Lohengrin
Details
In Brief
Had Richard Wagner lived in the 20th century, he might have been one of the most brilliant filmmakers – one might think so based on his opera: Lohengrin, the mysterious knight and guardian of the Holy Grail, arrives in Antwerp disguised, in a boat drawn by a swan, to save the beautiful Elsa accused of murder. On the condition that she is never inquisitive about his identity, Lohengrin marries her. However, after their wedding, the defeated Ortrud’s manipulations fuel Elsa’s curiosity about her husband’s true identity – leading to its eventual revelation. As a result, Lohengrin returns to the temple of the Holy Grail…
Wagner’s cinematic world is not far from the OPERA’s new production of Lohengrin. In András Almási-Tóth’s staging, a setting emerges that begins in 19th-century romanticism and evokes futuristic, steampunk films, highlighting the irreconcilable contrasts between good and evil, dream and reality, and the fundamentally opposing world-views of Lohengrin and society – where emerging victorious, or even happy, is practically impossible.
Parental guidance
Events
Synopsis
Act I
The German king, Heinrich der Vogler, arrives in Brabant to summon the Brabantians to arms against the Hungarians while the duchy is plagued by another problem. On his deathbed, the old ruler entrusted his two children, Elsa and Gottfried, to Telramund, promising him Elsa’s hand in marriage. The girl, however, refused, and the count instead married Ortrud, daughter of the Frisian leader. Telramund accuses Elsa of having murdered her younger brother out of ambition, with the help of a secret lover. The king summons Elsa, but instead of defending herself, she recounts a dream of a knight in silver armour who will come from afar to fight for her innocence. She will give him her hand in marriage, and he will become the new ruler of Brabant.
The king decrees a trial by combat: the dispute will be settled by duel, and whoever is defeated will be deemed guilty. Yet no one steps forward to fight on Elsa’s behalf. She calls upon the knight from her dream, whereupon he appears, just as she described, clad in silver armour and accompanied by a swan. He pledges his loyalty to Elsa on one condition: she must never ask his name or origin. The mysterious knight defeats Telramund but spares his life.
Act II
While the Brabantians celebrate their victory late into the night, Telramund blames Ortrud for the loss of his honour, since she persuaded him to accuse Elsa before the king. Ortrud convinces her husband that the mysterious knight possesses magical powers that will vanish if Telramund wounds him, or if Elsa can be persuaded to ask his name and lineage. They swear revenge.
Ortrud approaches Elsa, who is preparing for bed, pretending to humble herself; she plants seeds of doubt in Elsa’s mind about her unknown fiancé: one day he will abandon her. For how can she trust someone whose very identity she does not know?
Dawn breaks. Telramund’s banishment is proclaimed, and Elsa’s immediate marriage to the mysterious knight is announced. The plan is for the knight to lead the Brabantine army into battle the next day.
As the bridal procession begins, Ortrud, and later Telramund, attempt to disrupt the wedding. Ortrud confronts Elsa publicly, demanding to know if she can even name her husband, Brabant’s new ruler. Telramund accuses his conqueror of deceit and sorcery. The knight rejects the accusations, declaring that he owes an answer only to Elsa. Doubt stirs within her, but she suppresses her curiosity. The king leads the young couple to the altar.
Act III
At last, Elsa and Lohengrin are alone on their wedding night. Elsa struggles to restrain herself but finally asks the forbidden question.
At that very moment, Telramund bursts into the chamber to wound the knight and break his spell. Lohengrin kills him with a single stroke of his sword, then sadly tells the heartbroken Elsa that the next day he will answer her question before the king and all the world.
At dawn, the men gather to march to war. The king is informed of Telramund’s death. The knight appears and recounts the night’s events: Elsa has broken her vow, so he must now reveal his identity and depart. He is a Knight of the Holy Grail, son of King Parsifal – his name is Lohengrin.
The swan reappears, and Lohengrin greets it sorrowfully, for he must return before his time. Turning to Elsa, he tells her that if she had remained steadfast for just one year, her brother would have returned purified by the Grail. Lohengrin leaves her his sword, horn, and ring, then departs.
Ortrud triumphantly cries out that the swan is in fact Elsa’s brother, whom she herself enchanted. In that moment, Gottfried appears in human form once more. He embraces his sister and takes up his rightful rule…
Opera guide
Introduction
“Lohengrin – Mr. R. Wagner made a musical play out of it. On their wedding night, a young couple quarrels because the newlywed bride insists on knowing whether her husband comes from a respectable Christian family. Offended, the husband doesn’t even wait for the train – he sails away with the nearest swan.” This is how Frigyes Karinthy summed up the plot of Wagner’s romantic opera in his That's How You Write! parody series, with a pardonable touch of blasphemy and liberating humour, approaching the work with affectionate irreverence. At the heart of the opera lies the prohibition against asking the hero’s name, a motif the composer himself explained in 1851 as follows: “Lohengrin was seeking a woman who would believe in him – who would not ask who he is or where his home lies, but would love him as he is, because of what she perceives in him. He sought a woman before whom he needed no explanation or justification, but who would love him unconditionally. It was therefore necessary for him to conceal the higher nature of his being, for only by keeping that exalted nature unrevealed, unexpressed, could he ensure that her admiration and wonder were not directed merely toward his superiority...”
In any case, Lohengrin is the last Wagnerian work in the serious and heroic mode that, when viewed in half-light and with a bit of squinting, still resembles other operas. True, its treatment of time is uncommonly expansive, though Meyerbeer, to be sure, was not one to economize on minutes either (a reference Wagner would no doubt appreciate). Otherwise, the intrigue, the scheming couple, the medieval ruler, and the presence of the miraculous and the mythical could remind us of other German Romantic operas, most notably Weber’s Euryanthe. The ever-caustic Eduard Hanslick pointed this out while disparaging Lohengrin: “The kinship between Lohengrin and Euryanthe strikes many listeners immediately, not least because of the striking resemblance between Ortrud and Telramund and Eglantine and Lysiart. Wagner’s pair of villains may be called a direct imitation of Weber’s – a caricatured imitation, if we consider the exaggeration of every expressive means, or a feeble imitation, if we consider the actual musical substance. Lohengrin’s German sovereign also bears a remarkable likeness to his French royal counterpart. [...] Still deeper and more decisive is the affinity between Wagner’s operatic style and Euryanthe – one might even say Lohengrin descends from Euryanthe.”
Yet Euryanthe, despite all well-meaning efforts, remains a historical curiosity, while Lohengrin is an indispensable cornerstone and moral exemplar of the operatic canon. It is also a privileged testing ground for director’s theatre, as the audience at the Erkel Theatre discovered with some consternation in 2004, when Katharina Wagner reimagined the work as a political drama of party congresses and regime change, not without a measure of inventiveness and judgment.
Ferenc László
The director’s concept
He did not expect ever to stage the story of the Swan Knight, admits András Almási-Tóth, artistic director of the Hungarian State Opera. As he sees it, the work is filled with problematic elements: “A figure appears who stands above all others, an Übermensch-like being entering the human world, yet that world profanes him, and thus, he must ultimately move on,” explains Almási-Tóth. “This can easily be interpreted as an expression of German superiority. Moreover, the opera presents a strongly patriarchal society, in which the woman exists only in a deeply subordinate position, she cannot even ask who her husband really is. These features make the characters rather unsympathetic,” he adds. In recent years, the international opera scene has often sought to overcome these difficulties by reinterpreting or even inverting the story. Almási-Tóth, however, believes the goal should be to stage the work in a way that allows it to retain its original power to reflect the emotional world conveyed by the music itself.
At the centre of his concept stands the eternal struggle between light and darkness. The true issue, he says, is which side Brabant’s new ruler, the young Gottfried, will ultimately choose – the light represented by Lohengrin, or the demonic forces led by Ortrud. “It’s a metaphysical problem, in essence, the fate of the world is at stake. After the Grail revelation, Lohengrin tells us that Gottfried’s soul could have been purified of Ortrud’s influence if Elsa had remained with him for a year. As it is, the people receive their future ruler unchanged, which doesn’t bode well.” The director also points out that Elsa is essentially a tool within the story. Her tragedy begins the moment she realizes this, for until then she had completely surrendered herself to the man. “She dreamed up a hero for herself, and then someone arrived who seemed to embody that ideal. But from that moment on, we usually see only what we long to see. Elsa loses her grip on reality and when she finally faces it, it destroys her.”
Almási-Tóth compares Elsa to Semele, the heroine from Greek mythology who could not survive the sight of her lover, Zeus, revealed in his full divine form. “But it’s not that the woman ruins everything by asking the forbidden question,” he stresses. “Ortrud appears as a kind of emancipated figure who awakens Elsa to the realization that one cannot live this way. Then Elsa asks herself: Who am I in this story? And to find out, she must first understand who he is. It’s a step toward self-knowledge, toward seeing her own circumstances clearly.”
At the same time, the director does not view the conflict between Lohengrin and Ortrud as a simple battle between good and evil, since both characters play far more complex roles in the opera. “I actually find Ortrud much more honest than Lohengrin, who must lie and conceal the truth in order to stay. She is a visceral being, and even though she embodies demonic forces, both sides can exist only together. For Wagner, a central question is how sensuality can be integrated into intellect. You can see this in the character of Kundry in Parsifal, which I have also directed, but the same issue appears in Venus in Tannhäuser.” This duality will also be reflected in the stage design: two adjoining rooms will appear, Lohengrin and Elsa’s in gold, Ortrud’s in black, with events unfolding in parallel. Two swans will also appear on stage, one black and one gold, their constant tension symbolizing the eternal opposition between their worlds.
Kata Kondor
(Article originally published in Opera magazine 58.)