Lohengrin (Opera)

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    A Tenor’s Secrets to ‘Lohengrin’: Golf and a Blunt Spouse

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    Piotr Beczala, known as a charismatic singer of Italian operas, is challenging notions of what a Wagner voice should sound like.Piotr Beczala, tan from a recent trip to Mexico and hungry for a roast beef sandwich, walked offstage after the first act of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” at the Metropolitan Opera on Tuesday night and bounded for his dressing room.It was intermission, and Beczala, the tenor in the title role, was preparing for one of the evening’s biggest challenges: maintaining his voice and energy during his character’s 90-minute break between the first and second acts.“You have to keep the attitude; you have to keep the tension,” he said. “You have to do something, or else you will lose it all.”Standing by a piano in his dressing room, he sang bits from other operas, including Puccini’s “Turandot,” which he will perform in Zurich this summer. He practiced passages from “Lohengrin,” working through some of its lowest notes. In between, he took time to clear his mind, playing golf on his iPad (a course in St. Andrews, Scotland) and showing off photos of the dinner he had cooked a few hours earlier (Parmesan-crusted chicken with a side of Russian salad).During a 90-minute break between Beczala’s appearances in the opera’s first and second acts, he passes the time by practicing and playing golf on an iPad.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesOn Saturday, “Lohengrin” will be broadcast to movie theaters around the world as part of the Met’s Live in HD series. Inside Beczala’s dressing room on Tuesday, a makeup artist expressed concern that his tan would give him a reddish glow onscreen. Beczala replied that he planned to watch a recording of Tuesday’s performance with the former opera singer Katarzyna Bak-Beczala, his wife, to get feedback.“Routine is deadly,” he said as he flipped through the “Lohengrin” score. “Each performance has to feel completely new.”Beczala, 56, a charismatic singer from Poland with a boyish personality, has long been known for the Italian repertory, making his name in roles like Rodolfo in “La Bohème” and Edgardo in “Lucia di Lammermoor.”But in recent years, he has worked to establish himself as a skilled Wagnerian, too, starting with Lohengrin, an otherworldly knight who comes to the rescue of a virtuous duchess in medieval Brabant. With a lyrical voice trained in bel canto style, he is challenging notions of what a Wagner voice should sound like.François Girard, who directs the Met’s production, said that Beczala brought fresh energy to the role.“I’ve seen singers in their dressing rooms after Wagner performances and you want to call the ambulance,” he said. “Piotr is fresh like a rose, and you feel he’s ready for a double.”His Wagner performances have won accolades, so much so that his calendar is now packed with “Lohengrin” engagements. After his 10-show run at the Met, which concludes in early April, he will sing the role a dozen more times this year in Vienna and Paris.There is already talk of bringing him back to the Met for a Wagnerian feat: performing “Parsifal,” the composer’s last opera, alongside “Lohengrin” (Girard has staged both works at the Met, treating his production of “Lohengrin” as a sequel to his “Parsifal”).Beczala has mixed feelings, intrigued by the challenge of Wagner but also nervous about losing touch with favorites like “Il Trovatore” and “Aida.”Beczala’s performance in “Lohengrin” has been praised, including in The New York Times for its “uncanny serenity and dignity.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I’m still fighting against the idea of singing more Wagner because it’s dangerous,” he said. “I worry I will sing only Wagner. And I want to sing other music as well. Balance is very important.”Born in Czechowice-Dziedzice, Poland, about 70 miles west of Krakow, Beczala did not receive musical training as a child; he sang only in church. His father worked in the fabric industry, and his mother was a tailor. When he was a teenager, however, a teacher suggested that he take voice lessons.While attending a music academy in Vienna, he worked shifts as a construction worker, digging holes and tearing down walls. One day, while he was laying floors at a discothèque, he saw a man singing on the street for money. Sensing an opportunity, he positioned himself on a corner near the Vienna State Opera and belted staples like “La donna è mobile,” from Verdi’s “Rigoletto.”“I drank a beer, cleaned the dust from my throat and started singing,” he said. He used his earnings to buy standing-room tickets at the opera.He met his wife while singing in a chorus. She later gave up her career to focus on promoting and coaching him. She attends most of his performances, sitting in a variety of seats and taking detailed notes.“I not only help Piotr from the musical side, but also provide psychological support,” she said in a 2020 interview with a Polish news outlet. “Artists are very sensitive people. I know that because I’m an artist, too.”Earlier in his career, Beczala performed as a company member at the Zurich Opera, and won acclaim for performances as Alfredo in “La Traviata” and Tamino in “The Magic Flute.” His international career quickly took off, and in 2006, he made his Met debut as the Duke of Mantua in “Rigoletto.”The idea of trying Wagner came in 2012, when the conductor Christian Thielemann suggested he consider singing “Lohengrin.” They met the following year at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany, where Thielemann was conducting, to see how Beczala sounded from the stage. Beczala then debuted the role in 2016, alongside the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko and under Thielemann’s baton at the Semperoper Dresden, where he is the chief conductor.The relationship between Beczala and Netrebko, once his friend and frequent collaborator, has become strained since Russia invaded Ukraine last year. Netrebko was originally set to star alongside Beczala in the Met’s “Lohengrin.” But she withdrew from the production and, since the war began, has been canceled at the Met and faced other professional setbacks because of her association with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.Beczala, an early critic of the war who has canceled his Russian engagements, said he had not spoken with Netrebko since the invasion. He said that she did not do enough to oppose it and distance herself from Putin. “I like Anna really as an artist and a colleague,” he said, “but she made mistakes.”In the future, Beczala could take on the feat of performing Lohengrin alongside another Wagner hero, Parsifal.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesBeczala has been in New York since December, when he opened a new production of Umberto Giordano’s “Fedora,” singing the role of the murderous Count Loris. He was a week late to rehearsals for “Lohengrin” because of “Fedora,” which closed in January, but his colleagues said he seemed at ease with the role.“He came in, and it was just a breath of fresh air,” said the soprano Tamara Wilson, who plays Elsa, the role originally planned for Netrebko. “He’s the most calm, relaxed person ever.”Zachary Woolfe of The New York Times praised his “uncanny serenity and dignity,” writing, “Beczala performs the Wagner role — pure, precise and often treacherously exposed — with total security and elegance.”Beczala said that he has tried to emphasize the character’s identity as an outsider.“Normally you think you can make this character more interesting by making him more human,” he said. “But it doesn’t help. You have to be, as Lohengrin, outside of this community. You have to be almost like a god, a strange being.”After his long break on Tuesday, Beczala was in the wings at the Met, preparing to go onstage. He jumped up and down, rubbed his palms together and cupped his hands over his mouth, and breathed in and out.As the chorus sang, he smiled. “This is such great music,” he said.Then, after adjusting the sleeves of his white shirt and the ring on his finger, he headed onstage. More

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      Review: A Blunt New ‘Lohengrin’ at the Met Stars a Shining Knight

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      The tenor Piotr Beczala sings with uncanny serenity and command in the title role of Wagner’s opera, directed by François Girard with little subtlety.Directors love Wagner’s operas, which infuse the suggestive sketchiness of parables into clearly conceived plots and characters. They offer both strong bones and flexibility.“Lohengrin,” about an anxious and divided society into which arrives a figure with magical powers and secrets, has recently been placed in settings as varied as a laboratory, a classroom and a neo-fascist town square.And, on Sunday at the Metropolitan Opera, in a dark, blunt mixture of pre-modern and post-apocalyptic elements. Directed by François Girard, the production suffers from a facile children’s-theater color scheme, but boasts a shining musical performance from the orchestra and the two leading singers.At the Met in 1998, Robert Wilson distilled “Lohengrin” into a vision of hovering bars of light and glacially shifting gestures. The opening night audience, used to hyper-naturalistic Wagner productions, rebelled with a storm of boos. But 25 years later, the Wilson staging seems like an ahead-of-its-time landmark, a harbinger of how the company’s dramatic range would broaden.Among the highlights of this new era has been Girard’s staging, from 2013, of Wagner’s “Parsifal.” Set on a stark hillside among a group of men in white button-ups and black pants, this was a take on the opera’s protectors of the Holy Grail as a contemporary cult over which planets loomed and orbited in projections.Those cosmic projections have returned in Girard’s “Lohengrin,” with a kind of catastrophic heavenly explosion depicted during the orchestral prelude. The action that follows begins under a blasted wall that hangs at an angle over the stage, a huge hole open to a view of morphing stars and galaxies.The people who enter are dressed in early medieval robes and heavy jewels; a pagan throne is formed from tree roots. But the wall is made of reinforced concrete, and Lohengrin, the mystical knight who soon arrives to avenge the honor of a woman accused of killing her brother, is wearing the spare modern-day outfit of the Grail defenders in Girard’s “Parsifal.”The connection makes some sense: As we learn at the end of “Lohengrin,” when its title character’s secrets are revealed, Lohengrin is Parsifal’s son. But Girard’s nod to his “Parsifal” doesn’t do his new production any favors. While that “Parsifal” was revelatory in imagining the opera’s climax as the integration of women into the Grail cult, this “Lohengrin” isn’t interested in fresh interpretations. No one will mistake it for a landmark in Met history.Instead, Girard’s “Lohengrin,” which brings the opera back to the company after 17 years, is an emphatic, serviceable, basically conservative framework for the piece. Thankfully, some superb singers fill the frame. Most important, almost floating through the staging with uncanny serenity and dignity, is Piotr Beczala in the title role.Beczala, who has appeared at the Met mostly in French and Italian classics, was an impressive Lohengrin.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis square-jawed, always stylish tenor is best known at the Met for playing dashing men in French and Italian classics, like the Duke in “Rigoletto,” Rodolfo in “La Bohème” and, this winter, the ardent Loris in “Fedora.” But the clearest precursor to his melancholy Lohengrin is his Lensky in Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin,” who sings with wintry loneliness as he prepares to duel and die.Beczala performs the Wagner role — pure, precise and often treacherously exposed — with total security and elegance. The soft passages have fairy-tale delicacy; his outpourings, a robust plangency reminiscent of his more extroverted roles. But this Lohengrin, even at his most passionate, has the proper coolness of an otherworldly figure. He is human, but not entirely.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.There is also an intriguing coolness when we meet Tamara Wilson’s unjustly accused Elsa, a glassy sheen to her tone as icy-blond as her hair. But while Beczala’s Lohengrin maintains his reserve, Wilson’s voice gradually warms, gently molten in their love duet and palpably angry in confrontation.Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, conducts this grand score with a sure sense for the elasticity of pace that makes Wagner’s scenes breathe. He led the orchestra on Sunday in broad expansions before focusing it back into tumbling momentum. The shimmering start of the prelude to Act I was fragile without being wispy, building with lyrical flow to a stirring climax.There are onstage trumpets in this opera, and extra brass forces in the balconies. But Nézet-Séguin kept the textures light; even at its mightiest, the sound was never stolid.Tamara Wilson as Elsa with Beczala.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesChanging shirts between the acts, from black to red to white, he also underlined the already obvious play with color that is all too central to the staging. The choristers manipulate complicated sets of magnets in their robes to reveal red, green or white linings, depending on the dramatic needs of the moment. (The sets and costumes were designed by Tim Yip, an Academy Award winner for “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”; the gloomy lighting, by David Finn; the interstellar projections, by Peter Flaherty.)Green symbolizes King Heinrich, who has arrived in Brabant (around Antwerp in present-day Belgium) with his followers to rally the people there to join him in fighting off a coming invasion from the east. Red is the color of the native Brabantians, who are under the sinister influence of Friedrich von Telramund and his wife, the sorceress Ortrud. And white evokes the innocence and purity of Elsa, to whose aid Lohengrin has come.Fine, if rather on the nose. But the endless flashings of the different linings on the beat of musical flourishes — and the visible struggles that some choristers on Sunday had with the magnets — grew tiresome.And must every Met production now have bits of choreographed slinking and twirling? Here, credited to Serge Bennathan, were lightly dancing attendants with lanterns, heads-thrown-back courtiers, whirling nobles and laughably in-time marching. It was all of a piece with a production that’s straightforward to the point of eye-roll overstatement.As Ortrud, the soprano Christine Goerke was perhaps the performer closest to the mood of the staging: She’s unsubtle, if effective, constantly wringing her hands and gripping her necklaces. Girard strands her alone, making over-the-top witchy gestures, for almost the whole of the Act III prelude. We get it: She’s evil!Goerke’s voice has vigor, but rich phrases alternate with sour, snarled ones; some high notes shiver, while some just miss the mark. The bass-baritone Evgeny Nikitin, an imposing presence, sounded weary and out of tune as Telramund. I found myself wishing that the baritone Brian Mulligan, who sang the Herald with unusually vivid intensity, had that larger part instead. The bass Günther Groissböck was a forceful Heinrich.Wilson and, top, Christine Goerke. The choristers manipulate their robes to reveal red, green or white linings, depending on the dramatic needs of the moment.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe Met’s chorus, in one of the most difficult works in its repertory, was both stentorian and evocative: In the awe-struck passage after Lohengrin introduces himself, its ethereal singing was almost more felt than heard. Only in some of the most complex counterpoint could the sound have been crisper, the words sharper.Girard’s staging is more lucid than his murky take on Wagner’s “Der Fliegende Holländer,” which will be revived at the Met this spring. It does, at least, convey the urgency of the march toward war that gives the opera its stakes. And this production will always be an unintentional memorial to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.Conceived as a co-production of the Bolshoi Theater and the Met, it premiered at the Bolshoi in Moscow on Feb. 24, 2022, the day of the invasion. Soon it became clear that sharing the production would be impossible, and that the sets would have to be rebuilt from scratch, adding over $1 million to the show’s cost.“Lohengrin” is an opera with war on its mind. But King Heinrich and his call to defend Germany against invaders don’t make for an easy parallel with the besieged Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky.That is because Heinrich’s story was taken up — by Wagner and, later, by the Nazis — as a symbol of pan-Germanic nationalism, with all its darkness and xenophobia. That is the context in which a few opera companies have changed a word in Lohengrin’s final line, when he declares, at the magical return of Elsa’s brother, that the people’s “Führer,” or leader, has arrived.To further avoid the associations of this savior figure with Hitler, many directors offer a comment in how they depict the brother. Is there something ominous about him? Something redemptive? Anything?Girard, though, has a very Aryan-looking, blond young man in flowing, angelic white come down the stairs, a final odd bit of naïveté in this “Lohengrin,” a production that ends up being too simplistic for a complex moment and a complex opera.LohengrinContinues through April 1 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      How a Production of Wagner’s ‘Lohengrin' Changed the Met Opera

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      Robert Wilson’s staging of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” opened to a wall of boos in 1998. But it brought new theatrical possibilities to the Met.Huge bars of light, floating down from the flies. Singers almost like statues, their gestures shifting at a glacial pace.When Robert Wilson’s slow, spare, luminous production of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” opened at the Metropolitan Opera in 1998, it was a shocking break with the house’s prevailing aesthetic. While there had been some progressive stagings there, the elaborate, old-fashioned naturalism of Franco Zeffirelli and Otto Schenk reigned, particularly in the standard repertory.Wilson and his production, with its nearly nonexistent set and precisely calibrated, dreamlike movements, were greeted by a storm of boos on opening night. But this “Lohengrin,” so radical for the Met at the time, anticipated today’s broader range of directorial approaches there — like Willy Decker’s starkly symbolic “La Traviata” and Simon Stone’s contemporary-America “Lucia di Lammermoor.”On Feb. 26, the Met will introduce a new “Lohengrin,” directed by François Girard. The Wilson production, having not been revived since 2006, never quite got its due — or the kind of farewell justified by its impact on the company’s artistic trajectory. Here, interviews with some of the artists, technicians and administrators involved, excerpted and edited, tell the story of a watershed event.ROBERT WILSON In 1976, we had produced “Einstein on the Beach” at the Met on a night they were dark. It was a huge success, and the Met was interested because they got an audience they never had before. So they asked me, “Would you like to direct something?” They suggested “Aida” or “Madama Butterfly.” I said no, I want to do, with Ella Fitzgerald, the first jazz opera. So, the Met didn’t work out. Then, about 10 years later, Alexander Pereira became the director of the Zurich Opera, and he asked me to do “Lohengrin” as his opening production, and he got the Met on board.GREGORY KELLER (former Met staff director and one of Wilson’s assistants on the staging) In the ’80s, the voice was really king, especially at the Met. There was a lot of park-and-bark opera. Most directors were trying to bring in Stanislavski: “Who, what, when, where, why?” “What am I doing in this scene?” The questions a traditional director and actor talk about. And Bob completely breaks with that. He approaches things from an external point of view, with formal, classical, crystalline choreography. He’s fascinated by Eastern theatrical forms, Kabuki and Noh, and those formal, visual, artistic concerns were what he was bringing into the opera world.KIRT BURCROFF (then a new Met electrician) I’m not sure anyone, when we started, knew how we were going to pull it off. I’ve always thought the shows that look the simplest from out front are usually the hardest. And it was pretty sparse out there for “Lohengrin.”JOSEPH VOLPE (then the Met’s general manager) I was there for “Einstein”; I was on the Met’s technical staff at the time. And when I became general manager, there was always a desire to have Bob do something. I remember we had lunch, and he was so specific about every scene; on a napkin he could draw out every scene. He went through the entire opera over lunch. And everything that is called for in “Lohengrin” is there. It’s not there in the way most people would expect it. But it’s all there.WILSON I worked on it with Annette Michelson, the critic. And she said, “Read this.” It was Baudelaire, from after he saw Wagner’s “Tannhaüser”: “I’ve witnessed a spectacle of time, space and light that I have never experienced before.” So that was the key. Then I looked at the original pen-and-ink drawings, and actually, spatially, I did exactly what Wagner did. His first act had a big oak tree over here; I brought in a vertical bar of light that descended. It’s starting with a wider space and zooming into a marriage that doesn’t work, and then back out.The tenor Ben Heppner, who sang the title role in the production, with members of the men’s chorus (who wore stiff and heavy neck-to-ankle tunics) in the background.Metropolitan OperaKELLER I got to work with Bob on “The Magic Flute” at the Paris Opera in 1991. And one of the other Met assistants, Robin Guarino, had worked with him on “Hamletmachine” at N.Y.U. So we both knew the way he worked, and could shepherd him and get a product onstage he would be happy with. He had two of us he could trust.DEBORAH VOIGT (soprano who sang Elsa in the opening run) I had a bit of experience with Bob: I had covered Jessye Norman as Gluck’s Alceste at Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1990. We covers were brought in for weeks before the principals. They lined us all on one side of the room and had us walk to the other side, telling us we had two minutes to do it — not a second longer or shorter. And we spent the next six weeks choreographing “Alceste,” and memorizing Bob’s style of movement. I learned what it was like to have his choreography imprinted on my body, and Debbie Voigt’s way of moving and using my body stripped away. That gave me a head start that some of my colleagues did not have.In September 1991, Wilson’s version of “Lohengrin” premiered in Zurich.BEN HEPPNER (tenor who sang the title role in the Met’s “Lohengrin”) I got a call from my Swiss agent, who asked me if I would be willing to jump in for “Lohengrin” in Zurich. I said OK, and if they can send me the video, I’ll try to learn the staging a bit. And my 7-year-old son was so bored; he had nothing else to do, and said: “Dad, I watched it and I’ll tell you what to do. First of all, there’s no sword fight in Act II” — he knew “Lohengrin” pretty well by this point — “and when you move, you’re like a robot, the way you move your arms. And oh yeah, Dad, when you walk, you have to walk like there’s something stuck in the crack of your bum.” With this in mind, I put on the tape, and, son of a gun, if he wasn’t right about everything.KELLER Giuseppe Frigoni, the one who really honed the movement vocabulary, had created all these different moves for the chorus in Zurich. They had someone offstage prompting the chorus for those gestures, and at the Met, we wanted to cue the chorus seamlessly and silently. So with Joe Clark, the technical director, we devised these machines, like in a bakery, the “now serving 98” machines. We put these two big number machines on the edge of the pit so the audience couldn’t see them. And we devised a numerical system to cue the men and an alphabetical system for the women.WILSON It wasn’t all the Met people’s cup of tea. But they had committed. And, actually, Joe Volpe didn’t really understand it, but he was a smart guy; he knew that some of the people who had supported “Einstein” were some of the wealthiest people around. And they said James Levine was going to conduct. I was a big admirer of Levine’s. He had a deep interior sense.RAYMOND HUGHES (then the Met’s chorus master) Wilson saw his artistic concept all the way through the piece. It was about light and darkness. It was not monotonous, but it was black and white.JANE KLAVITER (prompter for the original run) I remember he never raised his voice, and he was totally personable. But he didn’t joke at all; he was very austere. I remember him wearing black. I don’t remember him smiling much.HEPPNER Each character had a resting position. For Lohengrin, it was the arms to the sides but not relaxed straight down; the fingers were together and the thumbs pointed slightly forward. And each character had his or her own set of arm movements, I would say maybe five or six.VOIGT I have always used my body and moving it as the impetus to get air moving and as a means of support, and with Bob you are having to really stand still, and that’s really difficult. Then Elsa’s entrance is so static, and the music is so still, that it’s extra difficult. It’s musically challenging unto itself — and, by the way, don’t move. His style is “Kabuki Position No. 2” moving into “Kabuki Position No. 10,” and you have five minutes to do it.HEPPNER Your arms were never to be relaxed; he wanted isometric tension there. I said, “You understand, if I do that, that tension will climb into my chest and throat, and by the second act you’ll be looking for a new Lohengrin.” He sort of didn’t have an answer for that. He also asked that I not have any facial expression. I said, “If I don’t have an expression, it will sound expressionless.” That also wasn’t his favorite.VOIGT I remember one of the first rehearsals, and Bob said to Ben, “OK, I want you to sing that line to Debbie but look into the house.” And Ben said, “But Debbie’s behind me.” And Bob said, “Yes, I know, but I want you to look out there, and look at your hand when you do it.” His stylized way of expression took a long time to understand and to accept. I had to learn that I had to find meaning in it myself. He was not going to spoon-feed that to us.KELLER I know both Debbie and Ben struggled. Bob gives you the choreographic form, and it’s your job to fill in what I call the Stanislavski part. It was challenging, but eventually we got there. They understood they had an enormous amount of freedom to fill up that form.WILSON The singers were struggling, and it was not Jimmy’s cup of tea. But the mood was not negative.KELLER Everybody felt really committed. It was hard and intense, but it wasn’t fascistic or terrifying.HUGHES What I loved was that the chorus could just stand and sing. They had those numbers projected down by the prompter’s box. Like, 3 meant you hold your shield up; 2 meant you hold your sword up. This was an arrangement that made them sound fantastic. “Lohengrin” had not been done at the Met since 1986, and it’s one of the biggest chorus operas of all time. So we worked really hard.“His stylized way of expression took a long time to understand and to accept,” said Deborah Voigt (right, as Elsa, with Heppner). “I had to learn that I had to find meaning in it myself.”Metropolitan OperaVOIGT Bob did get it; he understood that it was difficult. He respected when you really put yourself into it. It was difficult, but I was also finding it very interesting.WILSON It was just another world for them. There’s no training for what I do.BURCROFF That show brought in the modern era of opera here. We still haven’t done anything like it. Because we’re a repertory theater, we use a lot of the same lights in every opera — especially in those days. But very little about that “Lohengrin” utilized any of our repertory equipment. All of it was custom built. And all those light boxes that flew in from the sides, and popped up from the floor, putting those up and taking them down every day was a monumental task because of the size. Some of the boxes were 60 feet long. The swan was our first foray into automation. It was literally driven by one of our stagehands with a joystick, sending it across the stage and hoping it wouldn’t go into the orchestra pit.KELLER On the back scrim there were constant minuscule lighting changes, so your brain was always getting stimulated.WILSON My problem with Levine was he was so inconsistent with timing. For the prelude, I had these light cues that are so complicated and they’re on a computer, and you can’t change them, but he would vary three or four minutes sometimes in the timing. But we had a good rapport; he had a dialogue with everybody.HUGHES The Kabuki influence, the very stylized acting that he coaxed out, was absolutely convincing, particularly at the beginning, when Lohengrin and Elsa are still rather one-dimensional characters. I found it riveting when she sang “Einsam in trüben Tagen” and she was slowly — very, very, very slowly — walking across the stage. It lent Elsa such a lonesome dignity.KLAVITER The challenge was that the singers couldn’t turn their heads; they weren’t supposed to move. That made it harder for them to see me in the prompter’s box. A lot of prompting is eye contact.KURT PHINNEY (Met chorus tenor) The costumes were rather rigid, I think with the idea of giving a kind of hardened look. They were difficult to bend or move in, but we weren’t permitted to do much of that anyway. I think one chorister wanted to put a portable chair under his costume so that he could sit unobserved, some mechanism that he could find a posture of rest somehow.HEPPNER You have to have fun with these things. If people I knew were coming, I told them to wait for a specific moment, and at that point I would slowly move my fingers into the Spock gesture from “Star Trek.” I didn’t take it as seriously as some people did.At the curtain calls on opening night, March 9, 1998, the cast was cheered. The production team, not so much.WILSON My god. Never in my entire life, 57 years working in the theater, have I had such a hostile reception. I was told the Wagner Society had organized it. And it was violent.HEPPNER The noise seemed like it actually moved the velvet curtain.MATTHEW POLENZANI (star tenor who back then played the tiny part of a noble) It’s the loudest noise I’ve ever heard.KELLER We were all really shocked at the provincial attitude of the New York audience.The reaction was much calmer when the staging was revived that fall. Levine once again conducted, and cast changes included a new Elsa: Karita Mattila.KELLER We were very happy it was going to come back. It was an expensive production. The light boxes, the remote-controlled pieces. In the men’s chorus, each singer had a neck-to-ankle tunic, and it was all boned, with hundreds of nylon bone inserts. I think we also made the enormous graphite spears.VOLPE It took the revival for people to fully understand the production. I think that the singers became much more comfortable with the stage direction, and I think Bob became much more comfortable with the singers.KARITA MATTILA It was the first time — I think the only time — that I have actually gone to the administration. I went to [the assistant general manager] Sally Billinghurst’s office and told her, “I’m not sure I can do this.” And she gave me a good talk, just encouraged me to try and make it work, don’t do anything yet, just give yourself a little time. And I needed some pantyhose, so I went to Saks Fifth Avenue, and I noticed that a man was following me. I went to the cashier, and I was really nervous; I felt he was quite close, and I turned. And before I said anything, he said, “Excuse me, are you Karita Mattila?” “Yes?” “Oh, me and my wife, we are so looking forward to seeing you in ‘Lohengrin.’” It was such a wonderful lesson for me, a reminder to never let down your audience for some personal reason. If it is a challenge to understand, take the challenge. And after that incident at Saks, I was back, with a different attitude. There was no way now that I would want to give up.KELLER By then, we knew how to rehearse it better, how much time everything would take. And we loosened up. We didn’t loosen up the vocabulary. But if Karita said, “I can’t do this gesture now, I’m singing,” we’d say, “OK, do it a bar later.” We were true to what Bob wanted, but we listened to what the singers had to do. And he loved it: “Do the gesture here, do the gesture there; I don’t care.”Karita Mattila, who took over the role of Elsa when the production was revived, told the Met’s administration, “I’m not sure I can do this.”Winnie Klotz/Metropolitan OperaMATTILA I thought I might be doing things differently than some others. And I wondered what Bob Wilson would say. I remember when he came to the first stage rehearsal, I felt a little bit defiant or defensive before he said anything to me. I was going to defend my changes. But to my surprise he was very, very encouraging: “You have understood this perfectly.” I actually felt quite good in the end with the production. I felt like a poet, not a senseless puppy.The production was brought back a final time in 2006, starring Mattila and Heppner, and with the tenor Klaus Florian Vogt making his Met debut as Lohengrin in the final two performances. It was Volpe’s swan song; Peter Gelb took over as general manager that summer.PETER GELB I don’t know if Bob was part of the rehearsals for the revival that season. I was told at the time that the singers were not necessarily embracing his stylized movement the way he planned it.WILSON I was supposed to do “Lohengrin” again. This was some years ago. I don’t know what happened. But Peter Gelb and I talked about doing it.KELLER Robin Guarino had left the Met; I was the last man standing from the old production. They asked me to build a schedule for how many chorus sessions it would require, and their eyes got quite wide. There were probably 10 people left in the chorus who had done the show, so it would have been a lot of time to teach them the gestures, and X amount of time rehearsing in the costumes. At that point, the administration determined it would be as expensive to do a new production.GELB I planned to bring it back, without having first checked on what condition it was in. And I discovered from our technical department that it was in very bad condition physically. All our scenery is packed into these shipping containers in a lot in Newark, and over the years the “Lohengrin” had suffered the ravages of time. Especially the large fluorescent light boxes; they had partially disintegrated. The production would have had to be completely rebuilt, and we didn’t have the time or the budget for that.Twenty-five years after the production’s premiere, it’s possible to see its effects on the company.VOLPE Bob brought the Met along; because of Bob, we were in a different place. I don’t want to sound egotistical, but for me it was a wonderful production. It was time for the Met, and it was time for me, to produce something forward-looking, something different. I believe in opera, in traditional opera. But in a way, this was traditional. Everything that was supposed to be there was there; it was just a different way of presenting it.KELLER For me it was a really seminal experience at the Met. It was kind of the intersection of what I wanted to do as a youth — wild, crazy avant-garde theater — and traditional opera. The Met was trying to be avant-garde, and I think they succeeded, and Bob really wanted to have a show at the Met. This production meant a lot to him, and it meant a lot to help him get his vision done on this grand scale, and have it come off so seamlessly. I think it was a crossroads for the Met, that yes, there’s an audience for this. I would take the 1 train home, and there would be people saying they loved it, people saying they hated it. How much of a reaction can you get out of an audience these days?BURCROFF We didn’t know at the time that it was a crystal ball into the future. You think of the Zeffirelli “Bohème” and “Turandot,” when we’re bringing wagons full of scenery on and offstage. “Lohengrin” was one static set. And that became more the norm for us. Rarely do we open the curtain on Act II and it’s a completely different set. “Lohengrin” was really about the lighting. Before that, at the Met, it was about great scenery. “Lohengrin” was about the singers and the lights, and that’s more the norm now.GELB In a period that was generally known for its theatrical blandness, Wilson, who has been one of the great theater directors, really stood out. His “Lohengrin” was an early indication of theatrical possibilities that the traditional, core Met audience had not experienced.WILSON If I go to the opera tonight, if I really want to hear the music, I close my eyes and I hear much better. So can I keep my eyes open, and what I see can help me hear the music better than when my eyes are closed? That’s simply it. My responsibility as a director is, can I create a space where I can hear music? More

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      Wagner’s ‘Lohengrin’ Uses the Word ‘Führer.’ Keep It There.

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      In some cases, the inflammatory, Nazi-associated term has been changed out of sensitivity. What do we lose when that happens?There are some 10,000 words in the libretto of Wagner’s “Lohengrin,” which the Metropolitan Opera is presenting in a new production starting on Feb. 26. But the most inflammatory one comes at the end.The title character, a mystical knight who arrived in the first act to defend the honor of a woman accused of killing her brother, points to a handsome youth in shining silver armor who has magically appeared out of the water. He is the lost brother.“Here is the Duke of Brabant,” Lohengrin declares. “He shall be your leader.” In German, Wagner’s text is: “Zum Führer sei er euch ernannt.”Piotr Beczala will sing that line at the Met, as will tenors at the vast majority of other opera houses in the world when they put on “Lohengrin,” a repertory staple for over 170 years.But at a smattering of companies, particularly in Germany, and most prominently at the Bayreuth Festival — founded by Wagner and still run by one of his descendants — the text has quietly been changed because of the association of “Führer” with Hitler, who was a treasured guest at the festival.“Especially we in Bayreuth should be particularly sensitive there,” Katharina Wagner, the festival’s director and the composer’s great-granddaughter, said in a statement, “because we have a special political background and therefore also a special responsibility.”Wagner, who is also a stage director, added that she preferred to make the change — from “Führer” (“leader” or “commander”) to “Schützer” (“protector”) — in her productions of the opera.“Führer” is certainly arresting today. But when Wagner was writing the opera, in the 1840s, it was an unassuming, somewhat vague military title that referred, depending on the word to which it was connected in a compound, to varying degrees of operational command.The word got a new charge toward the end of the 19th century, when Georg Ritter von Schönerer, an Austrian antisemite who agitated for pan-Germanic nationalism and harbored fantasies of ancient Roman revival, took it on as the name his followers would address him by. (They also embraced “heil” and the rigidly outstretched, so-called Roman salute as a greeting.)Von Schönerer’s ideas and his gift for propaganda were inspirations for Hitler, who in the early 1920s began to use “Führer” as his title, along the lines of the success of Mussolini’s self-styling as “Il Duce.”As with Mussolini, the word became central to what was soon the fully cultlike worship of a charismatic would-be national savior, and “Führer” was the foundation of Hitler’s official title starting after the death of Germany’s president, Paul von Hindenburg, in 1934. One of the Nazis’ omnipresent slogans was “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer”: “One Nation, One Realm, One Leader.”Anja Harteros, front, and Piotr Beczala in Yuval Sharon’s staging of “Lohengrin” at the Bayreuth Festival.Enrico Nawrath/Bayreuther FestspieleSomewhat surprisingly for non-German speakers, the word is still found all over that language as part of compounds. A train conductor is a “Zugführer”; a driver’s license is a “Führerschein.” At Bayreuth, Katharina Wagner herself carries the title of “Geschäftsführer,” or managing director.But for the term to stand alone, especially as a military or political title, is basically verboten.And it’s not exactly neutral in the context of Wagner. Even if he wrote long before the rise of the Nazis, his works were tainted by his notorious antisemitism and, decades after his death, by Hitler’s enormous affection for his music and the dictator’s friendship with the Wagner family.Hence the “special political background” that Katharina Wagner referred to, the source of the sensitivities that she has worked to address. Some years ago, the festival unveiled a large display on its grounds about artists killed, imprisoned, exiled or otherwise affected by the Nazis. Several stagings — including Stefan Herheim’s “Parsifal” and Barrie Kosky’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” — have dealt explicitly with Wagner’s and the festival’s political legacy.The change of a single word seems like it could hardly be a subtler interpolation. At Bayreuth, which lacks supertitles, it is likely that almost no one would have noticed had there not been a small flurry of coverage of the issue last summer. And deference toward sensitivity might make sense, given the festival’s history.Yet the erasure of “Führer” is a missed opportunity. It also doesn’t quite make sense, with the unintended consequence of seeming not to take Wagner’s text and his careful word choices seriously. “Schützer” is used elsewhere in the libretto to describe Lohengrin’s role within the plot as a kind of transitional figure after Gottfried, the lost brother, has disappeared. The energizing question of the story is, in a leadership vacuum, what comes next? It’s therefore misleading, after Gottfried’s deus ex machina reappearance, to refer to him as “Schützer,” since he, unlike Lohengrin, is entitled to actually take political and military command.And if we’re rooting out Nazi associations in “Lohengrin,” why stop at “Führer”? Early in the opera, ominous reference is made to armed action against the German “Reich,” and stentorian choral “heils” proliferate, like something out of the propaganda film “Triumph of the Will.” In “Meistersinger,” why then preserve the ending, when the kindly cobbler Hans Sachs suddenly, grimly warns of foreign encroachments on the country and its “holy German art,” a call taken up with rally-style fervor by the crowd?Any of these changes might be made out of respect, but they also let us in the audience off the hook. Wagner’s works are as ambiguous and ambivalent as we are, pulled between the desire for freedom and the desire to be led and commanded. This should not be something to erase, but rather something to explore — for us watching and for the stage directors who shape Wagner’s vision for us.Yuval Sharon, who directed the latest Bayreuth “Lohengrin” but had no part in the decision to change the text, said in an interview: “I feel like it’s part of your responsibility every time you restage this opera, the same responsibility you have with any opera that has fraught language or fraught ideas. The visual aspect gives you an opportunity to offer a counterpoint to that original.”In other words, how should a staging represent Gottfried if we are to take in the nuances of what might be meant by him returning as Führer? Presumably, in 2023, it’s not as an unironically perfect Aryan boy in gleaming armor, an unquestioned savior. Sharon depicted him symbolically, as a verdant flowering of nature; Hans Neuenfels, whose “Lohengrin” preceded Sharon’s at Bayreuth, had an adult-size bloody newborn emerge imperiously from an egg.There are as many options as there are productions. But simply taking out “Führer,” with all its connotations, softens the complexity of the society depicted in the opera — a restive, angry one willing to submit to a leader who will quickly and easily solve its problems. The libretto’s medieval Antwerp is not so different from the Germany that blindly followed its own Führer.It is often said that we shouldn’t anachronistically import into Wagner’s works the ways in which they were heard and used long after his death. In the case of “Lohengrin,” later history actually illuminates this unsettling opera; changing a word out of an excess of sensitivity distorts it.“I think editing it feels a little bit like a whitewash,” Sharon said. “It can dull the edge of what makes the piece so potentially dangerous and disturbing. The opera carries in it the DNA of so many utopian visions, and simultaneously the very beginning of totalitarian thinking. Both coexist in his works, and you can’t have one without the other. Part of what’s amazing about Wagner is engaging with those impulses, in both directions.” More