The Madness And Glory of Wagner's Parsifal
Plus A Personal Tribute To Leeds-Based Independent Producer Kay Mellor
And so to the Grand Theatre, Leeds, for my best night out in ages — the press performance of Opera North’s much anticipated and long-delayed production of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal.
Engaging with this 19th-century German composer is not for the faint-hearted. Wagner’s works cry out to be performed on a vast scale, but his head — let’s face it — was full crackpot ideas. The philosophical thoughts of Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer rubbed shoulders in an overcrowded mind with Buddhism, Christianity, British folklore and nordic mysticism. He was a musical genius but he was also like one of those awful stoned hippies who trap you in a corner at parties, trying to explain their big theories about the universe.
In Parsifal, his last work for the stage, Wagner’s Teutonic equivalent of the-world-is-being-run-by-giant-space-lizards is the made-up — and as far as I could make out, male…