Lohengrin by Richard Wagner, and: Parsifal by Richard Wagner (review)

Reviewing together these two DVD releases of Wagner’s operas Lohengrin and Parsifal provides an opportunity to consider both the range of approaches to producing Wagner on European stages and the variety of approaches to filming opera in the early 1990s. The 1990 production of Lohengrin from the Vienna State Opera (Wiener Staats oper) has no weak principals. The surprising sound of Plácido Domingo’s lyric tenor filtered through the German language offends some and delights others, but either way it makes a compelling fit for the otherworldly knight of the title role. Cheryl Studer’s Elsa blends youthful innocence with erotically powerful womanhood, which is what Wagner seems to ask for. Smaller roles—Robert Lloyd as a world-weary King Heinrich, Georg Tichy as a magnificently full-throated Herald—are just as successful, as is the mighty chorus, which here reminds the listener of Wagner’s proximity to grand opera. One of the production’s greatest strengths is the vocal dynamism of Hartmut Welker and Dunja Vejzovic as Friedrich of Telramund and his wife, Ortrud; it would be difficult to improve on their fire-eating fury in Act II. Rudolf and Reinhard Heinrich’s production design is traditional without feeling tired, and Wolfgang Weber’s direction allows the principals the poise their roles suggest.

When listening to live recordings it is often difficult to know what to attribute to the sound engineer and what to the orchestra. The Viennese audience’s overwhelmingly positive response to Claudio Abbado and the Staatsoper orchestra may indicate that they sounded better in the hall than on the recording, where one hears the occasional ragged start and where single players, including sectional string players, occasionally pop out of the texture. That said, beautiful playing abounds, and Abbado’s pacing and interaction with the singers on stage repeatedly demonstrate his and the orchestra’s sensitivity and sophistication.

The 1992 production of Parsifal was the first new production conducted by the Berlin State Opera’s (Staatsoper Unter den Linden) then newly-appointed artistic director Daniel Barenboim. Here the principals are not perhaps as uniformly exciting as in the Vienna production of Lohengrin, but the chorus is powerful, and Waltraud Meier’s Kundry is mesmerizing throughout the opera’s three very different acts. Parsifal, like Kundry, evolves over the course of the opera, and although Meier accomplishes this brilliantly, Poul Elming arguably never quite shakes the Siegfried-like quality his Parsifal transmits so effectively in first act. Possibly John Tomlinson’s Gurnemanz falls just short of the gravity one might imagine for Wagner’s master of ceremonies and ultimate narrator, but this is due in part to Hans Hulscher’s direction, which allows Tomlinson to bumble nervously about the stage, running his hand through his hair. Falk Struckmann’s Amfortas is also affected by Hulscher’s direction. Struckmann’s vocal delivery achieves the necessary quality of constant anguish, but Hulscher has him show this by crawling and rolling around the stage. Amfortas’s open wound sounds like high tragedy but looks like undignified whining. Hulscher seems to have asked his Gurnemanz and Amfortas to act more like regular people, and of course this exists in tension with Wagner’s mythos and his demands on singers’ voices. Harry Kupfer’s design embodies similar tensions. The towering metallic walls of the Temple of the Grail reflect waves of bright blue light, suggesting grandeur and mystery but also the modern banality of a heartbeat on an electrocardiogram. Klingsor emerges from a circular portal like the door to a massive bank vault, but his flowermaidens exist on stage only as images of women on little TV screens. The free interplay of Wagnerian imagination...