our infantile sexual desires and that they are also triggered off by the recent events of our day.

· During the Prelude to PARSIFAL, Herheim opens the curtain to reveal the action which triggers the main action of the drama, that which becomes the narrative of the child's dream. In this prologue, a woman lies dying and efforts are made to induce the boy to give his mother a final embrace. But the child draws back in horror and runs out the French windows to play with his bow and arrows. We think immediately of Parsifal and his bow, and realize also that the curve of the French windows looks very much like those of the drawing-room of Wahnfried. The mother dies. Later, the child returns and imagines a union with the mother who now comes back to life as a seductress, and the two disappear into the bed, a prop which will play a central part in the main drama. The opera proper begins. In the child's dream, the characters we have seen in the Prologue in attendance on the dying mother now take the parts of Gurnemanz, the Grail knights, Parsifal and, most significantly, Kundry, the image of the mother figure; all wear luxuriant wings. But more than the immediate events of the day, the dream reproduces the repressed sexual desires and anxieties of the child: his denial of / longing for the mother; his castration anxiety; and even a birth trauma. The child is present during all of the action, identifying during the dream action particularly with Parsifal as he refuses (as he did with his mother) to relieve Amfortas's agony by replying to Gurnemanz's question. However, he also identifies with Amfortas: later there is an elaborate vision of a birth followed by a circumcision as the child's castration anxiety is translated into Amfortas's wound and also Klingsor's self mutilation as narrated by Gurnemanz. This is the dream of a child at the edge of that most crucial period of the pre-phallic / phallic period. The setting of his dream is late nineteenth Germany, and the costumes are those of the era of Kaiser Wilhelm. As in a dream, doors open magically, and the claustrophobic bedroom opens out into a garden. The whole set moves seamlessly here and indeed constantly in dreamlike fashion throughout the work, creating wonderful visual effects. (One of our party noted the exhausted stage hands outside during the intervals smoking what were clearly much-needed cigarettes). As Gurnemanz tells the four squires the story of Klingsor, the action bursts into the scene as it is narrated: the mirror over the fire-place suddenly lowers and the narrated action is played before us in magical, dream-like fashion. Much is made of the doors stage-left which open without agents as in the prologue; the central section of the stage has a cell which moves up and down and becomes variously a fountain (the fountain in Wahnfried's back garden?) and the grail altar. Extending into the orchestra pit is a grave bordered with ivy, clearly modeled on Wagner's grave behind Wahnfried. Parsifal, dressed in a child's sailor suit and armed with bow and arrow, makes his entrance on a curved balcony above the garden, again suggesting that of Wahnfried. Clearly the dreamer-boy had been playing frequently in the garden of the Wagners!

· The second scene has Amfortas retrieving the grail cup from the downstage grave. The time period seems to move forward a little here as the grail knights enter, for these are dressed as World War I soldiers, the Germans identifiable by their spiked helmets, the others in more neutral caps. The two sides take up the bread on the central altar and pair off in brotherhood, German with opponent, recalling the accounts of fraternization between enemies during World War I cease-fires. The dreamer-boy is a spectator to all this, and at the end of the act, Gurnemanz's frustration at Parsifal's inaction after watching Amfortas and the love-feast, is expressed in his testy words to Parsifal "Go seek, you gander, for geese"; it is the boy, however, who is pushed off stage by Gurnemanz.

· Throughout, the singing and orchestral playing have been of a high standard: a rich, sonorous Gurnemanz from Kwanchul Youn, a fine Amfortas from Detlef Roth; and superb playing from the Bayreuth orchestra under Daniel Gatti. This may well have been the slowest PARSIFAL I've yet heard, slower even than Levine or Knappertsbush, but it was both powerful and beautiful.

ACT II

· Klingsor's magic garden in this production has become a hospital ward. Herheim takes Klingsor's act of self-castration, narrated by Gurnemanz, to its logical extreme by costuming him as a transvestite in high heels, net stockings, tail jacket and blond wig. He is the head of this hospital. The knights wounded by Parsifal have here become the wounded soldiers in the hospital beds. The flower-maidens appear first as hospital nurses, but later many develop into voluptuous sirens in the soldiers' fantasies, and climb into their beds (Wagner directs that the flower maidens of the first group "return adorned with flowers, appearing like the flowers themselves, and make a rush at Parsifal"). The historical sweep now takes us a little further chronologically, for we are now clearly amid the decadence of the Weimar Republic. Kundry appears in drag (tails and a blond wig), in fact, as Marlene Dietrich garbed as she was in her famous act in The Blue Angel. Klingsor in the opening music of Act II describes the many guises of Kundry throughout the years: Herodias, Gundryggia, "Rose of Hell". Herheim seizes upon this to elaborate the child's dream of the mother / lover figure in various guises, and relies particularly upon the section where Kundry tells Parsifal at length of the death of his mother, her anguish at his absence, and how

Love sends you now a mother's blessing. Greets a son with love's first kiss

· So, to the sailor-suited Parsifal , alter ego of the child in his dream world, the figure of Kundry appears as both mother and lover. Red roses ("Rose of Hell") adorn the ever present bed from the prologue, and Kundry changes from Dietrich-like seductress to a figure with long golden hair and a white dress. Parsifal's rejection of Kundry's advances as he recalls the similar temptation of Amfortas and his wounding by Klingsor is used by Herheim to represent that moment in Freud's description of the child's sexual development where castration anxiety makes him draw back from love of the mother. Parsifal catches the spear aimed at him when Kundry calls to her master for help, and causes Klingsor's territory to vanish, a territory which in this production has embraced the Nazi ideology: the swastika banners crumble as the spear takes effect.

· Throughout the act the singing has been of a high order, Christopher Ventris emerging as a strong Parsifal and Mihoko Fujimura a rich-voiced Kundry whose problems in the upper register are all but erased by her very dramatic performance.

ACT III

· This act is set in a bleak, bombed out, rubble-strewn site still recognizable as the former garden of Act I. We recall that Wahnfried was badly damaged in the second World War. Kundry is dressed as she was at the end of the previous act but Gurnemanz is now in a shabby military uniform. When Parsifal appears, he is in full armour, which he removes and places on the central disc section (previously the fountain / altar). There the armour magically disappears and in its place appears the holy spear which Parsifal has retrieved from Klingsor. Beneath the armour, Parsifal's costume is now revealed to be very similar to Kundry's, just as his (now) long hair echoes hers. There is a curtain for the transition music to the second scene. Here, the grail temple has become a hall where rising banks of benches curve around a central area on the floor of which is the insignia of the German Federal Republic. Manning the benches on either side of an entrance aisle are the grail knights chorus, here men in business suits whose antiphonal choral dialogue takes place as if in the post-war Bundestag in Bonn. Above is a circular mirror which reflects the state insignia below. The coffin of Titurel, draped with a flag, is brought in with Amfortas following. As the lid is lifted, the chorus cry out and turn away as if to avoid some political or military horror. Amfortas's pain-wracked scene as he pleads to be allowed to die in answer to the chorus's aggressive demand that the grail be revealed, is superbly sung and characterised by Detlef Roth. Finally, Parsifal appears, looking more than ever like a Christ-figure, and heals the wound with the holy spear. As the music reaches its ecstatic conclusion, the spear glows. The reflecting mirror moves to a vertical position no longer reproducing the insignia below, instead confronting the audience with its own image. The two sections of the benches no longer argue and perhaps the disappearance of the insignia of the Federal Republic suggests its later reunification with the former Eastern sector. Certainly the child's horror dream has been resolved.

· Herheim's production has involved a hundred year sweep through German history; more particularly, it has surveyed the history of the Bayreuth Festival, its expropriation by, and association with, Nazism, and its redemption in the nineteen fifties. All this is portrayed in the context of a universal story concerning the development of a crucial early period of our (or rather the male) personality. The complexity of this production makes writing an account of it, after a single viewing, very difficult. Added to this is the problem of recalling the details some five weeks after the performance. So I am very conscious of not having done justice to Herheim's work. While this production is clearly a quite radical reading of Wagner's work, it is equally clear that both text and music have been scrupulously studied to produce a reading which resonates with contemporary sensibilities. In this, it contrasts strongly with another radical reading, Katharina Wagner's production of DIE MEISTERSINGER which pays scant attention to text and music.

· PARSIFAL was a wonderful ending to an otherwise lack-lustre festival. I may be swayed momentarily by my enthusiasm for this new production to return to Bayreuth in future years; yet when I think of the routine, or worse, nature of the other productions this year, I must conclude that money and energy can be better spent elsewhere. London, perhaps, when it repeats the excellent Keith Warner RING? Or Vienna's new RING in 2009? Ah, but then there is that beautiful sound unique to the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. Can one find that elsewhere?

NOTE: one of our party at Bayreuth, Paul Wöbcke, has since noted that numerous photographs of the production have been published in an online German newspaper at the following :- Link