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Tuesday 2 December 2008

A unique acoustic

Robin Holloway on the unique orchestra layout that produces the Festspielhaus’s unique acoustic

There was no space in my report last month, on a first visit to the Bayreuth Festival, for what was in retrospect its most exciting quart d’heure, a privileged informal investigation of the unique orchestra layout that produces the Festspielhaus’s unique acoustic.

This, I was kindly permitted to explore one afternoon. Impossible to imagine from the auditorium the precarious peculiarity of this astonishing construction, steeply raked downward from the conductor’s chair at the summit, semi-circles of hell before the air-conditioning denied to the audience was installed to relieve the sweating players (though invisibility allowed them to dress, or undress, casually — something not permitted the visible, sweating spectators). All is as tight and neat below decks as a Man o’ War, with raised platforms to left and right for three harps each, and at the lowest level the timpani and the percussion used so sparingly by this often noisy composer. I perched a moment in the conductor’s chair and felt like the lord of the ring.

So the sound, drawn from the bowels of the building, cannot amass; it seeps through itself, drums through brasses, brasses through woodwinds, woodwinds through strings; creeping upwards, thence outwards, interpenetrated layer-within-layer, totally blended yet still separable. Which is, of course, to descibe the sonority of Parsifal, the only opera written in full working knowledge of the spaces both theatrical and acoustic — unique to work and building.

All this makes a fascinating contrast with another great composer at his own festival — Benjamin Britten’s concert held at the Snape Maltings. Odd that this justly celebrated success is deficient in just one all-important way: it doesn’t function (or only awkwardly) as a theatre. Odd, because the core of Britten’s output is operatic (the three Church Parables and the pageant Noye’s Fludde don’t fit either theatre or concert hall). One might think that his primary concern was to mount this oeuvre to maximum advantage in authentic conditions, a model to the rest of the world, just like the Bayreuth Festspielhaus for Wagner’s.

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