Lohengrin, the first Wagner opera to be produced in Italy, has long been a staple of the Italian stage. There have been more than 450 documented productions in the country going back to its national premiere in Bologna in 1871. Rome, however, has not seen the work for fifty years, with the last performances given in 1975. Judging by the photos, older productions respected Wagner’s intentions, but those days are long gone. Damiano Michieletto’s misbegotten new season-opening production of Lohengrin for the Rome Opera shows that untraditional approaches to Wagner have become passé, no longer novel or daring but instead common and predictable.
A medieval fairytale romance, Lohengrin tells the story of a knight sent from heaven who arrives in a boat drawn by a swan to save Elsa, a damsel in distress falsely accused of murdering her brother Gottfried, the heir to the throne of Brabant. Putting a swan on stage, as Wagner’s detailed stage directions demand, strikes some contemporary cognoscenti as ridiculous; Michieletto’s program notes almost apologize for the swan’s absence, pointing out that Italy had its first swanless Lohengrin as far back as 1948. The foyer of the Teatro Costanzi, renovated in the Art Deco style in the late 1920s, featured an old production’s mock-up of the very swan boat modern directors studiously avoid.
Demythologizing Wagner became common practice after World War II. More stylized, modernist productions were less lugubrious, and they relieved his operas of their martial spirit and aggressive connotations. Instead, they foregrounded the oeuvre’s psychological insights. Michieletto, working in that countertradition, usually explores libretti and source materials to cultivate highly original and engaging productions, but here his customary cleverness was lacking.
This production does convey, however faintly, the opera’s central moral of the virtue of self-restraint. Lohengrin must save Elsa in a trial by combat against her accuser, Telramund, a Brabantian count who is both the next male heir and married to Ortrud, whose pagan family had originally ruled the land. The rightful winner is to be chosen by God. Here, Michieletto stages the scene as a test of the opponents’ ability to withstand molten steel poured on them from a device above. Lohengrin endures the pain, while Telramund’s flesh bursts into flames. Barely escaping with his life, the villain spends the rest of the opera in castaway clothes leaning on a crutch. When he comes back for vengeance in Act II, Lohengrin snatches away the crutch and leaves his enemy to crawl away. Telramund’s second attempt to kill the knight, with a knife rather than a sword, leaves him with a fatal self-inflicted wound. All the while, egg-shaped objects in the battleship-gray color of the molten steel descend from above the proscenium, seeming to weigh down on the characters. An especially large one presses on Elsa who, filled with doubt by Ortrud, asks the forbidden question of her champion’s identity, ending their romance and sending him back into the mists. For reasons that eluded me, the consequences of Elsa’s act are visited upon the assembled populace of Brabant, who are all struck blind. Michieletto characterizes the egg as a symbol of Lohengrin’s mysterious origins, but the concept is too thin to add anything of real substance to the opera.
Paolo Fantin’s postmodern set is a vaguely Nordic wood-paneled background that opened up to allow furtive entrances and exits. Carla Teti’s costumes add little more. Gray chorus members mill about looking downtrodden. In flowing white garments, Elsa looks like a female sufferer in a Pre-Raphaelite painting. Lohengrin’s white linen gives him more the air of a lighthearted yachtsman about to sail the Mediterranean than a stoic hero who travels by swan. The only nod to tradition is a casket decorated with swan feathers, but yet again the meaning is unclear. Is Michieletto trying to tell us that Wagner is dead?
A high-quality musical performance can make up for defects of production, as was the case here for the most part. The Rome Opera’s music director Michele Mariotti led a sluggish overture, with the famous crescendo building at an intolerably slow rate. But he soon recovered a brisk pace, and his orchestra’s expert horns shone. Ciro Visco’s choruses carried their scenes. Dmitry Korchak lacks true heldentenor qualities but sang with a layered sweetness that captured the title part. The American soprano Jennifer Holloway, singing Elsa, could develop more fully as her career progresses. Sometimes there was a shallowness to the voice, even if overall it radiated an appealing warmth. The Icelandic baritone Tómas Tómasson, maintaining a certain gruffness throughout, got off to a robust, self-assured start, only to fade in the second act, thus matching Telramund’s pathetic decline. The real star was the splendid Russian mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Gubanova, who had a mellifluous tone that nevertheless captured Ortrud’s true evil. The baritone Andrei Bondarenko made a stentorian impression as the king’s herald.
