From the sacred to the profane: the Wagners, Bayreuth and Parsifal

Wagner’s final opera comes to Glyndebourne this week. Why will the composer and his wife be turning in their graves? Michael Downes looks at the family’s attempts to keep Parsifal in BayreuthWhen Glyndebourne opened its doors for the first time in 1934, the work on the programme was Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. Mozart was the only music performed throughout Glyndebourne’s first four seasons, and he is still the composer with whom Britain’s first and best-known “country house” opera festival is most associated.It was on a very different composer, however, that the gaze of the festival’s founder, John Christie, was initially trained. Christie was a Germanophile and obsessed with the work of Richard Wagner. “He was always hankering to do Parsifal at Glyndebourne as an Easter festival,” recalled his son, Sir George, who ran the Sussex festival after John’s death, until his own son, Gus, took over in turn at the start of the millennium. “He was only shut up by my mother.” Continue reading...

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