Music: Wagner in Indiana

For three years, Midwest music lovers who like to settle down to five hours of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal in the closing days of Lent have been heading for Bloomington, Ind. Indiana University does not advertise the Palm Sunday Parsifal produced (in English) by its Opera Workshop, but those who have seen it have spread the word. Each year, more & more people, from Indianapolis, Louisville and Cincinnati, make the trek.

This week Bloomington (pop. 28,000) was filled with its biggest Wagner crowd yet. Some nibbled a “Parsifal” Supper ($1 buffet) in the university dining hall; others brought their own in boxes. Then, in the university auditorium (3,788 seats), they sat back while the first sounds from the 60-piece orchestra drifted up from the pit. Onstage, they saw simple and well-lighted sets, fresh and unstilted acting.

With the exception of one Workshop professor who sang the role of Gurnemanz, the singers were all graduate and undergraduate students of the university. To lighten the singing load (and share the experience), there were two Parsifals and two Kundrys. A standout performance: that of Tenor Guy Owen Baker, 27, a veteran of all three Bloomington Parsifals, who sang the title role in Acts I & II.

By the time the final curtain fell on the Holy Grail drama, many a listener was dabbing at his eyes. Those who could compare it with the Metropolitan Opera’s traditional Good Friday Parsifal (untraditionally absent this year) found the Bloomington version staged and acted more cleanly, if musically less professional.

Indiana’s Parsifal is only one of several operas the Workshop produces each year, but the only one that has become a perennial. The idea came from Music Professor Ernst Hoffman, who wanted his students to tackle Wagner, picked Parsifal as one of the composer’s works that is least demanding and least liable to tax young voices. Hoffman himself wrote a straightforward English libretto.

The designing, staging and direction is the work of Hans Busch, 36, son of famed Conductor Fritz Busch. Hans, who studied stagecraft wherever his father happened to be conducting, e.g., in Dresden and at Britain’s Glyndebourne, where he worked under Carl Ebert, is now an associate professor on the Indiana faculty. He also works at outside assignments. This winter he made his bow at the Met with a restyled (but not unanimously praised) Cavalleria Rusticana (TIME, Jan. 29).

Hoffman and Busch have not yet turned Bloomington into a backwoods Bayreuth, but their Parsifal is beginning to establish a strong little tradition of its own.