Parsifal
Michael Tanner remembers the greatest musical experience of his life
No surprise: the greatest musical experience of my life was Parsifal at Bayreuth in 1962. I thought at the time…
Small wonders
It has been a reasonably good week for peripatetic opera-loving female-underwear fetishists. In La bohème at Covent Garden Musetta slipped…
Ave, Maria
Anyone who thinks that an artist’s life is irrelevant to their artistic achievement, and for that matter anyone who thinks…
Spare us this unanimous chorus of praise for Pierre Boulez
Pierre Boulez, who died last week at the age of 90, would have been the last person, one hopes, to…
Powerful and upsetting: Pelléas et Mélisande at the Barbican reviewed
There are some operas, as there are some people, that it is impossible to establish a settled relationship with, and…
Half-brilliant, half-bewildering: Peter Pan at Welsh National Opera reviewed
In Beryl Bainbridge’s novel An Awfully Big Adventure the producer Meredith Potter issues a doughty injunction on the subject of…
In the mood for Parsifal, my Passiontide fare
This week, I have been mostly listening to Parsifal. Not the St Matthew Passion, which is my usual Passiontide fare.…
Parsifal has anxiety, rage, near-madness — unfortunately the Royal Opera's version doesn't
Debussy’s description of the music of Parsifal as being ‘lit up from behind’ is famous; less so is Wagner’s own…
Mark Elder and the Hallé surpassed any other account of Parsifal that Michael Tanner has heard
The Proms season of Wagner operas — pity they didn’t do them all; Die Meistersinger would have been specially welcome,…
