Yesterday (March 22) at noon my husband Charles and I were in theatre 14 of the AMC Mission Valley 20 movie complex watching the Metropolitan Opera’s “Live in HD” presentation of Wagner’s opera Lohengrin. The live performance actually took place Saturday, March 18 but because it was a Wagner opera, and therefore longer than most other people’s, the performance started at noon Eastern time – which would have been 9 a.m. Pacific time. The Met offered two “encore presentations” yesterday at noon and 6:30 p.m., and we chose the one at noon. Lohengrin takes about 3 ½ hours of actual opera, though with the intermissions and general padding we didn’t leave the theatre until 5 p.m.. Lohengrin was presented in a new production by French director François Girard, which made me hesitate momentarily because I’d seen his horrible production of Wagner’s last opera, Parsifal (a prequel of sorts to Lohengrin since Lohengrin is Parsifal’s son), and I had had a schizoid reaction to it. I loved the singing – especially from Jonas Kaufmann, the Parsifal, who’s the best Wagner tenor currently alive and active (Lauritz Melchior remains the greatest Wagner tenor of all time) – but hated Girard’s bizarre modern-dress production, in which the knights of the Holy Grail all wore long-sleeved white dress shirts and black slacks. (Since that was also the job attire then required by Charles’s workplace, when I came home and told him about the production he said, “You mean the Knights of the Grail all work at Vons?”) The worst part of Girard’s Parsifal was the attempted seduction of Parsifal by the female lead, Kundry, in which the bed they were on ended up so bloodstained it looked like at least three babies had been born on it. (There was a humorous feature during the intermission between acts two and three showing the tough task the stagehands had to clean it up.)
Fortunately, Girtard’s Lohengrin spared us most of the trickery he’d inflicted in Parsifal; though Lohengrin himself showed up in the same uniform of white shirt and black slacks (which Girard explained in an intermission interview was deliberately designed to link this to his Parsifal), the rest of the cast looked vaguely (and properly) medieval. The conductor, Yannick Nézet-Séguin (the Met’s current musical director), was slower than usual but not oppressively so. (I’m really tired of Wagner conductors who equate slow with “spiritual” and ponderous with “profound”.) The Lohengrin, Piotr Beczala, was a bit of a surprise since I’d seen him about five years ago in a Met production of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor in which he sang Edgardo, the male lead. Obviously Beczala is not a Heldentenor, but Lohengrin is one Wagner opera that doesn’t need one; it can be sung by a lighter-voiced singer (Jussi Björling had it in his repertoire even though I don’t think he sang any other Wagner work – not even Walther in Die Meistersinger, which would also have been well within his capabilities) and he cHe also looked good, which was more than could be said for the other principals; Russian baritone Evgeny Nikitin as Telramund was dramatically strong but his body was the sort of hefty size that people who don’t like opera like to make fun of – and so were the two women. Tamara Wilson as Elsa was properly dreamy and vocally right for the part, but both she and the Ortrud, Christine Goerke (who joked during the intermission interview about switching from the Mother Superior in Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites – the leader of a convent being threatened with massacre during the French Revolution – to a pagan villainess) were, to put it politely, zaftig. Then again, given that many of the top female voices in pop music now come from “women of size,” including Adele, Lizzo and Megan Thee Stallion, maybe it’s time to put an end to all the jokes about opera singers, especially women, being large.
I’d seen Lohengrin live on stage once at the San Francisco Opera in 1978, in a production that was supposed to feature René Kollo (one of the better wanna-be Heldentenoren of the late 1970’s whom my mom, my brother and I had been wowed by in a Met broadcast of the role), but at the last minute he bowed out and was replaced by French tenor Guy Chauvet, who was hardly in the same league. But that was in the pre-titles age and so I didn’t get the minute-by-minute experience you get now either on video or "live" in a house where supertitles are being used. This time around I noticed in ways I hadn’t before how much Lohengrin is a story about identity, about what makes us who we are and how the names we call ourselves and each other shape our perceptions. This was a live issue for Wagner, who spent the first nne years or so of his life being called “Richard Geyer” after his stepfather, Ludwig Geyer, a boarder at the Wagner home who married Wagner’s mother six months after Herr Wagner died. Wagner’s biographers are still arguing over which of the two men in his mother’s life was his biological father, and it was a live issue in Wagner’s time for a number of reasons, not the least of which because “Geyer” sounded Jewish. “Geier” is also the German word for “vulture,” and a lot of anti-Semitic propaganda of the time denounced the Jews as vultures living off the achievements of Christian civilization and contributing nothing themselves. Itr was not until his teen years that “Richard Geyer” officially became “Richard Wagner,” and I remember doing the same thing myself: through much of my childhood I was called “Mark Folger,” after my stepfather, and it was only when I realized that the shadowy figure called “Daddy George” who came into and out of my life off and on was my biological father that I insisted on calling myself “Mark Conlan” and demanded that my mom have my school records changed accordingly.
The central premise of Lohengrin – that the heroine is saved from disgrace and possibly execution by a mysterious stranger who proposes marriage to her but only on condition that she never seek to know just who he is or where he’s from – had already been used by Wagner in his very first opera, Die Feen (“The Fairies”), though in that case the genders were reversed: the fairy queen Ada fell in love with and wanted to marry a mortal man, but he was not allowed to ask her who she was or where she was from. What’s more, Die Feen was based on a story by Italian writer Carlo Gozzi, and one of his other stories served as the basis of Puccni’s unfinished last opera, Turandot – also about a mystery prince who must conceal his name. During the opening scene between the bad guys, Telramund and Ortrud, at the start of act two, it occurred to me that the relationship between them was very much like that of Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth – a basically decent but weak man and his ambitious, psychopathic wife. Then I realized that Verdi had been writing the first (Florence, 1847) version of his opera Macbeth at about the same time Wagner was composing Lohengrin. There’s another Shakespeare parallel which I realized when Tamara Wilson was interviewed for one of the intermission features and mentioned that she had previously sung Desdemona in Verdi’s opera Otello – and it struck me that both Desemona and Elsa have their marriages ruined and their lives prematurely ended because they or their husbands fall for a villain’s lie.
Over and over again, Wagner was drawn to stories about men whose identities are uncertain; Siegmund, Siegfried, Tristan and Parsifal all grow up literally not knowing who they are, and for each of them it’s a major step in their character arcs when they find out. It’s certainly true that stories about heroes who arrive to do good deeds but conceal their true identities are nothing new – they’re as old as the Arthurian legends and as new as comic-book superheroes – and Lohengrin’s self-presentation in the aria “In fernem Land,” in which he answers the questions about who he is and where he comes from, makes him sound like a medieval version of James Bond: an agent sent out by a mysterious organization of great power to right the world’s wrongs and foil dastardly plots against humanity and justice. I used to admire Lohengrin more than I do now; it’s still very much an old-fashioned opera with recognizable and distinct arias, duets, ensembles and choruses, and after the psychological complexity of the male leads in Wagner’s immediately previous operas, The Flying Dutchman and Tannhäuser, Lohengrin seems like a step backwards into a world in which the heroes are very, very good, the villains are very, very bad, and it’s all too easy to tell which are which. This time around I raised it back up in my estimation of the Wagner canon.
It’s true that some of Girard’s staging ideas were a bit silly – though nowhere as bad as the horrors he inflicted on Parsifal a decade ago. He decided to set most of the opera in an underground grotto – this was apparently supposed to represent a post-apocalyptic future but it looked pretty medieval-basic to me – with Lohengrin descending into it on his entrance. One good thing Girard did was outfit the choruses with variable-colored costumes, dark green or red when their flaps were closed and pure white (or at least what was supposed to be pure white, since Charles complained that the “whites” got awfully yellow-looking as the performance progressed), so you could readily tell when the choristers were supposed to be good and when they were supposed to be evil. But I was disappointed in the lack of a swan to draw the boat on which Lohengrin arrived (there wasn’t a boat, either), and the big duel between Lohengrin and Telramund at the end of act one was rather stupidly staged with only one sword between them. I’d noted that the set and costume designer, Tim Yip, nad won an Academy Award 20 years ago for the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and while he probably had nothing to do with the film’s martial-arts sequences I briefly hoped that the Lohengrin-Telramund battle would be staged as a martial-arts duel. Then again, as Charles pointed out, given the physiques ot the singers involved, especially Nikitin’s, it’s hard to imagine that working. Given what he’d done with the bed in Act II of Parsifal, I was dreading what Girard and Yip were going to do with hte bed in the Bridal Chamber scene – but there was no bed; Lohengrin and Elsa just faced each other standing up as she asked the fatal question. Still, I found myself thinking about Lohengrin in new ways after seeing this presentation of it – and that’s what new productions of a classic are supposed to do.
