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Bachtrack, 16 Mai 2022 |
Von David Larkin |
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Wagner: Lohengrin, Melbourne, ab 14. Mai 2022 |
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Treasure in the rubble: Jonas Kaufman makes Australian stage debut
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It seems that not even Jonas Kaufmann likes the title character in
Lohengrin. In a publicity video for Opera Australia, the star tenor dubbed
him “the false symbol of a hero” and, aside from his voice, there was
nothing heroic about his portrayal of this mysterious stranger who arrives
in 13th-century Brabant. Director Olivier Py works against the sense of awe
which Wagner intended to greet the title character from his entrance, so
that instead of a knight in shining armour towed by a swan, we saw him
playing airplanes with a young boy. Re-situating the action to the ruins of
post-war Berlin add to disenchantment of this production. Has the Wedding
March ever before been sung by a chain gang of women passing buckets of
rubble down the line?
So far, so standard. The notion of a godlike
military leader who is (or ought to be) above question rightly grates with
contemporary sensibilities, and stagings which deliberately work against
Wagner’s heroics are legion. But re-situating operatic scenarios to the
period around World War 2 is a tired cliché. It can still be done
brilliantly (for instance, in Barrie Kosky’s 2017 Meistersinger), but it
seems to be Py’s automatic go-to, to judge by the fact that his version of
Halevy’s La Juive, seen earlier this year in Sydney, adopts the same
strategy. But while a story of persecuted 19th-century Jews overlays easily
and convincingly onto the Holocaust, here it seemed gratuitous.
In
the present case, Py's updating is further complicated with a thick, if
hardly coherent, layer of symbolism. Lines from the poem Todesfuge by
Holocaust survivor Paul Celan are daubed on one wall (in German, without any
context), while mysterious emblems and devices are shown on banners or
scrawled by characters onto the backcloth. Most strikingly, the duet between
Lohengrin and Elsa in Act 3 takes place on a multi-level museum display
case, in which various artefacts (a horse, a ship, a clock) are juxtaposed
with iconic names from German literature and arts (Goethe, Schiller, Carl
Maria von Weber).
Again, there are precedents for heavily symbolic or
imagistic productions of Wagner: the stagings of Parsifal by Hans-Jürgen
Syberberg or Stefan Herheim jump to mind. Even the gesture of assembling
images of German culture heroes has been done before; for instance, in the
frontcloth of Richard Jones’s 2017 Meistersinger for ENO. But while in these
cases, the purpose of the symbolism was usually clear, even if the details
required further study, here it was puzzling and distracting to the point of
upstaging the singers.
And it was a shame to have one’s attention
taken away from the singing and orchestral playing, which at times was truly
outstanding. The Act 1 Prelude had the requisite ethereal quality, and Tahu
Matheson conducted Orchestra Victoria with sureness of touch and sensitivity
to the needs of the singers. From the first sung notes, it was clear we had
an excellent herald in Warwick Fyfe, his stentorian delivery of
announcements so forceful that it was plausible Lohengrin might have heard
him in far-off Montsalvat.
Every story needs a good antagonist, and
here we had two. Simon Meadows’ focussed tone and clarity of pitch made his
turn as Telramund one of the evening’s big successes. The huge-voiced Elena
Gabouri played his partner in life-and-crimes, Ortrud, and the sheer thrill
of sound when she opened up on her top notes was enough to make me forgive
her over-ample vibrato elsewhere. Emily Magee’s Elsa was not quite at this
level, but she acquitted herself creditably in her duets with both
villainess and hero. Daniel Sumegi exuded nobility as King Heinrich, and
both male and female choruses, busier here than in most other Wagner operas,
were excellent.
But ultimately this production will be remembered for
Kaufmann. With the top tickets an eye-watering $799 each (more than twice
the price of premium seats at other OA productions), the pressure was on him
to deliver the goods. In the event, his operatic stage debut in Australia
was a triumph. Whether cutting through the textures with his burnished top
notes, or showing his sensitivity at the soft end of his dynamic range, this
was a five-star vocal performance from one of opera’s biggest stars today.
The magical thread of sound he produced near the start of his monologue “In
fernem Land” was the thrill of the evening. So often associated with
loudness and bombast, Wagner may in fact be most moving when most
restrained. Directors take note: perhaps this could be the starting point
for a truly innovative take on the composer?
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