Very slowly, as if out of tempo, a continuous melody emerges from the depths of the orchestra. In a gesture as wide as a lifetime, it comes to life, begins to quiver, reaches the light and gradually returns to silence. Thus opens Parsifal, Richard Wagner’s “sacred scenic festival” conceived between 1877 and 1882 for his new temple, the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth. It is the most mystical and metaphysical of his operas, so much so that its interpretation will soon be accompanied by real dramatic weight – by too much weight, to some people’s taste. Wieland Wagner is one such person. In the mid-1960s, the composer’s grandson sought to bring about a change of aesthetic at the Bayreuth Festival, where he was acting as director and stage director: “I like to find conductors who don’t overload Wagner’s already emotionally-charged music with their own emotions. For Parsifal, such an overload is particularly inappropriate,” he tells Antoine Goléa. So he entrusted the score to Pierre Boulez, whose conducting career was recent but extremely promising; the French composer had just triumphed with Wozzeck at the Paris Opera in 1963.
His Parsifal was in turn a resounding success. On August 29, 1966, Jacques Lonchampt raved in Le Monde: “Boulez entered Parsifal without memories or prejudices, with that spirit of analysis which brings all the secret springs of music into play; and the great dark mirror was awakened.” The alchemy between the work and the conductor-composer was to endure: it was with Parsifal that the maestro bid farewell to the Wagner Festival in 2005. Meanwhile, in 1970, Boulez unveiled his vision of the “great dark mirror” in an article for the Bayreuth program. In it, we learn just how fascinated he was by the opera’s construction, and in particular the way in which the sound material unfolds after the main leitmotifs have been exposed: they “acquire a kind of ductility they didn’t seem to have at the outset, and combine to form an extremely rich, moving musical fabric whose direction we don’t know exactly. In other words, continuity seems, at every moment of the drama, both necessary and always risky”.
In 1996, another unexpected – and risky? – premiere for Pierre Boulez was when the Wiener Philharmoniker, who had been inviting him regularly since 1992, offered him the chance to conduct Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8 for the centenary of the composer’s death, at the Abbey of St. Florian near Linz, where Bruckner worked as an organist. The challenge was enormous, not only because of the exceptional nature of the event, but also because the Wiener Philharmoniker have had this work in their blood since they premiered it on December 18, 1892 – and because Boulez has never yet conducted a single note of Bruckner!
Did the Viennese want to repeat with Bruckner the Boulezian shock of Parsifal? That wouldn’t be surprising, since the Symphony No. 8 bears real similarities to Wagner’s opera. Its language of themes, motifs and clearly characterised ideas that the composer juxtaposes, repeats, and then transposes, opposes, combines and associates in lengthy progressions, venturing into unexpected tonal bifurcations, creating, what Boulez would call “an extremely rich and shifting musical fabric whose direction is unclear”.
Bruckner nevertheless carefully organised the trajectory of his work: he remained faithful to the traditional framework of the four-part symphony, with a confrontational first movement, a lively scherzo, a meditative Adagio and a spectacular finale. What’s more, several clues in the composer’s correspondence and in publications of the period suggest that an extra-musical programme underlies the score. For example, the gloomy brass tones of the first movement can be heard as “the announcement of death” before the swinging of the “death clock”, in Bruckner’s words; in the scherzo, the popular character of “Deutscher Michel” can be identified, recognizable by his night cap, whose character is sometimes stubborn, sometimes dreamy; as for the finale, its epic cavalcades, solemn rings, and triumphant resolution echo the 1884 summit meeting between Prussian King William I, Tsar Alexander III and Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph – to whom the score is dedicated.
The programmatic veneer was undoubtedly laid out to reassure the first audiences of a work of dizzying proportions. In 1887, conductor Hermann Levi, who had successfully premiered Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7 (and Parsifal) a few years earlier, turned down the No. 8, perplexed by such a monster. The composer reworked his score extensively over a period of three years. The version performed tonight follows the edition compiled by Robert Haas in 1939, based on the second manuscript of 1890. To venture on this musical Everest, listeners are free to let themselves be guided by a Brucknerian scenario, or to plunge into Wagnerian metaphysics. Or to follow the musical fabric in the manner of Boulez, as described by Lonchampt: “without memories or prejudices”.
Tristan Labouret
