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BAYREUTH.
Director Yuval Sharon dedicates his Lohengrin production to the Bayreuth Festival debate. The result is a boring matching Lego box.
By Wolfram Goertz, 27.07.2018
The bloody times in bad relations are illustrated in the bloody wives Lohengrin and Elsa von Brabant. The mysterious prohibition of Lohengrin's questions rested on her, she was never supposed to know her name, an absurd requirement that made her even more curious on the wedding night. The results? End of ground, end of the marriage.
Earlier, at the time of the conservatives, all the Wagnerians cried out: Why did the naive Elsa want to probe this secret if she now had a hero of a noble chivalrous race? The condescending image of women behind this imperative – never to doubt, only to believe – was adapted to Wagner himself, the artist who dissolves the world; he did not like it when a woman contradicted him. Nowadays, Elsa's right of inquiry as an act of female self-determination is expressly baderted. Encouragement from all sides: Jag him from the field, the tenor knight, jaded!
These aspects also play a role in Bayreuth's new staging of Wagner's work. According to the score, it is a "romantic opera", but the romance today is the snow or the Sahara of yesterday. A 21st century Elsa's address to a marriage counselor or a best friend when they come with fundamental and insoluble doubts about the husband. Or she decides alone.
Director Yuval Sharon dedicates his staging of the MeToo debate; For him, Elsa is a standard bearer of self-determination, contradiction and the claim of interbadual respect. For Elsa, the director believes, it's better that she pulls the ripcord early. Already at their first contact we know: These two are not going to have fun. Elsa looks naughty all the time and goes at a distance. The wedding night in the hotel room, the two read each other from the Bible. The intensity only manifests itself when Lohengrin shows his true face and begins to bind his young wife. Finally, there is the stove in Elsa.
Let's face it: Despite such updates, Sharon's staging is a box of boring relics, in which sublime characters are pushed onto the stage like stones until they are stolen. they reach their standing position, sitting or lying down. On the other hand, Sharon would have quietly meant that he was to be only a friendly entertainer, as the culmination of the production is the scenography of the famous artist Neo Rauch and his wife Rosa Loy .
However, we search in vain for an imaginative backdrop, the two have only painted a huge screen background with all sorts of celestial phenomena on the round horizon. Apparently they heard Bach's "Pbadion of Matthew" at home in the studio: they are the thunderbolt, the thunder has disappeared in the clouds. The result is a very museographic arrangement, which counteracts Sharon / Rauch / Loy with an element of the modern era. There is an abandoned substation in the middle of the stage, and the people around it look like a) masons, b) painted by Vermeer, or c) escaped from a Harry Potter movie. Many of them wear moth wings, look silly, and when they get closer to light, electricity, or the godfrey miss, which now looks like a green Karl Marx phosphorescent, they fall dead.
There is also a quote from Magritte 1: 1 when the sky is sunny and the light is on below. Sometimes, however, the light is just plain, and nothing specific can be seen except that Elsa walks back with boring thoughts from left to right or back and forth.
Yes, that's what it looks like, if there was to be something for everyone in the room: a pipe full of lazy symbolic magic, confronted with a few gadgets and surrealism . In terms of staging, this production is expensive. We would use the energy of these circuits for one wish: Scotty, beam me away from here!
So all hope rests on the singers – and on Christian Thielemann, the best dog on the podium of the conductor. He loves Lohengrin with a stick, like an impressive savior in need, when everyone fails. However, Thielemann is very successful in liquefying the score (which we can not say of the staging), the music does not remain static for a second. And the azure firmament of high ropes is simply miraculous. In terms of craftsmanship, however, this weighs heavily because coordination between the orchestra and the choir sometimes seems disrupted.
All that is blood should prosper in this carefully watered humus. With her sincere and fragile soprano (this is not a contradiction!) Anja Harteros sinks as Elsa in the celestial voice bed, in which, however, Piotr Beczala as Lohengrin can spread very comfortably. The Polish tenor recently replaced Roberto Alagna, while he dominates the Italian field, which is more of an advantage than a handicap for the Lohengrin.
This tenor must be a Belkantist, not a Schlagetot, and Beczala also presents the "Grail Story" as a poetic hymn to which the hero himself is intoxicated. Before, he had some pale spots, but the third act was superb. In addition, Waltraud Meier sang as Ortrud rather pale and strident and Tomasz Konieczny as Telramund rather strong and undifferentiated.
The moody mood of the audience was surprisingly unanimous. Yes, there was something for everyone. Wagner of the discounter.
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