Richard WAGNER (1813-1883)
Lohengrin (1850)
Klaus Florian Vogt (tenor) - Lohengrin; Annette Dasch (soprano) - Elsa; Jukka
Rasilainen (baritone) - Friedrich; Petra Lang (soprano) - Ortrud; Georg Zeppenfeld
(bass) - King Henry; Samuel Youn (baritone) - Herald; Stefan Heilbach, Willem
van der Heyden, Rainer Zaun and Christian Tschelbiew (tenors and basses) -
Brabantine nobles
Bayreuth Festival Chorus and Orchestra/Andris Nelsons
rec. Bayreuth Festpielhaus, 14 August 2011
OPUS ARTE OA1071D [2 DVDs: 209.00 + 0.26 bonus tracks]
Richard WAGNER (1813-1883)
Lohengrin (1850)
Plácido Domingo (tenor) - Lohengrin; Cheryl Studer (soprano) - Elsa;
Hartmut Welker (baritone) - Friedrich; Dunja Vezjovic (soprano) - Ortrud;
Robert Lloyd (bass) - King Henry; Georg Tichy (baritone) - Herald; Bojidar
Nikolov, Franz Kasemann, Claudio Otelli and Peter Köves (tenors and basses)
- Brabantine nobles
Vienna State Opera Chorus and Orchestra/Claudio Abbado
rec. Vienna State Opera, 1990
ARTHAUS MUSIK 100 957 [2 DVDs: 219.00]
In his work Music and Drama written in the aftermath of his exile from
Germany in 1849, Wagner laid down the basis of his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk.
In future music drama - including his own operas written before that time
- should fuse together the disparate elements of drama, music and staging
to produce a complete unity that would surpass the achievements possible by
any of these elements in isolation - by spoken drama, by orchestral music,
or by costume and design. To this end he constructed all his later works with
the greatest care to make sure that the various elements taken together should
provide an overwhelming impact. All productions of his works should be conceived
with this ideal in mind, but unfortunately the synthesis is very rarely achieved
- and it is not forthcoming in either of these DVD versions.
To take the later production first, Hans Neuenfels’s production for
Bayreuth originally given in 2010 had, like many modern productions, a ‘concept’
- a new vision of the work which would provide new insights into the meaning
of Lohengrin as a work. So far, so good. Neuenfels’ concept was
that all the characters in the drama were the subjects of an experiment -
by whom is not made clear, but presumably by God since he seems to have arranged
the whole basis of the plot. The chorus are laboratory rats, sometimes attempting
to break out into humanity and sometimes regressing to their animal nature.
Well, it’s an idea, and it could be made to work in the context of the
drama in isolation with a degree of special pleading in the reading of the
text; it would be an interesting insight if Lohengrin were a spoken
play in the theatre. The trouble is that it fights for much of the time against
the music itself. When Lohengrin picks up the crucifix at the end of Act Two
and brandishes it, the orchestra is ironically thundering out the motif
which is quite specifically associated with the ‘forbidden question’
of his identity. It is not a moment of triumph, as this production would have
it - it is a moment of sudden doubt in the middle of rejoicing. At the beginning
of the same Act, when the music of offstage revelry breaks in on the desolate
scene it should act as a moment of sudden contrast to the dejection of Telramund
and Ortrud - here it becomes a cue for the laboratory experimenters to pull
dustsheets off the singers, and any sense of contrast is lost. In the first
Act, the entry of Lohengrin is clearly earmarked by the music - and the score
- at the moment of climax in the chorus when Elsa lets out a sudden cry of
joy. Not here: the moment goes by with no reflection of the musical drama
in the staging, and it is only when all the music has died down that Lohengrin
comes into view, accompanied by a swan that may be a testimony to the taxidermist’s
art but looks nothing like any means of suitable transport.
There are some good ideas, but even these don’t necessarily hang
together. It is a nice thought to have Lohengrin and Elsa’s first meeting
take place with a degree of privacy, so that his ban on her asking after his
name and origins is not made in public and leads more naturally to his declaration
of love for her - but again this flies in the face of two of Lohengrin’s
own statements in Act Three, firstly when he tells Elsa that their wedding
night is the first time they have been alone together, and then later when
he reminds the assembled crowds that they all heard Elsa give her promise.
It is good to have Elsa and Ortrud interacting on stage from the very beginning
of their scene, which can be dangerously static if they are isolated respectively
on their balcony and on the square below - but this means that Elsa suddenly
has to leave the stage (officially to descend and let Ortrud in, but for no
apparent readily reason here) so that Ortrud left alone can invoke her pagan
gods to assist her vengeance. Here Elsa just sits down at the back of the
stage, with her back to the scene, and pretends not to listen to the outburst
that is going on behind her. The concept of King Henry as a doddering old
fool only just hovering on this side of dementia might work in the context
of a stage play - but it fights every inch against the bold and forthright
music he has to sing. And would any King, however deranged, with the slightest
sense of his own dignity let his Herald boss him around the way this one does?
The scene between Ortrud and Telramund works superbly, as it always should
if the director has any sense of drama at all; but I am not too sure about
the Gauleiter-like costumes they are wearing, or the frozen facial expression
which Ortrud adopts throughout, for all the world like Angela Merkel refusing
the Greeks a loan. Actually one understands that the German Chancellor attended
this Bayreuth production twice when it was new, so maybe she was taking hints.
There is also a real problem with the realisation of the Prelude. In
his later works Wagner was insistent on the idea that the prelude to any individual
Act should prepare the audience mentally for the drama that is to be revealed
when the curtain rises; and he carefully inserted directions for that event,
which are all too frequently disregarded by modern producers. But what we
are given here simply fights against Wagner’s music. We know what Wagner
intended to portray in the prelude to Lohengrin, because he has told
us - a vision of the Holy Grail descending to earth, and finally being taken
back into heaven. Following on his idea of the characters in the drama as
laboratory rats, Neuenfels here presents us with an animated film of rats
fighting over a crown - which looks horribly like an imitation of the cartoon
of Watership Down - and then with a scene of Lohengrin trying to fight
his way out of the experimental cage. At the moment when the Holy Grail is
revealed on earth in Wagner’s music, Lohengrin is seen to fail and sink
down in despair - exactly the opposite of what the music is telling us at
the same moment. One does not need to follow Wagner’s scenario slavishly,
but to substitute a staging that deliberately contradicts every emotional
fibre of the music does neither the producer’s conception or Wagner’s
heavenly string writing any favours at all.
The Third Act Prelude, music of rejoicing which commemorates the wedding
of Lohengrin and Elsa, is given an equally gratuitous gloss which goes in
every way against the spirit of the music. Here the cartoon rats hunt down
and eat a dog, and this same sequence is shown again as a backdrop to the
King’s address to his troops at the beginning of the final scene - where
it might possibly have more relevance, but the same image cannot possibly
be applied to both situations. At the very end Lohengrin perversely enough
does not leave Elsa, which makes nonsense of his protracted farewells
- although not so protracted, since a cut of 100 bars is made here. Wagner
himself insisted on cutting the second section of Lohengrin’s Narration
because he said he held up the movement towards the conclusion. I think he
was wrong, as the music is fine and the text helps to explain Lohengrin’s
otherwise mysterious appearance in Brabant at the precise moment he is needed.
That said, this additional excision is wanton barbarism of which Bayreuth
should definitely be ashamed. Apparently the cut was made by Sawallisch in
1962 - presumably with Wieland Wagner’s agreement - but it remains disgraceful.
Possibly the producer, and Wieland Wagner before him, objected to the militaristic
tone of the words, but the lengthy introduction to the final scene - which
is equally military in mood - is retained, although the stage is shrouded
at this point in near-darkness with none of the historical exegesis which
Wagner specifies. At the very end the presentation of Gottfried as a homunculus
hatched from the swan’s egg is not only incredibly disgusting as he
pulls his umbilical cord - in an egg? - apart, but is grotesquely ugly and
totally unbelievable as a revelation of the new Duke of Brabant.
What this all comes down to is an unwillingness to let Wagner the composer
have his due, as well as Wagner the dramatist; and the disparity is fatal.
The fact that practically all modern productions of Wagner suffer from exactly
the same problem does not make the failure to grasp the ideal of the synthesis
of the arts any the less lamentable. Such productions divorcing music from
drama were indeed inaugurated at Bayreuth after the Second World War by Wagner’s
grandsons, taking as their watchword Wagner’s own recommendations to
always look for something new. Wieland Wagner in particular trimmed back on
the realistic productions, shaving scenery and drama to their bare essentials
and allowing Wagner the composer to have his due at the expense of Wagner
the dramatist. It is this sort of influence that is apparent in the Vienna
production on the second of these DVDs.
Wagner’s preludes do present a problem in terms of video presentation,
because a home audience cannot or will not accept the idea of simply looking
at a blank curtain for some five minutes; it is frequently resolved, as it
is here, by video directors by giving us a view of the conductor and orchestra,
but this does not serve to create the mood that Wagner desires. One of the
best solutions seems to be that adopted by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle in his Tristan,
where in the prelude we are given evocative and symbolic seascapes which both
reflect the drama to come and allow the viewer to enter into the sound-world
without visual distractions. We are also given a view of Abbado and his orchestra
not only during the specified scene change halfway through Act Three, but
also during an unauthorised scene change at dawn in Act Two.
The scenery in Act One in Vienna is almost totally non-existent; although
the costumes are realistically tenth century and not very attractive, the
characters seem to exist in a historical vacuum. Just before Lohengrin’s
entry the grey featureless background acquires a projection of a stylised
swan, and then as he arrives we are confronted with a metallic swan construction;
as soon as this leaves the grey background fades to black and so remains.
In the Second Act we are given a side shot of the minster entrance and the
Kemenate where Elsa lodges - with its balcony - stretches across the back
of the stage; during the inauthentic scene-change the Kemenate swings backwards
through a ninety degree angle. The sole purpose of this appears to be to allow
the procession to the minster to take longer to achieve; but the speed at
which this procession moves could cause even a tortoise to accuse it of lethargy.
Indeed throughout this production all movement on stage is glacially slow,
and for much of the time the singers simply stand in one spot to deliver their
lines. At the end of Act Two Ortrud does indeed threaten Elsa with a glance
of menace at the point the Ban motif is heard, but Elsa has to unconvincingly
pause and actually turn around to look at her for this to be possible. Otherwise
the dramatic cues in the music are given in a slovenly manner; Lohengrin appears
two bars after the climax of the music announcing his arrival, and
Elsa comes onto the balcony a couple of bars after the change in the
timbre of the music has announced that fact. The stage direction is credited
to Wolfgang Weber, but there is little evidence of his involvement at any
point.
The scenery is no more substantial in the Third Act. At the very beginning
the Bridal Chorus takes place in a colonnaded avenue under a starlit sky,
but as soon as the chorus have withdrawn the scene descends once again into
stygian gloom in which no vestige can be discerned of a bridal chamber. Incidentally,
both here and at Bayreuth the chorus are onstage from the very beginning,
which not only contradicts Wagner’s specific instructions but ruins
the intended contrast between the initial statement of the theme by the chorus
offstage, and its subsequent repetition once the chorus have entered.
At the end of the scene we are again returned to the orchestra pit while Abbado
conducts his way vigorously through not only the interlude between scenes
but through the whole of the opening section of the following scene for which
Wagner has given detailed staging instructions. There seems to be no reason
for this, as the scene now unveiled hardly differs from that which went before
except that the darkness has now given way to a louring grey. At the end the
metallic swan reappears. One is amazed to see that two names are credited
with the design of the scenery in this production; to paraphrase Rudolf Bing,
any self-respecting opera house could have got it this minimal with one. At
the end we are subjected not only to the same objectionable cut as at Bayreuth,
but this excision is extended from 100 to 168 bars; the result of this is
not only to rob us of an extensive section of music but also to rob Elsa of
any chance to show repentance, and Ortrud has more to say about the departure
of her husband than she does. The singers are thrown back almost entirely
on their own devices, which are often very good; but there is no evidence
of a directorial hand holding the action together.
The singing now falls to be considered. At Bayreuth Klaus Florian Vogt is
an excellent swan knight, and his voice when he enters has exactly the right
ethereal quality that one desires with not the slightest hint of strain or
edge that is sometimes evident when Wagnerian heldentenors try to sing
softly. Later on one does miss some of the sheer heft that some of the lines
demand. “You will never triumph here”, he tells Ortrud; but there
is no sense of command here, merely an almost apologetic observation. On the
other hand Vogt floats the narration with great beauty, and rises to the final
peroration with good sense of drama. This same narration is the weakest point
in Plácido Domingo’s performance, slightly too fast - he was
slower in his CD recording with the normally volatile Solti - and not quite
distanced enough at the start. The cut referred to before means that we move
directly from the narration into the farewell, which makes for an extremely
extended final scene for him at the end of a long evening. Not that he shows
any signs of tiredness, and his performance as a whole has all the warmth
and command that Vogt lacks. Some may object to his clearly unidiomatic German,
but in a cast that also includes an American Elsa, a Czech Ortrud, a British
King and a Hungarian Herald it does not stand out for that reason.
Regarding the Elsas, the Bayreuth and Vienna performances are more evenly
matched. Cheryl Studer, caught in Vienna in her prime before her all-too-brief
career collapsed, is not as sheerly beautiful to look at as the younger Annette
Dasch in Bayreuth, but she sings with perfect control and beguiling tone throughout,
and her top notes are cleanly and confidently taken. Dasch is nearly her match
- the top notes not quite so thrilling - and clearly has a glittering career
in front of her if she continues in this vein. It is amazing to learn that
this was her first excursion into Wagnerian territory. Robert Lloyd as the
King is, as always, a solidly strong singer but Zeppenfeld in Bayreuth is
excellent as well and his firm declamation makes nonsense of the befuddled
characterisation he is asked to assume.
As the villainous couple both Harmut Welker and Jukka Rasilainen have the
fire that the Weberian outburst at the beginning of the Second Act requires.
They also possess good solid top registers which encompass both the high G
in that outburst and the sustained high F sharps in the duet at the end of
the same scene. In the part of his wife, Dunja Vezjovic sounds distressed
on her highest notes, but otherwise gives a nicely nuanced performance that
discovers plenty of variety in a role that can degenerate into sheer squalliness.
That is a danger that Petra Lang, despite more solid high As, does not avoid;
she is a monochrome character and her lower notes do not have the strength
to penetrate the orchestra without forcing. It is not a pleasant sound. Both
Heralds are good, but Samuel Youn is clearer in both diction and sound than
Georg Tichy.
The chorus at Bayreuth, despite being hampered by their rodent headgear -
they become much clearer when they take their rat-heads off in the final scene
- are more firmly disciplined than their somewhat worn-sounding Vienna counterparts.
Both however produce plenty of good solid sound when, as frequently, it is
demanded. The Bayreuth orchestra are nicely disciplined under their young
Latvian conductor, and the recorded sound is better than that given to the
Vienna players under Abbado. That said, Abbado clearly loves this score and
his reading has a greater passion which Andris Nelsons strives in vain to
achieve.
Taken however as a representation of Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk these
productions effectively sink themselves without a trace. The unfortunate fact
is that there doesn’t appear to be a Lohengrin in the catalogues
which even approaches the idea of a conception which marries music and drama
in a seamless and unified whole in the manner which Wagner expects. There
are productions by Nicholas Lehnhoff and Richard Jones which impose alternative
directorial conceits. Judging from the excerpts I have seen Lehnhoff’s
rather less damaging than Jones’s schoolroom production. The only one
which seems to strive in any way to mirror the luminous beauty which shines
through the score is an earlier Bayreuth production by Werner Herzog set in
a desolate snowscape. That must at present be regarded as the best video version
of Lohengrin available. A Metropolitan Opera production is effectively
torpedoed - on the basis of the YouTube excerpts I have seen - by the performances
of Peter Hoffman and Eva Marton, both for different reasons totally uncharismatic.
Another version available, again from Bayreuth, is by Götz Friedrich,
highly regarded in its day but again afflicted with some indifferent singing.
Would somebody at Covent Garden consider whether we might have a recording
of the 2009 revival of Elijah Moshinsky’s production? This was well
sung and conducted and at least made a serious attempt to engage with the
meaning of the work as a whole.
Paul Corfield Godfrey
see also reviews of the Arthaus
(Abbado) and Opus
Arte (Nelsons) release by Jim Pritchard
POSTSCRIPT
Since writing the above review I have had the opportunity to see Nicholas
Lehnhoff’s production (referred to above) in its entirety. His staging,
updated to the twentieth century with Lohengrin looking like a yuppie merchant
banker in his silver suit, is not always wholly true to Wagner’s precise
directions. That said, he always realises the importance of the relationship
between the music and the action, none of the essential points are missed,
and he gets real dramatic performances from his principals. The singing itself
varies from the very good - Waltraud Meier excellent as Ortrud and Hans-Peter
König powerful as the King - to the less satisfactory, with both Solveig
Kringelborn as Elsa and a younger Klaus Florian Vogt as Lohengrin seriously
underpowered in places. What however totally rules this out of court as a
version of Lohengrin on DVD is the wholesale cutting which Lehnhoff
and Kent Nagano inflict upon the score. This extends to not only the full-length
excision in the final scene employed in Vienna, but also fifty bars of chorus
as the men greet the dawn in Act Two and even more extraordinarily the whole
of the central section and repeat in the Wedding Chorus. Wagner was particularly
proud of his writing for the chorus in Lohengrin, and these slashing cuts
demolish one whole segment of his scheme. What a shame.
Taken as a representation of Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk these productions
sink themselves without a trace.