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Sunday Times, 19 July 2009 |
Hugh Canning |
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Bavarian State Opera [part of an article]
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Richard Jones's production of Wagner's
Lohengrin in Munich [while British festival heralded best value summer opera
event] |
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Booing by German audiences is an occupational hazard for opera régisseurs at
their opening-night curtain calls. It is rarer, however, for the protests to
continue at later performances in the run. I attended the second night of
Richard Jones’s new production of Wagner’s Lohengrin at Munich’s Bavarian
State Opera and the booers were still in full cry. Some of the hostility was
undoubtedly directed at Kent Nagano, the BSO’s music director, whose
conducting often seemed tentative, with an instrumental blend that failed to
capture the mystical intensity of Wagner’s “grail” music.
Jones’s Lohengrin is characteristic of his penchant for cutting Wagner down
to size, bringing an everyday, even banal, dimension to the work of
Germany’s great operatic monstre sacré. The curtain rises on a bare stage,
at the centre of which, Elsa von Brabant, wearing dungarees, with her back
to the audience, is designing a house on an architect’s easel. For the rest
of the opera, Lohengrin and a group of workers help to build the house,
which is completed in time for the Act III wedding scene.
Jones superimposes the autobiographical hinterland of Lohengrin onto
Wagner’s “romantic opera”, which was written at a time of personal distress.
Wagner was unhappily married to Minna Planer and a homeless exile from
Germany after his revolutionary activities in the Dresden uprising of 1849.
Whether one needs to see such footnotes on stage is certainly debatable, but
Jones follows through his concept unerringly. Elsa, like Minna, turns out
not to be a self-sacrificing woman unquestioningly subservient to her lord
and master, and so Lohengrin torches her house, their bed, along with a cot
for future progeny. The concept takes on a life of its own, generating its
own — rather than Wagner’s — scenario.
German audiences are well acquainted with directors’ alternative plots, so I
can only assume that it was the regimented, fascist or GDR-communist
treatment of the chorus that provoked their wrath. Lohengrin’s German Reich
tub-thumping, and the craving for a leader to help Germany out of a national
crisis, provides rich pickings for those who wish to see premonitions of
Hitler’s Nazism in Wagner’s works.
The British director is an enigma, no doubt unwilling to reveal all the
secrets of his productions, but even if this Lohengrin was sometimes
baffling, sometimes irritating, it was never dull or uninteresting. He
gets outstanding histrionic performances from a cast of youngish,
German-speaking principals with substantial voices. Jonas Kaufmann brings a
burnished-golden, Italianate ring to Lohengrin’s Grail Narration and, at the
end of a long evening, he sang Mein lieber Schwan with breathtaking
inwardness. Anja Harteros’s radiant Elsa, a sultry brunette rather than
the usual vapid blonde, marked another important debut in this rising
soprano’s burgeoning career, while Wolfgang Koch’s vehement Telramund,
Michaela Schuster’s dramatic mezzo Ortrud and Christof Fischesser’s noble
King Henry are all welcome additions to the roster of international
Wagnerians. |
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