It's The Music, Stupid!

Let us imagine for a moment that the text of Wagner's Lohengrin was the book of a play instead of a libretto of an opera. A rather unpleasant thought, actually, as that libretto would make for a fairly dreadful play as would the libretto of most any opera. But let's hold that objection in total abeyance for the nonce so that we may investigate a somewhat different if ultimately intimately connected matter.

Now let us further imagine that along comes an avant-garde-type stage director who decides that this well-known, celebrated play of Lohengrin has possibilities and hidden, embedded meanings never even so much as suspected by its famous, celebrated author, but which he, the stage director — insightful, deep-thinking, creative, avant-garde stage director that he is — sees all too clearly. And so he sets about restaging this celebrated play from the ground up somewhat along the following lines.

"Our society is a loveless one," reflects our creative, insightful, deep-thinking director. "We are a dull, indifferent, and numb lot we are, and so find ourselves traveling blindly down a one-way street leading to a no-way-out situation.

"Aha!", our director cries. "This is what the play of Lohengrin is really about! I'll symbolize our loveless society by setting the action of the play within what will look for all the world like an antiseptically-white, coldly-lit laboratory, and symbolize our dull, indifferent, numb selves by dressing the chorus as a legion of swarming lab rats. If nothing else, it'll give the chorus something to do with their costumed bodies instead of just standing there and delivering. Perfect!

"But every once in a while," further reflects our director, "we dull, indifferent, numb entities get a one-time chance to better ourselves, to become better people, to become more human, to come closer to a utopia of perfect humanity.

"Aha!", our director cries once again. "This one-time chance I'll symbolize in Lohengrin himself! But there's a catch. This new level of humanity we can achieve only through complete, unconditional trust in its possibility. At first we do think it possible and do trust unconditionally, and, so, at the end of Act I, I'll have the lab rats peel off their rat skins to show that, underneath, they're actually wearing, like innocent, trusting young people, bright yellow dress coats. But I must be careful to see to it that they still retain their huge rat claws and paws, for, at bottom, they're really still lab rats. Then, in Act III, shortly before Elsa asks Lohengrin the forbidden question, I'll have a black coffin filled with swan feathers emerge between the sheets of Elsa's and Lohengrin's marital bed symbolizing the corrosive doubt which the evil Ortrud has insinuated into the consciousness of the innocent Elsa, and which doubt, in the end, will come between Elsa's and Lohengrin's love, and make their sharing a life together a thing impossible even to contemplate. Oooh! This is getting good!

"Now, how to finish the whole thing off...? Wait! I know! When Lohengrin is supposed to transform the enchanted swan back into Elsa’s lost and presumed dead brother, Gottfried, I'll instead have Lohengrin reveal a huge egg out of which there will emerge a hideously ugly, monstrous, newborn baby. Then I'll have the baby get up and tear its own umbilical cord into pieces which he'll then throw at the legions of the now healed who have gathered together to witness Lohengrin's leaving, but who are now all collapsed on the floor. And the pieces of the umbilical cord must look exactly like rats' tails symbolizing that when Lohengrin, who symbolizes the one-time chance, leaves, everything, including the now healed once lab rats, will go back to being just what it and they were before Lohengrin's arrival!

"Damn! That's really good. It will all épater the hell out of le bourgeois, and garner for me a virtual tsunami of outrage from the audience, thereby confirming my Konzept and its staging an unqualified triumph! I'm so fucking brilliant I sometimes scare myself."

The above little scenario was concocted by us using staging particulars and the inevitable Regie's intellectual rationale justifying and explaining the staging's whys and wherefores, all of which we adapted from a firsthand report by a person who attended the Generalprobe (dress rehearsal) for yesterday's Hans Neuenfels Lohengrin at the Bayreuther Festspiele. We found the thinking behind the above Konzept most interesting in that, original authorial intent entirely aside and unconsidered, as absurdist a Konzept as it quite clearly is, the truth of the matter is that if Lohengrin really were a play, that Konzept would not be out of bounds in terms of directorial discretion, and, depending on the execution, could actually end up a valid new take on an old play based on even older material. A fairly wild take, certainly, but the attempt a legitimate enterprise that notwithstanding.

Problem, of course, is that Lohengrin is not a play but an opera, and the principal thing that makes opera different from plays is that in opera the composer, not the scribbler of words, is the dramatist, which means the drama resides in the music not the libretto which libretto's critical function is to act as armature for the drama. That further means that wholesale messing about with that armature while failing to realize or even understand the contradictions and absurdities that entails vis-à-vis what the music is saying at every point in the drama is to produce ultimately not a valid new take on the opera but the absolute assurance of its utter collapse as a unified dramatic work of art. And we won't even mention consideration of such piddling matters as original authorial intent as made manifest in the score (music, text, and stage directions) which is another but intimately related matter; one that cannot — must not ever — be passed over or given merely lip service.

In this S&F entry, we quoted Katharina Wagner's days-before-the-performance remark that Bayreuth's new production of Lohengrin would have "rats [that] will be let loose on a set designed to resemble an animal research laboratory," and instantly declared that new production to be Eurotrash. The "progressive" types who are fervent champions of such trash as they consider it a brave and creative new way of seeing and thinking about old ideas, immediately loudly bray "Foul!" for our impertinence not only in our passing summary condemnatory judgment on a production sight unseen, but doing so on the evidence of but a mere single descriptive sentence about that production.

Well, the fact remains that with most Regietheater opera productions (but by no means all; the LAO Achim Freyer staging of the Ring is a perfect example in point as it's impossible to pass any sort of judgment at all concerning it without first having seen the entire cycle at firsthand in the theater, much less after merely reading descriptive sentences about it or inspecting photos of the production), an accurate descriptive sentence or two about the staging of a production is often all that's necessary to condemn the production as Eurotrash and be able to do so with an absolute assurance of the rightness of our judgment. When we're told, for instance, that a production of Parsifal presents a third act that takes place in a 20th-century railway shed, and that the Knights of the Grail are there all attired in WWI uniforms complete with gas masks, and that the act ends with Parsifal walking off into the sunset (or was it sunrise?) along the railroad tracks hand-in-hand with a still-alive Kundry, we need know nothing more about that production in order to, with complete certainty in the rightness of our judgment, condemn that production as flat-out Eurotrash. The music will not permit such a staging — again, never mind such piddling matters as original authorial intent as made manifest in the score.

Just so the case with this Hans Neuenfels Lohengrin. It's flat-out Eurotrash because the music will not permit such a staging. That the dozens of photos of the production thoroughly bore us out in our judgment was no surprise, nor was it cause for back-patting or hurling about I-told-you-so's. We knew with absolute certainty that such it must be and could not be otherwise because the music told us so.

With opera, there's just no getting around it. In the end, what controls and shapes the drama and determines what is and what is not permissible in its staging is not the text, and certainly not the "unique vision" of the stage director (i.e., his Konzept). First, foremost, and always, it's the music, Stupid!