Richard Wagner’s opera Lohengrin directed by Cornel Mundruzo, Review

At the Munich Opera Festival, Richard Wagner’s unusual Lohengrin was shown staged by the new star of the opera stage, Cornel Mundruzo. I looked at how the myth in the performance gave way to everyday life, Alexey Mokrousov.

“Do you remember how in Bayreuth the audience, having begun to applaud Vogt, could not stop for a long time?” The question of another neighbor is capable of perplexing, and not to answer him with a story about the metamorphoses of the Hungarian Cornel Mundruzo, a brilliant film director who is now staging at the opera house? The German tenor Klaus Florian Vogt is a truly great Lohengrin, and for the last 20 years the former horn player of the Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestra has served as an example to other Wagnerian singers. Applause now overtook Vogt in Munich, but they do not cancel the question why at the premiere the directors were booed no less than clapped.

The premiere audience can be understood: you go to Wagner, the curtain opens – and there, instead of a picturesque plain on the banks of the Scheldt near Antwerp, a spectacle of some kind of blatant grayness. The choir looks like an impersonal mass, dressed in almost light gray tracksuits. But these are, at the very least, Saxon and Brabant counts and nobles. Most of the heroes in the same nondescript costumes turn out to be part of the mass, Lohengrin’s sports outfit is not much different from them. The exception to the gray background is Elsa dressed in black. The South African soprano Johanni van Oostrum (she sang the Marshalsha in The Rosenkavalier at the Bolshoi Theatre) manages to create the image of the heroine, as if coming from afar, belonging to another world, perceived by others as something foreign and aggressively rejected by them.

The visual solution of the performance (the Latvian artist Monika Pormale staged, in particular, “Shukshin’s Stories” at the Theater of Nations) with its brevity opposes the romantic understanding of “Lohengrin”. When red flags are raised above the choir, doubts disappear – this is a hidden greeting from Europe to China: the Bavarian Lohengrin was staged together with the Shanghai Opera House. A little more, and the flags will turn into “Mao’s red books”, but the maximum that awaits the public is that at some point the clothes of the choristers become two-tone: red top, white bottom. Mundrutso is ready for a dialogue of cultures that begins after a global catastrophe, in an era of universal hopes for salvation and consolation. It remains to wait for the reaction in Shanghai to the play with color and the rejection of the mystical fog inherent in most of Wagner’s interpretations. The Grail is now only a dream, not a myth, the sacred has given way to the ordinary.

The dissipation of the romantic fog determines the logic of the performance. The swan, on which Lohengrin sails, is not visible, but his fight with Friedrich Telramund (Danish baritone Johan Reuther is familiar to Muscovites from the performance of “Golden Rhine” conducted by Vladimir Yurovsky) pleases with the choice of weapons. The cardboard sword is countered by what appears to be a battery-operated sanding disc that scatters sprays of fire. Finally, the secret of Lohengrin is revealed: advanced military household appliances ensure his victory. However, compared to the smoking scene, it looks like childish pranks. Passing cigarettes to each other, Elsa and Ortrud (the German soprano Anja Kampe is as good as ever) inhale something far from the usual tobacco products.

They smoke in front of the blank palace facade. Suddenly, 26 windows open, red ribbons pulled down from them turn the stage into a festive tent, preparations for the wedding are overshadowed only by Elsa’s paranoid desire to find out the name of the groom. A disaster is inevitable. In the finale, a huge black meteorite crushes the white stage, on which Elsa soars into the sky.

The finale of the French conductor François-Xavier Roth, who is now in charge of the Cologne Opera, was almost better than the famous overture. Together with the orchestra of the Bavarian Opera, Roth discovers a new dynamic in Wagner. By placing the wind instruments in the left box above the orchestra, the conductor created an unusual sound space, and at first this decision seems strange, but in the end it is convincing. A supporter of historically verified performance, Roth is at the same time an expert on both Berlioz and Stravinsky; devoid of strained pathos, crystal clear language is his main achievement in Lohengrin.

The Orchestra of the Bavarian Opera, also known as the Bavarian State Orchestra, is celebrating its 500th anniversary this year – the countdown comes from the founding of the Court Chapel, created in Munich from the musicians of the former chapels of Emperors Maximilian I and Charles V. But it’s not about age, but about quality. The diversity of the repertoire is amazing. During the week, Verdi’s Aida, Handel’s Semele directed by Stefano Montanari and staged by Klaus Guth with Brenda Ray in the title role, Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas with Aushrine Stundite are played – Krzysztof Warlikowski added Schoenberg and a dance an interlude written by his regular collaborator, the Polish composer Pavel Mikitin. True, outside the festival, in the season, Purcell is played without Schoenberg and modern dances – twice as short, tickets are four times cheaper and the pleasure, apparently, is also less.

The jubilee is on a grand scale. A scientific conference, new recordings, a site with the publication of archival rarities… Former orchestra leaders Zubin Meta, Kent Nagano and Kirill Petrenko will perform with the orchestra in symphony programs this year. In September, the orchestra is waiting for a big European tour, from Lucerne to Paris. Moscow is not expected, now for European music managers it is not commonplace, but a myth, like Lohengrin in the good old days.