Other Christmases

1 The room was decorated. There were white table-cloths on the tables. The cutlery was placed, and so were the crackers. The diners took their places. Some had come specially for the lunch. The crackers were pulled, and the hats were worn. In the kitchen, the volunteer cooks set out the dishes of food ready for serving. One placed the vegetables on the plate and then passed the plate so that the turkey could be added. Once complete, the plate was given to a volunteer waiter who placed it in front of a diner. One by one, the diners began to eat the Christmas lunch. A splendid effort. A tribute to generosity at Christmas. Yet there is one reservation to be entered: the plates carried too much food. There had been abundant food, all donated, to cook. There was thus abundant food to serve. And so the plates were piled high with food. Alas, generally speaking, the diners could not cope.

1.1 I wonder if the generous cooks served so much on a plate at their own Christmas dinners, later on that day. At home, perhaps the vegetables were set upon the table, and each took a portion according to preference. In the communal dining room, perhaps there was an inclination to see satisfaction, particularly the diner's satisfaction at Christmas, as being derived from the quantity that could be eaten. 'There you are. Get outside that. It's Christmas'.

2 The two brothers, one 34 the other 28, now live in a first-floor flat, having lived all their lives with their father in a terraced house in a quiet Close. On their father's sudden death, they were required to move. Their joint income of £140 a week is derived from State benefits. In addition, they receive full remission from rent and from council tax. However, the income must then meet all other expenses, including heating and housekeeping. The elder one has been unemployed for the years that I have known him. The younger one receives income support, being certified as unfit to be employed.

2.1 I wonder how they will get on. At present, I visit, as their father was a client. But they have no claim on SSAFA or on other military charities. I can be companionable, but I cannot provide any substantial help. I will visit, of course, over the next month or two.

3 According to the young woman, aged about 26, she had fled from her marital home, with her five-year-old daughter and six-month-old son, in fear of her husband, 22, a soldier. She will soon occupy a flat, one which her father presently rents to tenants. But she will have to organise her life as a single mother, on the assumption that she will not return to her husband. I visited her before Christmas, when I was able to make a small cash gift, one which was well received. I am due to visit her again tomorrow.

Preparing for Parsifal (1)

The emergence of Parsifal
First, a knowledgeable speaker dealt with the emergence of Parsifal and with some of the major themes. Seventeen (or more) years in the making so it seems. Wagner drew upon a poem by Wolfram, a medieval poet, and set the opera in Spain, on the border between the Arab and the Christian worlds. As Tristan is about erotic love, and The Mastersingers is about the love of music, so Parsifal is about compassionate love, about the tale of a blameless fool, Parsifal, who becomes wise through pity. [I will better understand that comment later on.] An opera about sensuality vis-a-vis spirituality.

[The background.
The devout king, Titurel, reeived two wondrous relics from the angels, the Holy Grail and the spear with which Jesus's side pierced. They are kept in the Castle of the Grail. Tinturel founded a Brotherhood of Knights who, miraculously strengthened by the relics, ride out into the world to help those in distress. Klingsor, a knight, sought admission to the brotherhood, but he could not fulfil the law of chastity and so castrated himself in order to kill his lust. Tinturel refused him.

In revenge, Klingsor transformed part of the surounding wilderness into a magic castle and garden. There, he has created bewitching young maidens whose pupose is to seduce the knights, as Klingsor intends to subvert the brotherhood and so possess the Grail.

Amfortas, having taken over as king, saw that the knights were falling into Klingsor's power, and, armed with the sacred spear, he went to do battle with Klingsor. However, he was seduced by a mysterious maiden. Klingsor seized the spear and wounded Amfortas in his side. The wound will not close. Amfortas is in agony.]

[Themes
the conflict between the sacred, the chaste knights, and the profane; the entrapping maidens; that conflict at the higher level of the new, Christian, religion and the old religion; Amfortas's failure to uphold the virtues of the Christian brotherhood, his vulnerability, his wound; how will the flow of blood from the wound be staunched, how will his agony be ended?]

A one-armed Amfortas
I will remember the performer, Falk Struckmann, who is to play Amfortas for his demonstration of the day-to-day tension which can exist between a performer and a director. In the current production, Amfortas is to be reduced to the use of one arm (the other being supported in some way and not available for expressive use). But, said the singer, I want to us both my arms to complement the music and the text. I remember the way he stood up, sang a line, and threw both his hands forwards and upwards.

He developed the point. The performer (the singer, the actor) has a view of the text and of the way to express an understanding of what the text requires. The performer both sings and acts. However, the director too has a view. There can be a tension between the two, a tension which has to be resolved. For this particular performer, the balance of advantage lies with leaving the performer to act as the performer feels. Nowadays, in his view, a concert performance where the performer has control both of voice and of gesture can be more powerful than a staged one.

Kundry
Asked about her sense of the production, she asked ‘Where in the world will you find such a Parsifal?. We have three Wotans on stage and Bernard in the pit’. (According to a piece in The Times, Bernard Haitink, on being asked what was the major requirement for the successful conducting of The Ring, replied ‘Comfortable shoes’.) In her opinion, it was really rare to have such fine singers on stage. She spoke about the clarity of the singing. ‘In Germany, I have never heard such singers where you can understand what they sing’.

She also spoke about the challenge of the part, the challenge of interpreting the part and the technical accomplishment which the part calls for.

It was good, I thought, to hear both performers as they talked about their roles in this production. Of course, I recorded but a small part of what they said. Now, as I key these notes, and with a recent conversation about the event in mind, it strikes me that there should be a ROH blog, one open to the performers as well as the public. I will put this idea to the ROH.

The flower maidens
There they were, all six of them, seated on chairs, under the direction of David Stylus, the voice coach, at the piano. It was Stylus who reminded us that Wagner said ‘Learn the text first, so as to speak it completely, before singing a note’.

As he and the singers worked, I was exposed to the attention which is given to the enunciation.

By the end, I had been introduced to Parsifal. In Stylus’s phrase my imagination had been sufficiently fired to post these notes and to give myself the job of reading the text before the performance. Read the text and thus be prepared to see and how that text is realised on stage.

As I complete these notes, I realise just how slightly they represent all that I heard and saw during the event. A review of the opera, illustrated by musical extracts; two of the performers talked about their roles and, to some extent, about their work in opera; finally, a director (coach) worked with six willing and professional performers – such was the content of the two hours. And yet my notes are as they are, a slight echo of those two hours.

My own feeling is of how much I enjoyed the event. I have been roused to think about Parsifal before the performance, to look at some of the websites, to read some (at least) of the libretto, to think about what is going on in Parsifal. Time spent in preparation is indeed rarely wasted.