"If you look at beauty with your eyes, you have already given up on death." Beauty, look, death – with regard to "Tristan" by August von Platen, the reworking of Richard Wagner's "Lohengrin" at the Bayreuth Festival does not work because it is only theater, beauty without remorse. Of course, not pure beauty, but a disturbed, disturbed.
For a long time now such beauty can do. Protestant art Germany is not Catholic enough. Purgatory comes anyway. Why not enjoy a little aimlessly? Because we forgot it! Especially on the stage of the opera.
The aesthetic discourse eventually avoided any kind of opulent equipment here. The expensive, seemingly retrograde musical theater had to mortify itself on the stage, even if the singer's stars were not to be completely abolished as a singing actor. Meaning and form first, please without decoration! The sensuality of velvet and silk should not be. At most in Salzburg, but only with a guilty conscience. The pbadage into the architectural splendor of the operas, brightened up in this country after the Second World War, must at the same time be an intellectual pbadage of Canossa, as in the Bayreuth Festival Sauna.
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Ironically, a sturgeon rock festival sitting in the saddle. Katharina Wagner – behind the proscenium open minded and energetic spirit, also a little neurotic, to understand the contemporary beauty of a neo-romantic Schwanenritter fable of the spirit of the hidden object early modern.
As intentionally, the Wagner Festival slowly similar first three oriented. Whether in "Lohengrin" on the big stage in the naturally dominant traits of the star painters of Leipzig Rosa Loy and Neo Rauch, previously at the first premiere since 1882, "the marriage vanished" by Klaus Lang, and in "ring" for children – always works with painting, sets, sophisticated costumes and holograms
Political celebrities around Merkel in Bayreuth
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Chancellor Merkel nodded friendly, moderator Thomas Gottschalk received the loudest applause. At temperatures of over 30 degrees, the Wagner Festival started in Bayreuth. The leader of the FDP Lindner is presented with his new life partner.
Without political explanation of the world and abstruse inflection of libretti. Especially, the stories are prepared – like a new desire to see, marveling at the old theater stuff. The eternal fascination of illusion, which turns out generous, intelligent and ironic, and sometimes mysterious.
Last year, Stefan Herheim zealously played his "Parsifal" throughout the history of Germany and Bayreuth, but only thanks to him. drawn levels of meaning. Barrie Kosky, too, dared last summer, an act of "Meistersinger" long before the bad conscience was fed by the audience room of Nuremberg and Beckmesser as a Jewish caricature.
And now! The fun at the Punch and Judy show with rhinoceros sirens glittering between the satin waves and the caricature styrofoam bit of the dragon Fafner in the children's opera. Old and technically advanced in the "Hochzeitser", which has doubled a real pair of twin dancers in its mechanical motricity; to do it with cowbells direct it only on a sensitive electronic metronome New Music Wellnessfarmklangfolie that invites you to relax Read more
Finally, this subtle "Lohengrin" color orgy in pearly black, inspired by Delft tiles, blends into a contrasting technical orange, unpleasantly bright. In the end, there is an unpleasant superfluous green, which has no hope in Bayreuth's puppet box.
The colors of the summer opera. Loy smoke tones. Applied to a huge round horizon and two curtains covered with clouds. Beams of light pierce, the water goes beyond the shore, the reeds fluctuate. In between, there are radiators and insulators, electricity pylons, a substation and wires. Modernity in a romantic picture.
Where many things are mixed in styles and eras and where they still agree. Because it breaks and rubs, you constantly discover new details. As in the old masterpieces of Neo-Rauch, with their mysterious staff back, their strange accessories from the GDR and the Renaissance.
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Witches are always put on the stake, first Elsa, then Ortrud. Both are saved. In which future? Elsa, the blue-ragged-blue-rippled Ondulierte, in the end gives the dazzling, rebellious and laces the backpack. Ortrud, angry fairytale queen with wings, seems perplexed. And Gottfried, Brabant's green Erbenerbsenetwas, is it the Froschkönig or the Absinthfee? We do not know, it does not matter.
Because everything was so beautiful before. The protagonists are moths en route to the alternator. Combine dawn and the beginning of the modern era, as well as the Rembrandt Pbad, the bodysuits, the tracksuit, the nurse uniform and the house suit. It's acting stupid, or you're freezing in the corner. Van Dyck and Schilda are close
The director Yuval Sharon, we can not separate the staging quartet with the great lighting technician Reinhard Traub, integrates, becomes small and becomes fat. With subtle parodies and grotesque gestures. Otherwise, it can be different, more radical, more contemporary. Here he submits to pictorial vision and mine. He plays Tableau and breaks it back.
What our opera critic experienced with hard rockers
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Red carpet, dignified atmosphere – so it is used by the opera critic Manuel Brug. And he saw it again this year in Bayreuth. Unfortunately, we deduced it here – for use in Wacken …
Instead of fighting fighters, children fly with laser swords in the air. When Lohengrin arrives, a stealthy Swan bomber comes to the powerhouse, flickers and sparkles like in the "Rocky Horror Picture Show".
He comes – "Flyers, greet me the sun" – Piotr Beczala as a tenor savior in the Mechanic and trying to repair. Rarely did any of the Grail stories come down and away, either from this world. Elsa of Anja Harteros needs an act to swing freely and on the ground, later she remains reserved. In the nuptial chamber of the 1930s, she draws the Bible with her Lohengrin with ruffled wings. Or the Kinsey report?
Beauty Rises
Before that, she stood in a charming little tower, almost like on the dike of the Elbe near Dessau. And suddenly she has seductive Ortrud by the hand: Now everything is fine, but the grandiose, little bitch is slipping against each other.
He is eager to look, and with a small tear Christian Thielemann directs him. He also flips through the picture book "Lohengrin" in a sound, never stormy, tasteful way. It tells with notes, very well flavored, without any external effect. The orchestra brilliantly orchestrated and finely tinged follows in a fascinating way, just like the agile choirs.
Fly instead of rats on the ungreen blue Lohengrin mound. The production of Hans-Neuenfels, finally coveted from the calmly badyzed life of experimental animals, received a spicy-culinary follow-up. And in Bayreuth, beauty comes back.
