Tolkien for the unconverted

Essential reading, viewing, and listening from the EI editors.

Maybe it’s just too close to home, but despite (or perhaps because of!) being raised in the real-life Mordor that spurred his imagination, I have never got Tolkien. And my God, I’ve tried. The books, the films, Led Zeppelin albums, anything. But, having delved inside whatever medium is on offer, I emerge soon after, bored and thinking: what’s the fuss? This is just silly. Which may be why I enjoyed DJ Taylor’s The King Under the Mountain: In Search of JRR Tolkien.

Taylor, the acclaimed biographer of Orwell, has not written a biography (would the estate allow it?), but a meditation that reaches back to his first encounter, his obsessional love for these ‘lapidary’ offerings, and the strange contradictory character of the author himself. A deeply conservative figure (he hated the Beatles among much else), who became a hero of the hippies (never a good sign), his oeuvre is now akin to a religious text for tech bros such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel (one suspects there is rarely a long queue for the Ladies at Tolkien conventions). And the sheer scale of Tolkien’s commercial success is astounding; as many as 300 million copies sold. Whatever one’s view of Tolkien and his work – and mine remains unchanged – Taylor has written a typically incisive and thoughtful study of one of the major cultural figures of our age. What his vast popularity says about ‘us’ is another question.

A complete picture of Parsifal

I have received reports that there are those who think Wagner is Tolkien plus music (the poor, deluded fools), though unarguably he, too, is the cause of obsession. The new Covent Garden production of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal is, I think, the 11th I have seen of the composer’s final work – which was also the first opera of his I saw, at the same venue. For some bizarre reason, possibly ever deeper familiarity, this is the first time I feel I have grasped a complete picture of this sublime offering, one which confounded Friedrich Nietzsche and broke the once close relationship between him and the composer. And that is despite this production’s ludicrous ending, one imposed for the tired, all too predictable purpose of ‘transgression’ by the director Evgeny Titov, a protégé, unsurprisingly, of Barrie Kosky.

In fairness, the production is sparse enough to give the music the space it deserves – though there is always the option of closing one’s eyes – and the cast is a fine one. Brindley Sherratt, now gracing the stage he deserves, is a thoughtful Gurnemanz, who carries the burden of the considerable narrative. Ekaterina Gubanova is a bewitching, otherworldly Kundry, a thankless role, akin to Mary Magdalene, part saint, part whore. Stanislas de Barbeyrac is an affecting, vulnerable, ultimately murderous (so, finally, ludicrous) Parsifal, while the great German baritone Christian Gerhaher, one of the finest Lieder singers of our time, is an agonised Amfortas, visually a reincarnation of Holbein’s dead Christ.

Above all, though, there is the music, never more intoxicating than in the interweaving ‘dance’ that closes Act I, with the House’s orchestra in top form (apart from some rather anaemic bells), marshalled by the Royal Opera’s new music director Jakub Hrůša. Any doubts raised about his succeeding Antonio Pappano in that role can be swiftly cast aside.

In Andrei Tarkovsky’s top ten

Any film that’s numbered among Andrei Tarkovsky’s top ten is likely to prove a masterpiece, and that is certainly the case with Hiroshi Teshigahara’s bewilderingly strange and austere Woman in the Dunes, made in 1964. The story, that of Kōbō Abe’s eponymous novel, shifts from Tokyo to an isolated village, and could be set at any point in time, where a struggle over custom, captivity, pursuit, power and sexuality eerily unfolds. Toru Takemitsu’s soundtrack gives the film a pulsating, percussive energy, interspersed with scenes that capture the still, stylised ceremony of Noh theatre. It is like nothing else. The pianist Glenn Gould, who is supposed to have seen it over a hundred times, claimed it was a contender for the greatest film ever made.