Debuting in the pit of the Festspielhaus, the theater of the Bayreuth Festival, is a challenge for any conductor. Because of its history, its repertoire and its specificity, since Wagner's fandom audience will relentlessly judge you by how you manage to handle the peculiar acoustics of the hall, a space devised by the composer himself to make the opera a sublime and almost narcotic experience. But if on top of that you have been chosen to open the contest... and you do it with your first Parsifal... the risk is noteworthy.
It doesn't matter. Pablo Heras-Casado is very confident before tomorrow's premiere. "I am aware that Bayreuth is where you risk the most, but that's what we artists are for." The musician from Granada, whose face jumped to couché paper when he married the presenter Anne Igartiburu –a marriage that came to an end in 2021–, will become the first Spanish maestro to open this festival; He was the second to get on this notable podium, after the failure of Plácido Domingo, who in 2018 was booed at Die Walküre.
With an extensive musical career behind him, Heras-Casado has been on the podium of the most important orchestras. And as principal guest director of the Teatro Real, he has performed, among others, five Wagners: The Flying Dutchman and the tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelung. It was there that Katharina Wagner, great-granddaughter of the composer and conductor from Bayreuth, had her eye on that Parsifal, whose stage production (by the American Jay Scheib) includes augmented reality glasses.
Now he has been immersed in the score for two years. And he says he has felt comfortable since he began rehearsals on June 5. "I'm wonderful, not even in my best dreams would I have imagined being this good," he told La Vanguardia. On his Instagram, Heras-Casado poses as a messiah in front of the theater.
Do you have to feel like a messiah from the podium to direct Parsifal, Wagner's most spiritual work?
"Absolutely. The nickname and the comparison with being a master of ceremonies – she says – has never made as much sense as in that score. Not much happens in the strictly dramatic, it is rather meditative, mystical... so that you are the master of a great liturgy”. A work that connects him with his beginnings, he affirms: “Not because they were with Renaissance and Baroque music, but because my musical experience has always been connected with the liturgy, with the sacred. It has been many years as a singer and as a concert and liturgy director. I have known the connection between ceremony and music. And in Bayreuth, the space itself is mystical, more than any other, due to the congregation of artists and people who join each summer”.
Indeed, the pilgrimage to Bayreuth is inseparable from European musical history: it has taken place since Wagner inaugurated the theater in 1876 for his tetralogy. Parsifal, his last opera, would premiere in 1882. And by faith, the musicians must have treated him crazy when he launched his innovative pit: a kind of pressure cooker under the stage, only open at one end, through which the maestro has visual contact with the artists on stage. The orchestra can play intensely without covering the voices. And the most difficult thing: the artists hear the orchestra late...
“It's hard to explain until you experience it,” says Heras-Casado. I've talked to colleagues and assistant directors who have been here for 20 years, but until you immerse yourself in that space with your body and ear, you don't know how you're going to adapt. In my case it has been fast and natural. You invent a way of conducting, because you have to rebuild the internal balances by families of instruments and create them anew. You have to mold certain things and greatly exaggerate many others. The balance between the pit and the singers is very peculiar – he adds – but above all it is that only 10% of the orchestra hears the musicians a little, so they depend on the conductor. Here you are the main helm, determined and powerful. I can't even trust my ear for balance, sometimes I almost lose the singers, there has to be harmony over the phone with my assistant in the room”.
And then there's the matter of bringing the orchestra almost half a second ahead of the singers. “You unfold: on the one hand you hear singers and chorus (I always hear them late, as if they were behind my pulse) and on the other the orchestra goes ahead. And the singers should know that they have to go a little later than my administration”.
Figures like Georg Solti or Valéry Gergiev have failed on that podium. Do you understand why?
“I can understand it, it is another type of habitat. You have to reinvent yourself. I understand that there may have been shipwrecks ”, she concludes.
