Karajan's pilgrims boo 'Parsifal' Lite OPERA SALZBURG:

By ANDREW CLARK
It is 13 years since Herbert von Karajan died. The world he embodied seems to inhabit a different era, but the Easter tradition he established at Salzburg survives. Although the "Karajan pilgrims" - patrons who stumped up enormous sums to finance his Easter ego-trips - are depleted by natural wastage, the Salzburg Easter festival has found a life of its own, driven by Claudio Abbado's artistic pragmatism and the festival's ongoing status as an exclusive club.

The past few days have found the city wrapped in snow, but the atmosphere on stage at the Grosses Festspielhaus has been all Mediterranean light - not a quality usually associated with Parsifal, despite the geographical locations Wagner gave it. "Light" in this instance does not mean intellectual or philosophical enlightenment, penetrating the mystic gloom of German- speaking Europe's favourite Easter opera, but the radiant illumination of Abbado's Wagner conducting and the sun-filled stage panoramas designed by Gianni Dessi.

Expectations were high for Abbado's Salzburg swansong: this was his first Parsifal in the theatre, and he had engaged Peter Stein to direct it. The result - to be restaged at the Edinburgh festival this summer, with the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester taking the place of the Berlin Philharmonic - is strangely disconcerting. The music is all there, deliriously so in the Berliners' contribution, but Stein's production is a flop. He adheres religiously to the text, as if determined to take not only Wagner's stage instructions at face value, but the work's spiritual message too.

Each act is suffused with Christian symbols - a Christ-like body wound for Amfortas in Act 1, a neon-lit cross at the end of Act 2, a giant halo rising from the ground in Act 3. Naturalism reigns, with the wounded swan, the Grail cup and Klingsor's cod-Arabian costume all literally portrayed. There's incense in the temple scenes, and the Flower Maidens are 19th-century damsels with rosebuds in their hair. It all smacks of a return to the womb, as if a century of uncovering the work's wider, deeper allusions has never happened.

Coming from one of the great European stage directors, it doesn't really add up - and here's why. As a member of the '68 generation, now exiled in Italy, Stein has never really come to terms with Wagner. When he was asked, back in the 1970s, to stage The Ring, he wanted to rewrite it. His gut reaction to Parsifal was probably the same: Wagner's static pageant was hardly likely to appeal to adirector who became famous for animating modern stage characters in classical settings.

This time, however, he saw a chance to confront rightwing guardians of the Wagner flame with their own hypocrisy. You want to take the master at his word? Well, here it is: Wagner is clearly not the saint you think he is. You want something more modern, more imaginative? Then don't denounce it as "un-Wagnerian".

The whole exercise seemed rather pointless - the processions were sterile, and some of the design ideas looked amateurish - so it's hardly surprising Stein was booed. Perhaps, after all, he wanted to drive home that the real truths of Parsifal lie in its music. It was a strange way to do it, but he succeeded. Abbado led a performance of long lines and chamber-musical intimacy, revealing the wonderful colours of the score without lingering or indulging in unnecessary spotlighting. Not everyone will have liked the use of onstage boys instead of offstage sopranos in the Grail scenes, which sounded distinctly unmystical; and the temple bells were freshly cast Tibetan gongs, a distracting presence at the side of the stage. Nevertheless, this was as fluently beautiful a Parsifal as I have heard.

The cast was not one to write home about. Thomas Moser's Parsifal sounded properly Germanic, but his big, bearded physiognomy was hardly a match for Wagner's "innocent fool". He did, however, cut a convincing figure in the central confrontation with Kundry, which found them trapped in a stage-wide garden-maze. Violeta Urmana was the powerfully dramatic seductress, but the other principals - Albert Dohmen, Hans Tschammer and Eike Wilm Schulte - were no better than standard German casting.