Lohengrin, Richard Wagner’s fairy tale of loyalty and trust, returned to New York’s Metropolitan Opera after an absence of seventeen years. That is a long time for Lohengrin, the most commonly performed Wagner opera in this storied house; the Met presented it 618 times before the curtain rose on François Girard’s new production on February 26. Lohengrin, in fact, was performed in every season from the Met’s opening in 1883 until America entered World War I in 1917, and returned with some regularity from 1921 until the 2000s.
The plot is beguiling. Even operagoers who say they are averse to Wagner make an exception here. In tenth-century Brabant, the German King Heinrich (Henry the Fowler) is raising an army to fight an eastern enemy. In the process, he must settle local disputes. He has learned that Brabant’s young ruler Gottfried vanished while in the woods with his sister Elsa. Accused of Gottfried’s murder by the nobleman Friedrich von Telramund, Elsa has fallen into a dreamlike state and can only defend herself by calling for a champion to demonstrate her innocence in a trial by combat. Enter Lohengrin, a mysterious knight who sails up in a boat drawn by a swan. Proclaiming Elsa’s innocence, he offers to defend her on condition that she never ask his name or origin. He then defeats Telramund, who is cast out amid great rejoicing.
Ruined, Telramund is consoled by his wife Ortrud, a pagan sorceress who still secretly practices her people’s pre-Christian religion. Ortrud plans to plant doubt in Elsa’s mind about Lohengrin’s origin and thereby persuade her to ask the forbidden questions, while Telramund will dispatch the compromised knight. They fail at first, skulking away as Lohengrin and Elsa are married, but the music suggests that suspicion is spreading in Elsa’s mind. Alone on their wedding night, after the opera’s famous “Wedding March,” Elsa’s doubts get the better of her and she can no longer resist seeking the taboo knowledge. She asks the forbidden questions, and immediately Telramund enters and tries to kill Lohengrin. Elsa helps Lohengrin foil the attack, but her breach of faith forces the knight to leave anyway. Before his departure, he restores the lost Gottfried, who had been turned by Ortrud into a swan.
The new production made quite a splash in the headlines, as did the last one (Robert Wilson’s ethereal but heavily stylized effort that premiered to much controversy in 1998). But the production was not glamorous enough, apparently, to solve even temporarily the Met’s difficulty with attracting and sustaining audiences as both the company and New York City decline. At the second performance on March 2, every section of the house had at least dozens of empty seats.
This is a real shame, for musically the production is a powerhouse of high-energy Wagnerian music drama. Met music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin led what was assuredly the strongest performance yet in his Wagnerian career. He brings a lighter, more Gallic touch to Wagner’s operas than his predecessor James Levine’s Germanic meditations, but in this production he balanced it well with a sweeping command of the score, impressive work with the Met’s brass section, and an exquisitely refined exploration of Lohengrin’s sonic architecture. All this, complemented by Donald Palumbo’s superb choral direction and bolstered by looked like a larger than usual choral contingent, meant that the audience enjoyed one of the Met’s finest performances in recent memory.
The Polish tenor Piotr Beczała, who appeared earlier this season in the Met’s new production of Umberto Giordano’s Fedora, sang the title role with a ringing, clarion tone. He is not a natural Heldentenor in the vein of the well-remembered Ben Heppner, who sang the role with darker timbres in the 1990s and 2000s, but Beczala’s tenore di forza served the role well. His Elsa, soprano Tamara Wilson, was probably not the ideal vocal type of the part; the line lacked the creamy middle of a true Wagnerian soprano and followed a more Italian style. Nevertheless, she too turned in a fine performance.
Russian baritone Evgeny Nikitin was cast as the villainous Telramund—still appearing at the Met despite lasting prohibitions on other Russian performers—but was indisposed on the day of the performance under review. The regal Thomas Hall filled the role with a truly impressive company debut. Hall shared much of his stage time with the luxuriously cast Christine Goerke as Ortrud, a menacing model of descent in the mezzo range that to a degree complements her high dramatic soprano.
The accomplished bass Günther Groissböck was a stately King Heinrich, even if some passages sounded a bit arid in the upper range. Brian Mulligan made a strong impression in the role of the King’s Herald, a small baritone part that has portended greatness in other singers.
So far, all to the good. But Lohengrin is a difficult opera to stage today, and this production was not without its pitfalls. Lohengrin is among the more controversial of Wagner’s works. After two world wars, the setting of a Germanic war against an eastern enemy hits poorly. The libretto ends with Lohengrin proclaiming Gottfried his people’s Führer, a word triggering enough to command a recent article in the New York Times (some German companies change the word to a more neutral alternative like “Schützer,” or “protector,” but the Met keeps it). Building a plot around knowledge forbidden to a woman recalls the Biblical story of Adam and Eve, but also suggests women are weaker and more prone to temptation than men. Critics inclined to psychiatry have bemoaned the opera as a musical embodiment of a “male rescue fantasy,” a reinforcement of the politically incorrect notion that women cannot save themselves and that men who protect them are condescending or domineering. Troublesome contemporary feminists of the type who object to doors being held for them even now bandy about the apposite term “white knighting” to describe a phenomenon they despise.
For these reasons, recent productions of Lohengrin tend to stage the opera in a fractured post-apocalyptic universe, where only a breakdown of civilization can justify re-empowering male characters and medieval attributes. The director Yuval Sharon has said that he conceived his current Bayreuth Festival production—a kind of old school science fiction approach in which Elsa is physically bound by Lohengrin—in direct response to the 2016 election of Donald Trump. The Royal Opera’s current production, by David Alden, suggests a post-World War II disaster area in which fascism may come back.
In New York, Girard has his own post-apocalypse in mind. As the opera’s prelude plays, a projected full moon circles the earth against Star Trek-like CGI visions of outer space. As the crescendo resounds, a laser beam destroys the moon, leaving a suffering earth gazing into a changed environment. The use of a “space laser” was unfortunate given recent anti-Semitic rhetoric in American politics, but on stage its practical effect is to force the human population into a cave with a large aperture through which characters can enter or depart.
Set and costume designer Tim Yip apparently concluded that the only other lifeform that lives collectively in caves is bats, so he costumed the chorus in garish gowns that have body-length wings. At changes in mood or dramatic interventions in the music, they flap and flutter, revealing sudden color contrasts when turned. The villains are dressed in hellish red. The heroes appear in the predictable white. Elsa gets the expected elegant white dress with a reversible black undercoat, but Lohengrin incongruously appears in a button-down white dress shirt over slacks. His modern look alludes to the costume that Girard’s production of Wagner’s later opera Parsifal gave to its title character, who is Lohengrin’s father. But after a decade, the costume rather evokes an employee of a low-key Manhattan consulting firm enticed by a relaxed dress code to return to his post-pandemic office.Lohengrin, with its lush music and tragic exploration of trust, betrayal, and forbidden knowledge, certainly has imaginative gifts to offer contemporary audiences. Unfortunately, this staging—like other recent ones—falls prey to inexplicable stylization. The music still soars, but only to the cave ceiling, not to the skies.
