Wagner through the looking glass of Boulez

An interview with Jean-Jacques Nattiez

FIRST CONTACT WITH WAGNER

Before you were invited to conduct Parsifal in Bayreuth in 1966, what contact had you had with the works of Wagner?

I had not been an especially avid listener of Wagner, either on disk or in the theatre, where it was quite rarely played. I remember seeing a production of Die Meistersinger in Lyon in 1943, with André Cluytens, and…