Another week, another Wagner production at a summer opera festival. This never used to happen. When John Christie launched Glyndebourne in the 1930s, he hoped to stage the Ring. So he gathered a team of refugee musicians from Germany, who quickly assured him that it was impossible and he should stick to Mozart. The man who changed all that was Martin Graham, the plimsoll-wearing founder of Longborough Festival Opera, who died in April at the age of 83. Graham was irrepressible; a self-taught enthusiast. With no one around to tell him it couldn’t be done, he pushed ahead regardless, staging the Ring cycle twice in as many decades.
And now look. We’ve got Parsifal at Glyndebourne (its third Wagner staging), a chamber-sized Tristan coming up at Grimeborn and a full Ring cycle starting next year at Grange Park Opera – which, having built its own back-garden theatre, has followed the Martin Graham playbook still further by importing Longborough’s music director Anthony Negus. Meanwhile in Notting Hill, Opera Holland Park has taken a first step into the Bayreuth club with The Flying Dutchman, Wagner’s shortest opera, and the least Wagnerian that actually sounds Wagnerian, if that makes any sense.
It certainly makes sense for OHP, which is still operating on a Covid-era stage that places the orchestra in the middle of the performance space. That’s not invariably a bad thing: the orchestra is the sea on which this drama sails, and with Peter Selwyn conducting, the City of London Sinfonia went at Wagner’s (moderately reduced) score with suitably salty vigour. The apron stage thrust the singers towards the audience, the roof of OHP’s tent was configured to suggest sails, and out among the shrubs and the five-a-side pitches, the peacocks gave their best impression of seagulls.
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