Chicago's Parsifal

Because he considered an opera house no fit place for so sacred an opera, Richard Wagner, as long as he lived, never let Parsifal be performed anywhere but at Bayreuth. So special is Parsifal's appeal that it is not often given in the U. S. outside of New York. Last week the Chicago Civic Opera Company presented it for the first time in nearly nine years. Only great musicand equally great acting can convince a modern audience that a good woman would make it her business to go around seducing Christians just because she is under the spell of a magician. Last week, great music and the magnificent acting of Frida Leider carried a Chicago audience reverently through Wagner's famed Temptation Scene wherein Parsifal, purest of fools, resists and reforms her. No one denied that Frida Leider had able assistance from a good cast that included Rene Maison as Parsifal and Alexander Kipnis as Gurnemanz. from Maestro Egon Pollak's orchestra, from a reverent audience that had bought every one of the 75-c--$4 seats.* But so well did she sing & act that most of those who saw & heard her were far more interested in Kundry's screaming, crawling, writhing, seducing, sobbing than in the allegory of Parsifal's redemption of the world.

Frida Leider is a famed Kundry, has sung the role many times at Bayreuth, will do so again in 1933. Painstaking, she studies hard, practices much, once spent a year perfecting one phase of her interpretation of Isolde. She sings in Berlin, at Covent Garden, went to Buenos Aires last summer, is a friend of Professor Einstein.

To Kipnis also went much praise for his rich, luscious singing of a part which, because of its verbosity, is often apt to be boring.

After four hours and a quarter of Parsifal, last week's audience & critics found little to criticize except its length, the appearance of the ancient scenery, and the bedraggled condition of Parsifal's swan. They agreed they had been given something unusually fine.

Composer Wagner, had he been there, might have wondered why his directions for moving scenery in the Transformation Scene were ignored and the Transformation music played before a closed curtain. Director Herbert Witherspoon could have told him: to cinema-bred patrons, Director Witherspoon thought, Herr Wagner's elaborate device to indicate motion would have appeared quite "childish."

* Bayreuth's last Parsifal cost $7.50.

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