Lohengrin
Oliver Briscoe

Bayreuth had been cancelled, so I had been told about a year ago by someone to whom this mattered. One day it might to me too but, then, Lohengrin I was told would be a good place to start.
A year on, running through their hits to fill seats, the Royal Opera House revived David Alden’s Lohengrin (2018). A couple tickets had come to me rather last minute, rather good tickets, from a friend with a change of plans.

There were few people I knew who would really enjoy it. He was one. The others could not make it and widening the circle, I had to appreciate that four hours of German opera over a Saturday afternoon was not necessarily an attractive offer.
So feeling truant and pleased it was otherwise an overcast day and not a perfect early summer’s afternoon, I went alone. I had made plans for Daquise afterwards. If a day show was not as chic, it was at least reassuring to have an evening to spend.
Eddying through Covent Garden’s Saturday crowd, I was reassured too, finding as I neared the orchestra, I was amongst evening familiars, small men in designer suits with devastatingly made up taller women and old boys in sharp, long blazers with their wives. Settled into the prelude, all these afternoon thoughts were lost nebulously to the enchanting splendour of the house.

Lohengrin first came to Covent Garden in 1875, ‘in Italian’ as noted in Kobbé’s. This one opens firmly in Wagner’s noble German with the King’s call to arms. A crowd of workers, the chorus, taken straight from a Spartacist barricade is forced to the floor by rifles and greatcoats. Telramund in an astrakhan-collared scarlet coat, struts out as a grossly evil bourgeois, with him a loathsome Ortrud, a fairy-tale toad in a Merkel-like grey suit.

Having, out of character, violated Elsa’s maidenly dignity by locking her under the floorboards, Telramund has her dragged out to face a firing squad. Her champion arrives, we get no shining armour, no swan drawn boat from a golden chain. Instead, a flashing light trick supposed to be the God-send and a loose white linen suit for our knight. He parries the be-spatted Telramund’s sword-blows with the power of the Grail through his hands and the chorus watching the trial are given some suitably fascist-looking salutes, as they piously put their trust in the purity of God’s judgement and its righteous victory. As our hero and his bride rejoice their love, the first act closes, Telramund and Ortrud cast aside as if wronged.

As I sat for Act II, the man next to me disarmingly started to chat. He ascertains it is my first Wagner. I learn he is a lawyer, he has seen the Ring Cycle thrice, once at Bayreuth because his partner was friends with a Bavarian finance minister.
‘Are you enjoying it?’
I was stumped, having not given it thought.
‘Not really…’ he suggested.
I took a moment longer, looking for the words. ‘You do not really come to Wagner not expecting to enjoy it’ and he conceded agreeable as the opening notes took up.

The exiled scene unfolds with perfectly grotesque sexual plotting, forcefully putting across how Telramund has been seduced into so viciously accusing Elsa, to marry Ortrud. From these moments, the whole tale turns on the heredity of names, giving strength to Elsa’s doubt and Ortrud’s plot, as the last of her line. Nowhere too do we feel Wagner’s furious power and the promise of The Ring as in her famous ‘Entweihte Götter!’ a thrilling blood-pact swearing terrific revenge, answered by a flash and growl from the skies.

Under a totemic statue of a Partieschwan, Lohengrin then saunters in wearing an officer’s coat and jackboots to be married. The chorus is thrown into some nonsense staged violence, giving Telramund in his accusation the unconvincing role of resistant.

Act III startles as the spotlights fall on the stalls, cue a fluster of turned heads and then out into the aisle comes Elsa and her knight, in a wonderfully simple trick which must never fail to please, seeing the two up close, blissfully in love. We are delightfully back to Wagner, back to a bridal chamber and white linens with a backdrop from the Neuschwanstein Castle Grail cycle.

Much like our lovers, before we are too happily settled, Alden tears us back to his brown-shirt dystopia. Partieschwan banners in Nazi livery hang in crisp ranks, offensively perverting Lohengrin’s tragically exalted sacrifice into a fetish of German violence. Can we allow the German no good? No culture without shame? Lohengrin is no false God. He had not come to oppress the Brabantians. This is a chivalric Germany of blood feuds and Christian knights, pure of heart. However this twisted production questions the danger of worship and strikingly impresses the dark truth in Ortrud’s final trick, as the fulfilled vengeance of the old Gods not forgotten.

The house erupts, enraptured, I bask in its strength; you cannot neuter the übermensch. As we stand my neighbour asks ‘Did you like it?’ again my feeling could not answer such a small question ‘Very much so’ and soon outside the weather had cleared into a fine evening.

I later put my thoughts to my Wagnerian mentor:

That review sounds as though it was lifted from Pseud’s Corner in Private Eye! I agree that some of the production’s themes were dubious, but relative to some other modern productions this one was pretty restrained and inoffensive. There was one notable recent production of Lohengrin at Bayreuth where all the characters were depicted as rats, and part of some experiment in animal behaviour. A few knights dressed as German or Russian soldiers is fairly orthodox in comparison.

I think the key to evaluating the performance is the quality of the music. If the stage production is too absurd, then you can just close your eyes and listen. In this production the music was superb–great performances in all the main roles, and solid orchestration. What more could one ask for?

We may have to wait a bit for Bayreuth as I didn’t book any tickets this year, but I will try to get some next year. In the meantime, the ROH is staging Tannhäuser in Jan/Feb 2023, which is going to be worth seeing because the main female role (Elisabeth) will be played by Lise Davidsen, probably the most promising Wagnerian soprano in the world and destined (hopefully) to be the greatest of our generation. I will try to book for us.

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