Lohengrin (DVD): Richard Jones, Kent Nagano, Jonas Kaufmann, Anja Harteros

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

By Jerry Floyd, 12 September 2011

Performances by Anja Harteros (Elsa) and Jonas Kaufmann (Lohengrin) are reasons enough for obtaining this DVD, taped at Munich’s Bayerische Staatsoper in 2009. Both artists sing this tale of missed emotional connections with a lyric tenderness infrequently experienced nowadays in many Wagner productions.

Harteros’ creamy soprano and dramatic radiance recall exemplary Elsas of the past, e.g., Elisabeth Grümmer, Régine Crespin, and Pilar Lorengar.

Some opera singers don’t fare well in close-up shots, but Harteros’ expressive face radiantly limns Elsa’s joy when she is rescued by Lohengrin in the first act. And Harteros is just as dramatically and vocally compelling as her character is overcome by anxiety and finally remorse in the last two acts.

Harteros and Kaufmann perform the score’s quieter passages with refined mezza-voce technique, so appropriate for their other-worldly relationship.

Save for a slight gulp during his final “Seht da den Herzon von Brabant!/Zum Führer sei er euch ernannt!” Kaufmann sings effortlessly. Based on this performance and his 2010 Lohengrin at Bayreuth, the role of Lohengrin is better suited to Kaufmann’s voice than the Siegmunds he sang in the Metropolitan Opera’s Die Walküre last spring.

Physically the dark-haired Kaufmann and Harteros are also well matched, even if Kaufmann resembles a scruffy football player as he makes his entrance in a (Bavarian) blue tee shirt and athletic warm-up pants. (Elsa is first seen wearing construction worker coveralls.)

House Warming

Director Richard Jones’ amateurish blocking, including having cast members tromp back and forth across the stage, hardly seems like major-league directing.

The unit set, a Bavarian house seen in various stages of construction during the first two acts and the Prelude to Act 3, is more distracting than enlightening. Jones and designer Ultz use this construction as a metaphor for the cult-like spread of National Socialism ideology in 1930s Germany. But the action often seems like the goings-on in one of those house building TV reality shows popular in the UK and US.

After Elsa asks Lohengrin the forbidden question in Act 3 about his name, the protagonist douses a cradle and the bed with flammable liquid, lights a match and drops it. There is no Götterdämmerung-like conflagration but rather an anemic house fire that symbolizes Lohengrin’s despair in this “don’t’ ask, don’t tell” opera.

Fried at Last

Just in case anyone misses the Wagner/National Socialism connection, the front of the completed house is adorned by Villa Wahnfried’s slogan, "Hier wo mein Wähnen Frieden fand – Wahnfried – sei dieses Haus von mir benannt" (“Here where my delusions have found peace, let this place be named Wahnfried").

As often happens in régie stagings, there are other dramatic lapses. How can someone as self-assured as Elsa is depicted early in the opera so easily succumb to Ortrud’s and Telramund’s wiles?

But régie theatre if something isn’t dramatically coherent, the director ignores it and hopes audiences won’t notice.

Kewpie Doll Ortrud

As noted in Wagneropera.net’s review of Stefan Herheim’s Lohengrin staging in Berlin, Michaela Schuster reportedly has performed Ortrud successfully in other productions. But the mezzo-soprano doesn’t sound vocally at ease in this staging and “Entweihte Götter” was just another monologue rather than a spine-tingling dramatic highlight.

 A successful portrayal of Ortrud needs to tap into the character’s homicidal malevolence. Schuster, however, resembles a kewpie doll with brightly painted lips and a Chuckie scowl, rather than a sly, cunning manipulator. 

Among others in the cast, Wolfgang Koch, Telramund, and Evgeny Nikitin, the Herald, deliver strong performances. Christof Fischesser is not a particularly imposing König Heinrich.

With Kaufmann temporarily sidelined because of chest surgery, Nikitin will be the only principal in the DVD cast who appears in the Munich ensemble’s Lohengrin in Tokyo later this September.

The Bayerische Staatsoper orchestra has been performing Wagner’s operas for about 150 years. Under conductor Kent Nagano, however, too often the orchestra skates across the surface of the music, rather than delineating the work’s disturbing psychological undercurrents.

Lights Out

In Act 3 the chorus also dons blue tee shirts and thereby become members of Lohengrin’s cult. But of course Lohengrin abandons them to return to Monsalvat.

 As the opera’s final notes are heard, the group sits on benches and picks up conveniently placed guns.

Ortrud, too, picks up a gun and sits on a chair. Elsa and Gottfried stand with their backs to the audience, the stage is darkened, and apparently it’s also lights out for the despairing Brabantians who are contemplating a mass suicide.

The Bayerische Staatsoper may not soon mount another Wagner production with the romantic sweep of August Everding’s and Ernst Fuchs’ acclaimed 1978 Lohengrin. But if directors continue to insist on reinterpreting this opera, they need to do so with more dramatic conviction.

DVD Review

• Joe Banno (The Washington Post)

Performance Reviews

• Jens F. Laurson (Seen and Heard/2011)
• George Loomis (The New York Times/2009)
• Marc Brooks (Musical Criticism/2009)
• RML (I Hear Voices/2009)

Video Clips

• Bayerische Staatstoper Promotional Video
• Decca Music Group DVD Excerpt (“In fernem land”)

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