After Krauss's 1953 Ring at Bayreuth, reviewed in June, here is his Parsifal from the same festival. It appears to have been the fastest reading of the work ever at Bayreuth compared with Toscanini's and Levine's, which have been just about the slowest. Krauss was only a few minutes faster than Boulez, but there is all the difference between Boulez's objective, almost uncommitted view of the opera and Krauss's subjective, histrionic approach. Indeed, his account of this work has many similarities to that of the Tetralogy: it is wonderfully direct and consistent in tempos and their relationship, pellucid in texture, and he is not unaware of the work's spiritual content. Nobody achieves the tensions and world-weariness of the transformations and the Amfortas music so acutely as Krauss, nobody is quite so evilly energetic in the Prelude to Act 2, and few manage the sustained, cleansing ecstasy of the finale, from ''Nur eine Waffe'', so tellingly. Yet I cannot welcome it with quite the enthusiasm with which I greeted his Ring, simply because the later, 1962, Knappertsbusch version on Philips has very many of Krauss's virtues, to which he adds a deeper understanding of the work's inner meaning. Knappertsbusch also enjoys the benefits of a greatly superior recording.
Krauss has the same Gurnemanz, Ludwig Weber, as Knappertsbusch on his earlier Decca LP set (nla), here singing with even more sympathy and eloquence and rotund, warm tone, but he yields to Hotter—Knappertsbusch's 1962 Gurnemanz—in both musical accuracy and verbal pointing. London's Amfortas is common to all three of these Bayreuth versions, and he is probably most secure and imposing for Krauss in 1953. Modl, also heard on the Decca set, is really unique as Kundry for her very individually inflected interpretation, to my mind ideal for the role, but she is something of an acquired taste: Meier, on the Levine version (also Philips), may perhaps be more generally acceptable. Vinay's tone as Parsifal was described by Andrew Porter in Opera in 1953 as ''stuffed''. I know what he meant- at the same time I find Vinay's timbre and his expressive powers superior to those of most tenors in this part, and he can really sing it. So can Jess Thomas for Knappertsbusch on Philips in a more generalized, possibly more pleasing way, but with not quite Vinay's sense of anguish—listen to ''Amfortas! die Wunde''. Nobody has ever surpassed Uhde as Klingsor, and he is here in his most incisive, compact voice. Indeed with him, Vinay and Modl, truly inspired by Krauss, the whole of Act 2 goes as excitingly as on any verslon.
Certainly more so than with Goodall, whose version, at least until Act 3, sounds laboured beside Knappertsbusch or Krauss. The conductor's profound knowledge of the score is never in doubt, but perhaps because he is so immersed in it, he often lingers so long over a passage as to debilitate an overview of the work. His cast, with the exception of Meier's Kundry and, at times McIntyre's Gurnemanz, seems unidiomatic in direct comparisons with Bayreuth counterparts. Besides, his version, because of its length, spreads expensively over five CDs. Its sound is incomparably superior to the Krauss, where—unusually in a Bayreuth relay—you are detracted by a noisy prompter and a number of intrusive stage noises and coughs, but to my mind inferior to the Knappertsbusch, which has none of the faults of its 1953 Decca predecessor and is a true reflection, in excellent stereo, of the Bayreuth acoustics (even more evident on CD than they were on LP). I remain faithful to the 1962 Knappertsbusch set which, with the well-known Karajan (DG) so finely engineered in the studio, only a little behind is my continuing and firm recommendation: I doubt if it will ever be surpassed. But for Modl and Vinay, indeed for Krauss, I shall want sometimes to turn to the Laudis version.'