18-05-2025
Parsifal review — potent singing brings Glyndebourne's Wagner to life
In the programme for Glyndebourne's new Wagner production its director, Jetske Mijnssen, says she 'needs characters who are rounded human beings'. Oh dear, she's come to the wrong opera. Parsifal is where you get a king eternally tormented by a wound that won't heal, or a bunch of religious zealots obsessed with the Holy Grail, or a magician who has castrated himself, or a woman tormented through centuries because she laughed at Jesus Christ. Rounded human beings these are not.
So Mijnssen rounds them out anyway, turning Wagner's last and most enigmatically mystical opera into a protracted family deathbed drama, set in 1882 (the year of Parsifal's premiere), with Ben Baur's sets evoking the panelled walls and heavy drapes of a Victorian drawing
