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Hans
Neuenfels has had a long wait for a Bayreuth debut. The grand-pére terrible
of German Regietheater won notoriety in the early 1980s for his infamous
Frankfurt Aida in which the titular Ethiopian princess was portrayed as a
cleaning lady with a mop-and-bucket, provoking pandemonium in the
auditorium, outrage in the press and a string of offers of work from other
`we-want-a-scandal-too' German opera houses.
Thirty
years on and Neuenfels still polarizes opinion. After each act of his new
Bayreuth production of Lohengrin there was a certain amount of preparatory
booing and partisan cheering, but it was nothing to the storm unleashed by
Neuenfels's curtain appearance with his team, Reinhard von der Thannen (sets
and costumes), Franck Evin (lighting), Björn Verloh (video), Henry Arnold
(dramaturgy and assistant director), and Susanne Øgland (conceptual
collaborator!).
Neuenfels's particular brand of Regietheater is, of course, provocative, and
he must be used to the boos, but his shoulder-shrugging
'what-do-you-expect?' reaction to the barrackers was, at the very least, a
just response. No one, surely, goes to a Neuenfels production hoping to see
text-book fidelity to the work in hand. I had seen only one of his
productions before -a Rigoletto at the Deutsche Oper in which the jester
dresses up as a pig and keeps his black-skinned daughter on a fantasy desert
island `to make her feel at home'(!) -and found much of his Lohengrin
riveting, stimulating, and often ravishingly beautiful to behold.
In
this Lohengrin -commissioned by the late Wolfgang Wagner but presumably
encouraged by his daughter Katharina, a professed Neuenfels disciple/fan-it
is his chorus of rats that gets up the noses of the protestors. During the
second-act orchestral introduction, disrespectful members of the audience
made ratty scratching-noises on the floor, provoking unseemly sniggers. They
had a point: the rat costumes -all numbered and neatly hung up on designated
hooks that descended from the flies-did look funny. Neuenfels was drawing an
analogy between the political manipulation of the masses and laboratory
experimentation on rats. Von der Thannen's clinical white sets, with large
openings in the walls suggesting the holes in cartoon-mousetrap cheese, and
the cages from which the rat-chorus emerged, certainly hammered home the
point. How much this has to do specifically with Lohengrin may be
questionable, but it was certainly a novel take on Wagner's romantic drama.
Neuenfels, of course, seeks to subvert audiences' expectations, and in doing
so he offers up some fascinating ideas and striking stage pictures. Von der
Thannen's staging certainly didn't deserve a hostile response. Lohengrin's
swan, initially paraded in a coffin-like boat, descends from the flies at
the end of Act 1 like the hovering dove in Parsifal, but plucked as if
oven-ready for the Sunday roast. In Act 2, Ortrud straddles the phallic neck
and head of a ceramic swan ornament, and for their showdown in front of the
Minster they wear identical black-and-white feathered gowns, like Odette and
Odile in Swan Lake. At the denouement, the revelation of the lost Duke
Gottfried is a Macduff-like bloodied embryo emerging from a huge egg,
shedding his umbilical cord¬an image of science-fiction horror. The future
of the Brabantine `rats' looks far from rosy, indeed the Grail Knight's
intervention in their affairs has brought calamity.
Neuenfels takes nothing at face value, portraying the `good' (white) and
`evil' (black) couples as mirror images of one another: Christian Lohengrin
wins Elsa by white magic, while pagan Ortrud has employed the black arts to
gain the hand of the powerful regent of Brabant and would use them again to
overcome her opponent. In the final scene, Lohengrin and Elsa wear mourning
black, while Ortrud and Telramund appear in pristine white-she in a
swan-feather stole and paper crown, he on a hospital trolley swathed in a
shroud. Nothing in Wagner-even in his early `romantic operas'-is a simple
case of black and white.
Neuenfels and von der Thannen save their most arresting image for the
opening of Act 2, which looks like a scene from Dracula: an overturned
coach, a dead horse, Ortrud and Telramund lie helpless as a group of rats
raid the trunks of gold and cash they have been making off with. It looks
breathtaking and evokes the Grand Guignol atmosphere of Ortrud's Lady
Macbeth-like seduction of Telramund to perfection.
Lohengrin is no knight-in-shining-armour, either. As played by Jonas
Kaufmann, he is a tousle-haired rebel, who barges his way into von der
Thannen's `laboratory' during the prelude and treats Elsa roughly at their
first encounter, plucking out the St Sebastian
arrows-she is a martyr to Ortrud and Telramund's slanders-from her body to
her obvious discomfort. From the outset Neuenfels poses questions about who
Lohengrin actually is, and what his motives are, rather than just accepting
the misogynist Wagnerian notion that a woman should know her place and not
ask awkward questions. It's a valid idea.
Kaufmann's Lohengrin-his first appearance at Bayreuth and possibly
his only one (he will be replaced by Klaus Florian Vogt next year)-was of
course the other talking point. He, too, divides opinion in Germany where
the airy, flutey crooning of Vogt is mystifyingly regarded as the benchmark
for this role today. Kaufmann is his diametric opposite, a dark-toned tenor
with a heroic, burnished, Italianate ring, yet one capable of singing the
sweetest of pianissimos (his 'Mein lieber Schwan' was exquisite, a rare
vocal 'hold-your-breath' moment at Bayreuth in recent years). This was a
golden-age Lohengrin, and I doubt if Bayreuth has heard its like since
Sandor Konya in the 1950s and '60s.
Kaufmann's colleagues may be less remarkable singers, but Evelyn
Herlitzius's flame-haired, histrionically magnetic Ortrud is certainly the
best I have seen at Bayreuth. Her squally soprano contrasted well with
Annette Dasch's cool, glassy-toned but by no means submissive Elsa.
Hans-Joachim Ketelsen offered solid, experienced Stadttheater routine as
Telramund, but he was a late replacement for Lucio Gallo. Georg Zeppenfeld's
nobly-phrased Henry the Fowler-played as a fretful paranoiac-and Samuel
Youn's sinister, shock-headed, Svengali of a Herald completed the cast of
principals admirably. As always, the Bayreuth orchestra and chorus remain
incomparable in this music. They were rehearsed and conducted by the hugely
promising and temperamental Andris Nelsons, who has yet to find the right
pace and instrumental blend for the transcendental pages of the score (the
Act 1 Prelude lacked ethereal iridescence). He is as yet a too
impulsive, stop-go Wagnerian, but he doubtless has plenty of time to calm
down and learn to conceive Wagner's long acts as symphonic wholes in the
coming revivals. Both he and Herlitzius sustained a few isolated boos on the
first night-undeserved in both cases,
I thought.
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