Today’s catch-phrase "control-freak" might have been invented for Wagner. His finnicky relations with the painter Paul von Joukowsky (1845-1912) over the set design for the first production of Parsifal in 1882 bear witness to this. The son of a friend of Goethe’s, Joukowsky had presented himself to Wagner in Naples in 1880, a case of the right man and moment, and he remained in the composer’s entourage till the end, sketching Wagner the day before the composer’s death in Venice three years later.

During this time Italy held great sway in Wagner’s imagination. Becoming almost a member of the family, Joukowsky accompanied Cosima and the composer on travels during which Wagner found inspiration in Italian art ¾ Titian especially ¾ architecture and nature; inspiration for stage settings for what was not only his first drama composed after hearing the acoustic of his Festival Theatre at Bayreuth, but also the first composed after seeing the revolutionary, cinematic effect of its vast stage, darkened auditorium and hidden orchestra.

Klingsor’s garden in Act II was inspired in Ravello while the composer visualised the Hall of the Grail explicitly as the duomo at Siena with its Licorice All-Sorts horizontally striped black and white columns. This was to provide a stout expression of the earthbound fate of the Knights’ lofty ideals, the indoor grid of straight lines in vivid contrast to the tree-swish of the scenes outdoors. What is heard works with what is seen and that first production was born of team effort between the composer and two or three other artists, Joukowsky by far the most important. He was the perfect answer to Wagner’s search for a designer, imaginative enough to respond, unimaginative enough not to compete. Wagner would complain and chivvy, suggest and reject until he could see his visual ideas realized before him.

A key to the design and to the significance of Parsifal is transformation. The outer acts move from the open air to the innards of a duomo; the middle act from a sorcerer’s turret to a garden of excess, then to blank ruination. Wagner allows his transformations to carry his most oblique and notorious utterance in the drama: as Parsifal and Gurnemanz progress in Act I from the clearing to the Hall of the Grail, the gentle guardian tells the bright upstart, "You see, my son, here time becomes space." It was twenty years before Einstein figured that one out.

These transformations were achieved by a cyclorama, a device common enough in theatres of the day, even in vaudeville ¾ as recreated in Michel Carné’s film, Les Enfants du Paradis, set in the Paris Wagner knew as a young man. It consists simply of a long painted scene, much wider than the stage, which is furled-unfurled from one end to the other. Nowadays it may seem little more convincing than similarly engineered early Hollywood backdrops for characters on horseback or at the wheel of a car. If the lighting is right — Wagner is unusually fussy too about lighting directions in Parsifal — and you have caught the fumes of Wagner’s spell, it scarcely need be more ‘convincing’ than that either.

Beginning the orchestration of the third act he said to Cosima, "What a stiff beggar the human being is, when he can think of nothing better than straight lines to get at the secrets of Nature, whereas Nature itself has none, until the artist comes along and takes his wavey lines from Nature." A key to Wagner’s stage vision, a vision of fluidity and the dance of the brush? Yes, and to a tension between the moral forces in Parsifal that the stage directions encourage the designer to follow. Oh but also, dare I say it ¾ Wagner had the damnability of the straight line on his mind, having recently taken to playing billiards each evening after his day’s work was done...

The stage directions do indeed give clues to the meaning of mysteries explored in the drama. Nature ¾ present or absent, honoured or harnessed ¾ is a central character and Wagner was careful to show nature in the outer acts in terms the expanse of vistas, while Klingsor’s temptresses’ garden is a walled garden, nature wild but not quite, tamed, compromised. Joukowsky had to work hard on this, to make it exotic, wild in its implication but clearly cultivated nonetheless. Wagner’s vision is explicit even in a painterly way and it is at that level that betrayal usually occurs in production; yet why put up with the warehouse steel grey vision when we would not put up with accordions in place of harps?