At the End of the Line: Patrick Carnegy bids farewell to Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s secular staging of ‘Parsifal’

Review of Parsifal, directed Lehnhoff, conducted Wigglesworth, English National Opera, London, 2011.

July 2011, Volume 5, Number 2, 75–8.

The sorry truth is that Parsifal has not fared too well on UK stages in recent years, a succession of seriously flawed productions being redeemed, at least in part, by their musical merits. Things have generally gone less well for the ROH than for ENO, whose 1986 attempt (directed by Joachim Herz) was, despite an arresting rehabilitation of Kundry (Anne Evans) as an active, positive force for good through all three acts, memorable mainly – indeed indelibly – for Reginald Goodall’s musical miracles with the orchestra.