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At the very end, a green man sways inside the night blue, up to the last facial fold. Hilarity and indignation in the audience of the Bayreuth Festival. What should this directorial theater of rest do in a production otherwise without spectacle? A performance that gives singers and conductor Christian Thielemann every chance to excel and sing without a hitch.
Above all, Piotr Beczala as hero of the title. Lohengrin is the ambassador of an all-powerful aid organization that uses magical powers to equip its emissaries. Such a singer must be a beaming man. Piotr Beczala perfectly represents this guy. His voice is full of nostalgia, hot in the sound. He never exhausts melodies. He is never sobbed, but he is always always soul and feeling.
When he rushes to the rescue of Elsa, innocently accused and already burned at the stake of Bayreuth, he falls in love with her at first sight. His offer of help then sounds like blackmail: I will help you if you marry me. Elsa (Anja Harteros) says yes.
Then, without thinking too much, she accepts the request of Lohengrin's second man never to ask who he is. Now, this questioning has always aroused the exegetes. It is also a classic subject for philosophy, gender studies, Wagnerians, feminists. But not suitable for the stage. How could he be staged in his abstract intangibility?
Disaster spreads
Bayreuth purveyors Neo Rauch & Rosa Loy and their manager Yuval Sharon did not even try. They prefer to let the music flow, and Christian Thielemann ensures that the envelope of the story (concrete content can not reproduce the music) becomes clear. While gradually the evil spreads to this beginning as a life-saving opera and in the end no happy ending with the wedding is, but the divorce.
In the first act, the choir stands around a substation. The blue that dominates the evening has already been heard by Nietzsche of the narcotic prelude, where a graceful cup, the Grail, floats from the sky. The blue, which the world-famous painter Neo Rauch has always prescribed for the evening, is also a staggering one. But it reaches deeper: it's the darkness of the story, maternally caring, warm and seductive like Wagner's music. People do not want to leave. Already not at all at the awkward substation. It promises a better life, but at the same time immerses life in the unbelievably dazzling light of reason. And it scares medieval choristers with dark decorations.
If the light then the witch decent. The one with Elsa is wrong, but in the end his opponent Ortrud has to believe it. Both are rebels against the men's world, and that is perhaps why their great duo succeeds particularly well. Anja Harteros and Waltraud Meier are two idiosyncratic singers who use their vocal deficits to express themselves. Because they know exactly how Wagner thinks, structures and gets ready for climaxes, they can turn this sneaky and devious duo into a big conspiracy scene between two women against the male world. And Christian Thielemann helps with this plot.
Elsa serves the wife
Thielemann is still a magician of sound. He can also lead, sing big bows, make martial crack and hunt folklore. Above all, he can deploy the sound, cushion it, comb it. In this, he has always improved. And so this "Lohengrin" often floats like an impressionistic color orgy, but never obscures the tragic and deadly course of history.
In the third act, then more and more orange. Lohengrin saw his sadistic passions on Elsa. And she goes from frightened fear to a self-determined woman dressed in orange. It is she who deposits her husband.
In the end, her brother returns, which she allegedly murdered. The brother is green man, bearer of hope in the world of uniform gray. For this reason, Elsa, as prescribed by Wagner, does not sink in despair, but it is hostile and misogynistic armies.
Ortrud stops in the background. These two women will belong to the future.
(Tages-Anzeiger)
created: 26.07.2018, 19:56
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