Lohengrin, Royal Opera, 24 April 2022

Royal Opera House

Henry the Fowler – Gábor Bretz
Lohengrin – Brandon Jovanovich
Elsa – Jennifer Davis
Friedrich von Telramund – Craig Colclough
Ortrud – Anna Smirnova
King’s Herald – Derek Welton
Brabantian Nobles (‘Four Followers of Telramund’) – Elgan Llŷr Thomas, Thando Mjandana, Matthew Durkan, Thomas D. Hopkinson
Pages (‘Four Women at the Wedding’) – Katy Batho, Deborah Peake-Jones, Renata Skarelyte, Louise Armit
Gottfried – Alfie Davis

David Alden (director)
Peter Relton (revival director)
Paul Steinberg (set designs)
Gideon Davey (costumes)
Adam Silverman (lighting)
Tal Rosner (video)
Maxine Braham (movement)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus director: William Spaulding)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Jakub Hrůša (conductor)

Considering the first night of David Alden’s (then) new production of Lohengrin in 2018, I found ‘a conceptual weakness at ... [its] heart. I suspect it can be remedied: if a shell, it is a fine shell. It will not, however, remedy itself.’ Rather to my surprise, I found this first revival, notably under a new director, Peter Relton, much stronger. It is not always easy to be sure what has actually changed, and what one is viewing differently for oneself. I shall not try; the earlier review remains for anyone who wishes to read it. In at least partial recantation, then, I am happy to say this made for a far more satisfying evening, dramatically and musically, than that experienced four years ago. Moreover, for Wagner to have returned so emphatically to one of the city’s main houses marked a step-change in London’s operatic recovery. However much one wished it to succeed, ENO’s autumn Walküre proved a bitter disappointment. If Lohengrin did not quite match the success of Covent Garden’s astonishing recent Peter Grimes, it stood closer to that than to November’s dispiriting evening at the Coliseum. 

An interwar fascist regime, on the verge at least of further war, is the setting (albeit with certain irritating Alden anachronisms of the sort that conceive postmodernism as style rather than philosophy). The aftermath of war, presumably the Great War, that haunts the first act in particular, every character seemingly damaged, mentally and often physically too. The charge of war and of preparations for another has obvious resonances to spring 2022; they could hardly fail to speak. If King Henry cowers like a question mark—in his throne, with crown, he seems an all-too-obvious rip off from Hans Neuenfels at Bayreuth—and the Herald wears his injuries anything but lightly, others struggle to stand too. Telramund and Elsa act and react in caricatured expressionist style. Even Lohengrin adopts a foetal position of comfort with Elsa, presumably seeking a mother figure lacking in the Grail brotherhood. (As Nietzsche did not say, let us not go there.) 

Only Ortrud, doubtless significantly, operates as normal. Perhaps it is her ‘magic’, or perhaps that magic is a metaphor for something broader; that is really up to us. A fine touch, at the close of the second act, is her apparition in a box, toasting (cursing) with champagne the unhappy couple. Hemmed in by Paul Steinberg’s sets, their crossings and their disjunctures a striking visualisation of catastrophe, the action is never likely to end happily. This, after all, is a tragedy, probably the purest in Wagner; a signal strength here is that we do not forget that. That is not, of course, to say that it always need be played exclusively as such, but there is an ultimate trajectory here less in evidence than last time, which certainly strengthens the drama in this context. 

So too did Jakub Hrůša’s conducting of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House—and the golden orchestral playing itself. Hrůša is not afraid to take his time, the first act feeling especially broad, though never merely slow. Careful attention to detail and to its place in the whole had Wagner’s score veritably glow with inner life. The old operatic forms on which much of Wagner’s conception is ultimately based were clear. In Mein Leben, Wagner recalls Schumann’s puzzlement at a Dresden reading of the poem; he ‘liked it, yet couldn’t figure out the musical form I had in mind for it, as he couldn’t find any passages suitable for traditional musical numbers. I then had some fun reading him different parts of my poem just as if they were in aria and cavatina form, so that in the end he smilingly conceded the point.’ Full performance can heighten that sense further—yet also more dialectically. For equally clear were the development of those forms and the forces energising that development: harmony (especially that of Ortrud), of course, but also an energised conception of Gluckian accompagnato arising from Wagner’s work as conductor, editor, and director. 

At any rate, not only did Hrůša show a fine Wagnerian’s ability to hear vast structures—acts, at least—in a single breath, but he inspired the finest playing from all sections of the orchestra throughout. Each act had its own way of unfolding; no one-size-fits-all approach, but rather a patient, powerful strategic ear and mind. Moreover, he often favoured—unfashionably—long, quasi-vocal orchestral lines: not so much Straussian as with kinship to the Wagner of a conductor such as Karajan. The vertical was not ignored, but experience suggested ultimately a more horizontal conception of Wagner’s—‘endless melody’, perhaps—and convincingly so. 

Brandon Jovanovich offered a finely judged portrayal of Lohengrin, as acute in verbal as musical terms, its clarion heroism shielding—and sometimes not—a vulnerable and decidedly ambiguous inner core. Craig Colclough’s Telramund, tragically in thrall to Anna Smirnova’s sensational Ortrud, presented similar ambiguities, those similarities engaging sympathy and our appreciation of dramatic complexity. If there was something winningly ‘old-school’ to Smirnova’s vocal delivery and sheer star presence, that was not at the cost of more ‘modern’ engagement with directorial concept, far from it. Jennifer Davis’s movingly human Elsa grew in stature throughout a committed performance. Gábor Bretz vividly captured the King’s instability. Derek Welton made for an uncommonly vivid Herald, hinting intriguingly at psychological complications from a wartime past. 

Last but far from least, William Spaulding’s Royal Opera Chorus sounded on as fine form as I can recall for some time. How welcome, moreover, it was to have a large chorus seemingly unrestricted—reality may have been different—by pandemic restrictions in what it could do and, above all, how it could sing. Ultimately, then, it was that crucial, yet often elusive, sense of a dramatic whole that served to distinguish revival from first incarnation.

Lohengrin, Deutsche Oper, 10 September 2017

Deutsche Oper, Berlin

Images: Marcus Lieberenz, from the 2012 premiere (different cast)

King Henry the Fowler – Marko Mimica

Lohengrin – Brandon Jovanovich

Elsa – Rachel Willis-Sǿrensen

Friedrich von Telramund – Thomas Johannes Mayer

Herald – Dong-Hwan Lee

Ortrud – Anna Smirnova

Brabantian Noblemen – Ya-Chung Huang, Andrew Dickinson, Byung Gil Kim, Dean Murphy

Pages – Saskia Meusel, Andrea Schwarzbach, Cordula Messer, Martina Metzler

Kasper Holten (director)

Steffen Aarfing (designs)

Jesper Kongshaug (lighting)

Claudia Gotta (revival director)

Chorus and Supplementary Chorus (chorus master: Jeremy Bines) of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin 

Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin

Donald Runnicles (conductor)

The last time I had seen Lohengrin at the Deutsche Oper it must have been one of the final performances of the old Götz Friedrich production. It had worn well; indeed, I wrote that ‘it would be better to retain Friedrich’s production for a while longer than to err by rushing into replacing it.’ On the basis of seeing this, already the twenty-fourth performance of Kasper Holten’s production since it was first staged in 2012, there was no rushing, although the pace of change was nevertheless swift. Holten’s staging at its best, especially in the second and third acts, has something pertinent and – to me, at least – new to say. It has made me think about a work I know reasonably well, which is surely precisely what we should hope and look for in new stagings of repertory works.

Holten’s production has three main strands, in which Steffen Aarfing’s designs and Jesper Kongshaug’s highly dramatic lighting, play, as one would hope, an integral part. The first seems to me less successful, although it is always difficult to know how much of that is a matter of changes made once a work is in repertoire and rehearsal time available. The wartime setting of the work is highlighted, but intermittently. I tend to think it should either be more present or less; as it is, the slight coming and going of what seems almost to be a Konzept proves a little distracting or even confusing. It is certainly to the fore in the First Act Prelude – conducted, by the way, with magnificent breadth and depth by Donald Runnicles: perhaps his very finest moment here – when we see a battlefield, strewn with corpses, which women then visit in grief, one emitting a very loud scream indeed at orchestral climax. (It will be echoed by Elsa when she sees Gottfried’s corpse at the close: a powerful moment indeed.) Holten says that he views the Prelude as a kind of requiem, which seems to me a misunderstanding of both music and mass, but anyway. Uniforms are to the fore throughout, suggesting soldiers from different eras, the light mixing of eras intentional, so as not to fix, although again I am not sure to what end precisely. War between Germany and Denmark over Schleswig-Holstein, appropriately enough, seems to have formed part of Holten’s inspiration, even though it came some time after Lohengrin’s genesis and first performance. There is certainly particular resonance in Berlin to the heavy royal-imperial imagery of Prussia-Germany, not least in the Tiergarten’s Siegessäule, albeit purely in the memorial sense, rather than as the queer emblem it has since become: perhaps a missed opportunity.

For there seems little doubting Lohengrin’s agenda. Whatever it is he is hiding, it is not in pursuit of anything other than what we should expect. He acts in unusually predatory fashion towards Elsa in the third act – quite chilling, in fact – and treats her with utter contempt thereafter. If he is not going to have her, then what is the point? Otherwise, he is, quite simply, a politician: a charismatic politician, yes, but one we can see through immediately and do. I do not think I have seen so unremittingly negative a portrayal of the ‘hero’ in this work, and it works very well indeed, confronting one with questions one might prefer never to have been asked, let alone answered. The angel wings – an angel, a memorial, a swan? – are taken off once in private. The crowd loves them, though, and he responds in kind, snake oil salesman, perhaps even thaumaturge, that he is. Does this disregard the text unduly? I do not think so, for what he says gains new meaning in such a context. Is he lying? Is Wagner? Or is he at least deluded? The legacy of the charismatic hero, not least in the wake of war, is after all a problematic one, to say the least, especially in Germany. (It is in that respect that I wished the wartime idea had been pressed further, since it comes across a little unclearly in the crucial final scene.) If only Wagner’s original ‘Führer’ had been retained, as it was, for instance, in Peter Konwitschny’s celebrated staging, which I saw in Leipzig. None of this, of course, would have been possible without a fine performance in the title role. We certainly had that, however, in the case of Brandon Jovanovich, whose engagement with complexities of work and production was unquestionably one of the finest I have seen and heard. This was no unearthly hero; this was preening, fatally attractive man and politician, whom we knew would lead us to rack and ruin, although we felt unable to stop him. Jovanovich’s range of vocal colours proved far greater than in many assumptions of the role: never, however, for its own sake, but always in the service of the drama.

Elsa’s self-realisation is the other main strand – or at least was for me. Perhaps it was a matter of execution, or my own reception, but I did not feel that her role, where she was coming from, and what quite was going on came across strongly enough in the first act. Yes, she is blindfolded, and will soon begin to see, but her progress through the crowd, intriguingly led by Ortrud, seems a little confused, and not in a good way. Thereafter, though, the idea, familiar through Holten’s Copenhagen Ring, of viewing the work from a heroine’s standpoint has much to recommend it, especially when the tragedy truly becomes hers. The crowd remains in Lohengrin’s thrall, but Elsa has discovered disillusionment, even the abyss. Rachel Willis-Sǿrensen’s performance in the first act proved somewhat disappointing, her shrillness of tone extending into sections of the second too. However, she picked herself up commendably, and ended up giving a splendidly engaged performance, meriting the character’s shift into the dramatic foreground.

There was much to enjoy in other performances too. Thomas Johannes Mayer was suffering from a heavy cold, but did a sterling job under the circumstances. Some, I suppose, might have found the vibrato of Anna Smirnova as Ortrud a little much. I did not, for there was always a centre to her singing. Moreover, if there were occasionally a little of the pantomime villainess to her stage action, I suspect that was part of the point; if not, it nevertheless grabbed the attention. She was certainly giving the performance her all, and that was really what mattered. Marko Mimica proved a subtle King Henry, the competing demands of role and production – not for the first time, we are moved to ask ‘how does he fit into all of this?’ –questioningly, fruitfully balanced. Choral singing, as one might expect at this house, was excellent, as was the playing of the Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, very much in its element throughout. Runnicles paced the work well, its ebb and flow apparent without being forced upon one’s attention. There was something attractively self-effacing, although far from anonymous, to conducting that was clearly born of deep knowledge of Wagner’s score.