Appropriately enough, Simon Rattle chose Wagner’s Parsifal as his swansong as de facto artistic director of the Berlin Philharmonic’s Easter Festival in Baden-Baden. Wagner’s own farewell to the world has become traditional Eastertide fare in most of the important German cities: the spiritual patina of his late-career orchestral writing and the setting of Act III’s action on Good Friday have earned it a place as a quasi-sacred work for Holy Week, even though its premiere, at Bayreuth, was in July 1882.
Indeed, Rattle had planned it for Salzburg’s Easter Festival in the Wagner bicentenary, in 2013, before the orchestra’s abrupt decision to abandon Mozart’s birthplace in favour of Baden-Baden, Queen Victoria’s favourite German holiday resort.
Five years on and it’s Rattle’s farewell to the delightful