Lohengrin, Bavarian State Opera review — a meteor heads for Wagnerland

In a postapocalyptic society, Lohengrin is imagined into being by a needy populace. Kornél Mundruczó’s new production for the Bavarian State Opera does away with most of the opera’s traditional trappings. Richard Wagner’s world of knights and kings, in which a mysterious stranger appears in a boat drawn by a swan to save a damsel in distress, is stripped back to the barest of essentials. There is no swan, and the entire cast wears skinny jeans and unflattering sweaters in shades of cream and white.

Even the most fundamental of constellations — Lohengrin and his bride Elsa, good; Ortrud and her knight Telramund, bad — is sidestepped. Most productions battle with the impossibility of Lohengrin’s demands. Why may Elsa not ask her bridegroom’s name? Who and where is the child Gottfried? What is Lohengrin’s brotherhood of Holy Grail knights? In what sort of society does all of this take place? Mundruczó does not seem interested.

Monika Pormale’s sets are a series of claustrophobic spaces that are inside and outside at the same time — there are walls, but trees grow within. In the final act, a giant meteorite falls in slow motion from above, ignored by most. Mundruczó’s populace moves in the trance-like state of a cult, neither emancipated nor individual — only Ortrud, the sceptic, and Elsa, the traumatised, break free from the group.

At times, Mundruczó, director of films such as White God and Pieces of a Woman, seems to be borrowing from Ari Aster’s 2019 Scandi horror Midsommar, in which a remote community cheerfully enacts a series of brutal ritual murders; this crowd is ready to stone any number of people to death.

Lohengrin and Telramund are handed protective glasses and giant sparklers for what must go down as one of the silliest sword-fights in operatic history; Elsa slashes her wrists with a rock. In equal measures refreshing and exasperating, Mundruczó’s production strips away traditional ballast without finding any true coherence.

That is left to conductor François-Xavier Roth and the excellent orchestra. His is a lucid, lyrical Lohengrin, glass-clear, emphatic without ever lapsing into bombast. The orchestra, playing forcefully from a raised pit, is on top form.

Lohengrin remains Klaus Florian Vogt’s party piece, his plangent tenor slicing well above the full weight of the orchestra, his upper register unfolding effortlessly, like a boy soprano leading a Christmas parade. Johanni van Oostrum matches his solidity with a marvellously youthful Elsa. She is a stage animal, every fibre vibrant; though her character, in Mundruczó’s imagination, is intensely neurotic, her vocal lines remain innocent and nuanced. Johan Reuter’s Telramund is darkly passionate, Anja Kampe’s Ortrud intense and persuasive.

Given Hitler’s troubling affection for the opera, Lohengrin must always be reimagined for today’s Germany. This is a bold attempt to do just that, and it works musically, if not scenically.

★★★☆☆

To December 21, staatsoper.de