Comic book shallow Lohengrin, Bayreuth

photo : Bayreuther Festspiele : E Narwath

 When Piotr Beczała jumped in for Lohengrin at Bayreuth, I breathed a sigh of relief. If Roberto Alagna couldn't be bothered to learn the part for the highest profile Wagner mecca in the world, he should stick to other things. Though there were a few moments when his voice sounded pushed - hardly surprising since he jumped in at short notice - Beczała is a natural Lohengrin, with the right purity and ping.  He's at least thought about who Lohengrin might be, which ought to be the starting point of any production.  Why is Lohengrin so touchy about revealing his identity ? If he believes in love, should't he at least acknowledge Elsa's need to know who she might be sleeping with  "If" might be the operative word. Lohengrin carries cosmic baggage.  Beczała created a "human" Lohengrin, ethereal and sublime, but also a man with conflicts.  Wagner poses questions : it's up to us to figure out possible answers.  Alas, this production, directed by Yuval Sharon, goes out of its way to avoid depth of thought or understanding.

Is Wagner without ideas Wagner at all  ?  Sharon gives us comic book shallowness, cutesy visuals that resolutely defy anything more than surface engagement.  Lohengrin isn't a fairy tale. Though parts of the plot are fantasy, the drama unfolds against a background of tension and metaphysical disintegration. King Heinrich comes to Brabant to mobilize Christendom against the barbarians of the East, and Ortrud represents a tradition even older than Christianity.  Replace that with faux-medieval costumes, origami collars and cartoon psychology and reduce the opera to picture book emptiness.   Blue light does not in itself tell the story, even if it fulfils the modern diktat that opera should above all be pretty to look at in isolated stills. How can  Lohengrin be merely "beautiful" when horrific cosmic forces  are being unleashed all round  ? 

Christian Thielemann's conducting is divine, but even with a good cast,  he's not a magician. We now live in times so bombarded by TV-realism and audio-only listening that we may have lost the art of visual literacy.  Visual literacy is like poetry.  Just as music is more than the markings on page, you have to engage with the oblique and ambiguous, one way or another. there's never any single answer.  Refusing to think in the first place is no answer at all.   As in poetry, meaning reveals itself slowly, and evolves.  Modern audiences, used to judging things from single images, like photos, are conditioned to think like Beckmesser, marking their slates as fast as they can, without really paying attention.  Sachs was different.

So we see Elsa (Anja Harteros) with moth wings on her back ?   Of course she's vulnerable, but she's a lot more than anonymous cipher.  What's that coil behind her ? If Sharon is suggesting Elsa's a bug drawn to bright light, it's an image that doesn't go very far and isn't developed.  So we see swords embedded in the ground. Vaguely phallic, but there's more to Lohengrin than sex.  On the 3Sat broadcast, we could see Telramund (Tomacz Konieczny) and Ortrud (Waltraud Meier), lit up against the darkness, which might either have been a comment on their situatiion or a chance to get away from the cutesy staging.  Ortrud is an unsympathetic part, especially in contrast to Elsa. But there;s a lot more to it, which Meier in her prime might have made more of.  Here, she's fine to listen to, but she doesn't inhabit the part as she she would have done in the past, and isn't helped by the non-directing. Harteros is a fine Elsa, but why the grey wig. Images should hint at something, not merely exist as decoration. Why is a guy painting in oils before the entry of the Herald ?   Another possible image that goes nowhere.  Even more telling, Georg Zeppenfeld's King Heinrich, so well characterized in the recent Royal Opera House Lohengrin (please read more here), seemed sidelined in Bayreuth.  Butterfly wings appear on Ortrud and also on Lohengrin, for no apparent purpose.  the insect imagery seemed a direct steal from the Neuenfel's rats Lohengrin, which was much better thought through. (Please read more here)

Wonderful orchestra and chorus for the wedding scene, but I couldn't understand the brightly coloured pillars.  You don't need to get everything at once, and good stagings can take a while to digest, but this baffled me.  The coils again   The rope might signify the ties that bind, but as we know, this isn't a marriage that will last, and the violence against women in this opera doesn't come just from Lohengrin, but more so from the people of Brabant.  Thank goodness again for Beczała singing sublimely, clear, ringing tones warmed with sincerity and tenderness. Magnificent orchestral, playing for the scenee of the banks of the Scheldt, but comic book staging again, complete with cardboard cut-outs.  Later Lohengrin's sword becomes a thunderbolt and Lohengrin shows Elsa a box with a light, by way of explainging who he is.  The feeble electric coil/moth imagery again !  It's cute, but delimiting. Then little brother Gottfried wanders in, a green Lego figure against Elsa's orange and the blue all round.  This Lohengrin should be popular with audiences who prize fairy tale prettiness but arguably that isn't what Lohengrin, or Wagner, for that matter, might be about. Thank goodness, all the more,  for Piotr Beczała, Thielemann and the rest of the cast for saving the show.

Rossini La Gazza Ladra Pesaro

Rossini La gazza ladra (The Thieving Magpie), the grand opening opera at this year's Pesaro Festival  now available on BBC Radio 3.  Donato Renzetti conducts the Orchestra and Chorus of the Teatro Communale di Bologna. Fans of Nino Machaidze will be thrilled - she sings Ninetta, the heroine, unjustly accused of theft but brave enough to withstand villains and face death.  Machaidze's voice is "moist" in the best sense of the word, naturally fluid and and refreshing,. She negotiates the phrasing and decoration with elegant grace. The rest of the cast is good too - Alex Esposito  sings Fernando, her crooked deserter father. Listen out, too, for the combinations of male voices. Lovely, tight ensembles. (cast details on the link).This is also worth listening to because the speaking guest is Francesco Izzo,who knows what he is talking about ! and he's a good communicator. Here is a link to Izzo's book Laughter between Two Revolutions - Opera buffa in Italy 1831-1848. 

Damiano Michielleto has directed Rossini  at Pesaro several times - La  Cenerentola, La scala di seta,  Sigismondo, and this revival of La gazza ladra, first seen in 2007. He has also directed productuons at La Scala, Theater an der Wien and Salzburg, mostly Italian repertoire. Chances are, he knows his métier,better than the London press who savaged his  Guillaume Tell at ROH because he dared to respect Rossini's own stage instructions about the humiliation of women in war. What were they expecting, Walt Disney?  Please read my piece Audience back Gesler, not Tell   What's wrong with audiences who are more upset by two seconds of tit but not the idea of a sadist regime which forces a man to shoot at his own son?

That scandal distorted any real analysis of the opera,and of the deeper ideas in the production.  One critic, known for his own nastiness, screamed against the gala new production of Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci, which the Royal Opera House is presenting at Christmas. If he doesn't want to go, I'll take his ticket thank you, even though I've already purchased one, the high cost offset by fairly cheap Chabrier L'Etoile and Haas Morgen un Abends  Intrigued by what Michielleto might do with Cav/Pag, I did the unthinkable. I actually watched and listened to as much as I could  All performances are someone else's point of view. In normal life, we communicate by listening to people whether we agree or not.

La gazza ladra opens with a gorgeous, lively overture. Sure, we could watch the orchestra, but some would complain about that, too. In Michielleto's staging, we see an adolescent playing with silvery tubes. Is he/she putting together a kind of puzzle ? The plot is so convoluted that you can understand how an innocent might wonder at the proceedings. Later the silver tubes become a backdrop which adapts to whatever action is going on.  Do the silver tubes suggest the stolen cutlery (which, we discover at the end has been present all along). The tubes turn over and become tunnels, perhaps even a cathedral looming high? Why should visual images only have to represent one thing? Remember the story of the blind men and the elephant. One feels the tail, the other the trunk. But neither "get" the elephant.  

Each of the two acts is monumental, and in the second, the stage is dominated by a walkway above which the chorus parade in judgement. Given the importance of their music, not at all a bad idea. I'm less sure about the rain and water, but maybe that's the presence of nature, in a drama otherwise tied up with "indoor" ideas of possessiveness and material values. The adolescent watches, as a magpie might, bemused. The contrast is telling. Magpies like shiny things but they aren't avaricious. Now maybe we can understand why Michieletto uses young people, like Jemmy in Guillaume Tell to bring out a fresh perspective and sense of imagination. Without imagination, what is art ? 

So I'm glad I'm going to the Royal Opera House Cav/Pag double bill. Consider what those operas mean and why they get done at Christmas when the idea of "peace and goodwill" might be relevant. 

On Thursday 8th October, BBC Radio 3 is broadcasting Rossini La gazetta live from Pesaro. It's a satire on newspapers. Hahaha!

Great Führer of the sausage people

All you really need to get into The ROH Rossini La donna del lago is that a) it is a work of art based on a work of fiction that was consciously created to revise history and b) that Rossini was Italian. Why else is the guy writing Italianate bel canto trills if he's writing "about" the reality of Scotland? What do composers know about opera!

.All works of art are works of the imagination. Even history is a form of performance art because it can be reshaped through interpretation. And so to the Haggis, which appears in the John Fulljames staging. You don't need to know about the Celtic Society seen dining in the opera to get what the image means. All you need to know is what a haggis basically is, which isn't exactly rocket science. And if you don't know, you can find out.

Haggises are simple cheap food,made from offal and stored for times when fresh meat and veg were scarce. They weren't even Scottish. But they "became" symbols of Scotland when Robert Burns wrote a poem about them and the Celtic Club turned them into a cult. From poor folks' nosh to posh toffs' parties. Nowadays  haggises are siupposed to be served with semi-religious ritual on Burns Night, and stabbed in solemn fashion with a knife. Maybe it's a re-enactment of some Jungian memory of hunting real beasts in wild woodlands. Or it's a total send-up! See how easy it is to create culture and history? Anyone can do it if they try. There's no such thing as "fixed" history. Or performance.

Now for .the Great Führer of the sausage people.  A friend mailed me today to say:
"On Burns Night the Scots recite Burns's lines on the haggis when they stab the beast. Thus:

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o' the puddin-race

At a Burns Supper in Germany Burns's Lowland Scots lines had been translated into German. They were than translated back into English, thus:

A blessing on your honest, ruddy countenance,

Great Führer of the sausage people

 
So you don't need to know much to get an opera. But you do need to take on board the fact that you don't know everything. We all have different levels of general knowledge but the skill lies in a) using your brain and much more important b) realizing that other peoiple might just have something to say.
 
photo : courtesy Kim Traynor