Thoughts on Lohengrin

 

Judit Kutasi as Ortrud

Act 2, Lohengrin

Photo: Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera

Since the SFO Lohengrin opened, I've been thinking a fair amount about the opera and some of the details in it; also, having the odd second thought about my review. I should have praised Simon O'Neill more than I did; he sang tirelessly and musically in a solid and Wagnerian-sized voice. I realize that I have internalized an ideal Lohengrin and he's not it.

You will understand this when I mention that my previous three Lohengrins were:

• Ben Heppner, who had a great voice and was an excellent physical actor.
• Brandon Jovanovich, who has a beautiful voice, is tall and handsome, and has a natural and confident masculinity. Honestly, this makes him just the kind of guy I would want to turn up to defend me if I had been falsely accused of murdering my brother.
• Klaus Florian Vogt, who is handsome in a completely different way from Jovanovich and who has a voice of unearthly beauty, of a type you rarely, if ever, find singing Wagner successfully. If you have not seen the video of the Neuenfels Lohengin from Bayreuth, I can't recommend it highly enough. It played better in the house than on video (friends found the video a little silly; on stage, it was weirdly beautiful) but whatever. It's an amazing production and accurately represents Vogt's Lohengrin.

The Alden production that SFO staged muted a couple of points that are in the libretto. One is that there are both Saxons and Brabantians in the crowd when the curtain goes up on Act 1. We are in the 10th century, when Heinrich der Vogler (Henry the Fowler) was Duke of Saxony; he's in Brabant to recruit an army to stand up to the Hungarians. (It's always the Hungarians coming after you.) 

A staging could reasonably distingush between the Saxons and the men of Brabant, in the opening and throughout. The King's men and the locals might just behave somewhat differently through the action of the opera.

Another point that comes out primarily in the text is that Ortrud's family, alone among those in the opera, is pagan. Her lineage is noted by Telramund when he's claiming that Elsa murdered her brother Gottfried: "Ortrud, scion of Radbod, Prince of Frisia." Radbod was King of Frisia in the late 8th and early 9th centuries. Wikipedia tells us that a predecessor of his brought Christianity to Frisia, but Radbod tried to extirpate the religion.

The entire opera has as a hidden theme the people of the old gods versus the Christians, which amounts to Ortrud versus everyone else. A production could very reasonably dress her completely differently from the rest of the nobles, and also give her a different bearing or manner from everyone else's. She has hardly anything to sing in Act 1, so it's an opportunity to do something interesting with her physically. Traditionally, the character mostly skulks around the stage. But she's an extremely powerful witch: she can change a child into a swan! That's a very real power in opposition to Lohengrin's power as a representative of the Grail. And yet, in the Alden production, she's reduced to being an anonymous briefcase-carrying bureaucrat, dressed like everyone else.

Previously: SF Opera's Lohengrin