Wagner - Lohengrin

ONP Bastille, Tuesday October 24 2023

Conductor: Alexander Soddy. Production: Kirill Serebrennikov. Sets: Olga Pavluk. Costumes: Tatiana Dolmatovskaya. Lighting: Franck Evin. Videos: Alan Mandelshtam. Choreographer: Evgeny Kulagin. Dramaturge: Daniil Orlov. Heinrich der Vogler: Kwangchul Youn. Lohengrin: Piotr Beczała. Elsa von Brabant: Johanni van Oostrum. Friedrich von Telramund: Wolfgang Koch. Ortrud: Ekaterina Gubanova. Der Heerrufer des Königs : Shen Yang. Brabantischer Edler: Bernard Arrieta, Chae-Hoon Baek, Julien Joguet, John Bernard. Edelknabe: Isabelle Escalier, Joumana El-Amiouni, Caroline Bibas, Yasuko Arita. Chorus and Orchestras of the Opéra National de Paris.

Photos: Charles Duprat/ONP

I'm going to begin this post by indulging my puzzled obsession with 'production churn' at the Paris Opera in supposedly straitened times, so please feel free to skip the part in blue if not interested.

Yesterday, I Googled for 'Paris Opera Finances'; the following is a machine translation of the first relevant item to come up, referring to an interview with Alexander Neef, director of the ONP, in Le Figaro in 2022. It says 'he plans to enable the ONP to return to financial equilibrium in 2024-2025, while developing the modernisation of its programming with its musical director Gustavo Dudamel' Ha! He's already taken the money and run, 'and streamlining its operations. This is a complex undertaking after accumulating losses of more than 185 million over the last 2 years (15 million due to strikes and more than 170 million for Covid-19). While the government has provided exceptional support of 86 million euros, and the ONP has made savings of 72 million euros, we are still a long way off the mark, given that out of an annual budget of 230 million euros, the public subsidy of 95 million only covers around 40%. The rest depends on its own resources (sponsorship, ticketing and sales commercial revenue).'

The new Lohengrin is the third I've seen at the Bastille in 16 years. In 2007, we had Carsen's, with Heppner; in 2017, Guth's, with Kaufmann; and now, in 2023 we have Kirill Serebrennikov's, with Piotr Beczala, lavish in scale and detail and quite possibly the most expensive of all. I think the reason I'm puzzled is obvious. I'll leave it there and get on with the matter in hand.

Serebrennikov's Lohengrin is on a gigantic, sweeping scale, hugely ambitious, using all of the Bastille's vast stage, yet masterfully managed. It is esthetically complex yet slick and coherent, loaded with symbols and references, and mixes realism and fantasy in a combination of live, on-stage action, acting or dancing, realistic or not, and black-and-white film. Gesamtkunstwerk. I found it professional and plausible in the first act, but it lost me after that. The director and his dramaturge (apparently we should all have read Daniil Orlov's programme notes before attending) had too many ideas, and as their intention was to reverse roles in an elaborate anti-war statement, with Telramund and Ortrud as 'goodies' doing their best to run a hospital in the thick of a war, they eventually get bogged down in clashes with the libretto.

It would be impossible to take in all the details of such a production, how they interrelate and what they are meant to evoke, in a single sitting. This is the kind of show you need to see several times, close up on video, to grasp. It would therefore be equally impossible, without taking up pages, to describe it adequately. I'll try to keep it simple.

If I'd read Orlov's notes, I'd have discovered that the three acts were labelled Delirium (Elsa's, presumably set off by the disappearance or death of Gottfried), Reality and War. The stage is often divided horizontally and vertically into up to six spaces, with videos above and live action below. But before that, to introduce the concept, during the prelude, we see a film in which Elsa's charming and clearly beloved brother, wings tattooed on his back, disappears into a lake. The first act takes place, 'downstairs', in three grey rooms, perhaps the Telramund clinic, and we guess what we see is going on in Elsa's mind while war rages outside - the stage is filled with uniforms, there are guards in spherical helmets, calling to mind Mr BIC in the biro adverts and at some points wielding gold swords with medieval resonance. Lohengrin arrives in camouflage fatigues. Elsa is doubled and tripled, if that's the word, by dancers representing, probably, different aspects of her personality, one of whom appears naked, wrapped only in her hair, recalling the legend - relevant after all - of Godiva. There are male dancers too, each with one, white wing. (The single wing has become a cliché of Wagner productions over the years; this 'foisonnant' production also manages, later, to fit in another old favourite, the hospital bed - Elsa's, of course - under one bare bulb.)

This act is the most 'esthétisant' of the three, with scrawls on the walls, wire crowns (of thorns?) and shackles twisted together, Parcae or Norn-like, by Elsa and her lookalikes, and giant circles of light that focus our attention on whoever appears inside them, e.g. Heinrich. 'Upstairs', videos continue to play: underwater scenes, soldiers smoking... and snatches of text are projected as well: 'Never...', 'Do not ask...'.

In Act 2, 'Reality', we find Telramund and Ortrud at home in a drab and dingy, old-fashioned living room. Ortrud helps him into his prosthetic leg (I believe the idea may be that the loss of a leg helped turn him against the war). To the left, Elsa has a private ward, even a kind of suite complete with dining area, equally old-fashioned (with a record-player implying the late 50s or early 60s), with a big relief of Leda and the swan, over a curtained alcove, which also appears, smaller, in the couple's living room. Elsa is restrained by nurses, and in this act, live video, now in colour, reproduces the 'downstairs' action mirror-like, upside-down. When 'the people assemble', the scene changes and we now see the whole of the Bastille stage, a shattered industrial space divided into three sections by tall, iron columns, with, on the left, a military canteen, in the middle, a military hospital where Telramund and Ortrud treat the war-wounded, and on the right, a morgue where at one point, inexplicably (though, come to think of it, prefiguring Gottfried's emergence at the end), the body bags dragged in throughout the action open, and naked extras stride out of the room, to the morgue-keeper's comical astonishment.

Act 3 opens with another black-and-white, film, of an army charging. Soldiers dash into the blasted hangar with their war-brides to be photographed in a makeshift studio before setting off to join the fighting. 'On the banks of the Scheldt', Telramund's corpse is only one of an abundance of bodies dragged in and lined up in bags. At the end, after his Montsalvat rant, Lohengrin summons Gottfried from his bag and leaves.

That is a very short summary (believe it or not), but by now a full video is circulating (possibly with the back of my head in it, as I was in the middle of row seven, in front of the cameras), so those wanting to know more can know everything.

When Alexander Soddy conducted Peter Grimes last February, I complained that his conducting 'seemed loud, coarse and insensitive, rarely below forte (OK, at a pinch, mf, and I admit he did quieten down at last for Peter's tragic parting scene with Ellen and Balstrode), covering both Ellen and Auntie...' In Lohengrin, both orchestra and chorus were certainly on the most magnificent form, going at it hammer and tongs, but I had a feeling this relentless, in-your-face wall of sound forced at least some of the soloists (albeit usually near the front, facing the audience, and often helped by the resonant, box-like spaces offered by the set) to push to their limits.

Only four years ago, Johanni van Oostrum was singing Agathe, with Barbeyrac, at the Champs Elysées. Her vulnerable, fragile Elsa was of course perfectly in line with the production, but she was too stretched at the top to soar as gloriously as the part sometimes requires, and on the evening I was there one very awkward moment fortunately coincided with a collapse on stage, so the vocal glitch could be taken as tuned to the action. Koch seemed tired from the start, but again, the weariness was a good fit with the characterisation, and Kwangchul Youn, also fatigued, nevertheless sang with the elegance and dignity appropriate to his part.

This was my first live experience of Piotr Beczala. The production gave him little do other than be Piotr Beczala exactly as seen in his matinée-idol promotional photos, complete with his 60s-crooner hairstyle, so it's hard to say if he can actually act. He can certainly sing, warmly and gloriously. Even he, over the noise from the pit, had one fragile passage with a semi crack, but he recovered.

Gubanova, on the other hand, seemed remarkably comfortable, however loud the accompaniment: resounding, bronze notes all evening with no sign of strain. Shenyang, who was a remarkable Klingsor in Brussels last year, was equally sound and stentorian here.

As I've already said above, orchestra and chorus were both on the most magnificent form, suggesting that what you hear or only half hear in the stalls doesn't depend entirely on the Bastille's wayward acoustics - compared with the recent Makropoulos Case in the same house, it was night and day, I thought as I shuffled out.

But I'll leave the last word to a famous US critic, who sent me the following brief message on WhatsApp after seeing the same show a few days before: 'Just ended. Orch & chorus phenomenal. Ridiculous production. Orch played over all the soloists except Piotr.'

And that's it.