The Bayreuth boss is not having much luck when she directs away from home. Here’s Javier Pérez Senz for Scherzo on her Lohengrin.
The premiere of the production of Lohengrin, directed by Katharina Wagner, the composer’s great-granddaughter and director of the Bayreuth Festival, has understandably aroused great excitement on the international opera circuit. This world premiere comes five years late, as the outbreak of COVID-19 forced the closure of the Liceu, effectively precluding the premiere of the new production.
With six performances running until March 30th and tickets nearly sold out, the new production of Lohengrin—Richard Wagner’s first work performed at the Liceu—is the star of the Liceu season. Katharina Wagner, who often raises eyebrows with her groundbreaking vision, premiered a first production at the Budapest Opera House in 2004, presenting Lohengrin as a successful politician from the Swan Party and Elsa as a journalist obsessed with uncovering his origins and hidden agenda….
During the prelude, set in a forest with a small lake, a robotic black swan—moving its wings and head—witnesses a sinister crime: Lohengrin murders Gottfried, and the essence of the knight who protected Elsa vanishes. The secret of his identity and origin takes on a sinister edge, with dark intentions, like the swan he mistreats and ultimately kills. A true knight of the Holy Grail transformed into a sort of serial killer, whom Ortrud and Telramund will try to unmask with Elsa’s help.
Wagner allows for very diverse political interpretations, but if the ideas don’t fit the score, everything falls apart. And the delirious third act of this Lohengrin takes the cake. The proliferation of magical apparitions and double characters complicates the outcome to the point of absurdity, and when the curtain falls, you no longer understand anything…
It’s one thing to try to turn the good guys in the script into bad guys, and the bad guys into good vigilantes, and quite another to actually achieve it. Katharina Wagner’s interpretation doesn’t hold up theatrically because the music and the words tell us exactly the opposite. Otherwise, both the direction of the actors and the setting—an effective set by Marc Löher, with the forest and the lake as reference points and three elevated cubicles as the bedrooms of the two couples at the center of the story—are nothing short of classic. There are poetic moments in Peter Younes’s lighting, but it’s still just another production, with nothing to justify such excitement, except for the surname of the controversial stage director, who was loudly booed when she took her bow, especially from the upper floors, along with her stage crew….
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