The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (18 page)

Recording

CD: Rene Kollo (Tannhäuser); Georg Solti (cond.).
Decca 414 581-2

Lohengrin

Three acts. First performed Weimar, 1850.

Libretto by the composer

Wagner’s previous operas had been composed piecemeal, in sections:
Lohengrin
was the first to be consecutively written, in draft form, starting at the beginning and ending at the end.
This gives the opera a unity of style and dramatic continuity which had previously been lacking in his work.

The plot is based on an episode in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s
Parzival,
a medieval poem to which Wagner would return for his last opera.

Plot

Antwerp, in the tenth century.
King Henry rallies the Brabantines to defend Germany against the encroaching Hungarians.
Telramund accuses Elsa of murdering her vanished brother, Gottfried, heir to the dukedom.
In league with his sorceress wife Ortrud, who has secretly used her powers to bewitch Gottfried, Telramund claims the succession for himself.

Elsa needs a champion to defend her honour.
To answer her call, a mysterious knight appears in a boat drawn by a swan.
This knight promises to defend Elsa, and then to marry her, on condition that she does not ask his name or origin.
After she agrees, the knight defeats Telramund in a duel, but spares his life.

A furious Ortrud poisons Elsa’s mind against the nameless knight.
King Henry proclaims that Telramund has been banished and that the knight will marry Elsa and then march against the Hungarians.
But Ortrud and Telramund disrupt the wedding procession with accusations that the knight defeated Telramund by sorcery.
The knight still refuses to reveal his name.

In the bridal chamber, Elsa gives way to her burning curiosity and asks the knight the fatal question – at which point Telramund aggressively breaks in.
The knight kills him
and announces that he will answer Elsa’s question by King Henry’s judgment seat.
There, in public view, he explains that he killed Telramund in self-defence and finally reveals his identity.
He is Lohengrin, a knight of the Grail, son of Parzival, invincible only while anonymous.
Now his secret has been revealed, he must return to Monsalvat, home of the Grail.
The swan boat returns.
Ortrud reveals that the swan is in fact Elsa’s vanished bother Gottfried, transformed by her magic.
Lohengrin kneels in prayer, and as a sacred dove descends, the spell is broken and the swan is turned back into Gottfried’s human shape.
Lohengrin names him Protector of Brabant and leaves in the boat, now drawn by the dove.
Ortrud’s magic is destroyed, but Elsa, heartbroken at Lohengrin’s departure, collapses lifeless.

What to listen for

In the way that particular characters, emotions or dramatic elements (such as the question forbidden to Elsa) are associated with specific melodic themes (often known as leitmotivs),
Lohengrin
may rank as Wagner’s first mature opera.
In many passages of the score (notably the highly charged duet between Ortrud and Telramund at the beginning of Act II), he seems to break away from conventional length and shape of phrase and make the characters ‘speak in song’, the rhythm and melody being moulded by the text and its implications rather than by any fixed tune: Elsa’s ‘Einsam in trüben Tagen’ and Lohengrin’s ‘In fernem Land’ are not so much arias as narrations.
Both roles (for soprano and tenor) are among the most vocally gratifying in Wagnerian repertory, even if the loudest applause often goes to the mezzo-soprano singing Ortrud: her confessional rant in the final minutes brings an opera sometimes punningly described by its detractors as ‘Slow and Grim’ to an electrifying climax.

The famous bridal chorus occurs in Act II – in the opera, it is intended to convey a certain foreboding and hesitation on Elsa’s part.
Note also the contrast between the radiantly shimmering and diaphanous Prelude to Act I (the sound of
which gave the poet Baudelaire the sensation of weightlessness and vision of white light that he otherwise obtained from hashish) and the brassily triumphant Prelude to Act III.

In performance

The clash between the Christian world of Lohengrin and the pagan world of Ortrud has fascinated many directors, but the most successful productions of this opera have been those which do not get too bogged down in interpretation.
For Covent Garden, Elijah Moshinsky staged the piece within a gauzy white box, the costuming and props tastefully evoking the early medieval period, and its sheer unforced simplicity proved remarkably effective; Robert Wilson’s even bleaker visual concept for the Met was less successful.
One famous Bayreuth production, first seen in 1987, was staged by the film director Werner Herzog, who envisaged the opera in a landscape of snow-covered desolation and ruin, set against a black sky in the dead of winter.

Alas, the magic of theatre often seems to fluff the appearance of the swan-drawn boat and the descending dove – moments which are more likely to induce giggles than the rapture the composer intended.

Recordings

CD: Siegfried Jerusalem (Lohengrin); Claudio Abbado (cond.).
DG 437 808 2

Video: Cheryl Studer (Elsa); Woldemar Nelsson (cond.).
Bayreuth Festival production.
Philips 070 411 3

Tristan und Isolde

Three acts. First performed Munich, 1865.

Libretto by the composer

In the score of
Tristan,
Wagner dissolves the rules of harmony and key which had prevailed for a hundred and fifty years,
thus opening up a new series of possibilities for western music.
The opera is based on the medieval poem by Gottfried von Strassburg, but also has its roots in Wagner’s passionate affair with Mathilde, the wife of his patron Otto von Wesendonck, and in his reading of Buddhism and the philosophy of Artur Schopenhauer.
Both of these led him to the idea, suggested in the meditations of Tristan and Isolde’s Act II duet, that only by renouncing life and transcending worldly phenomena can one attain inner peace and wisdom.

Yet the score is also graphically sensual in its implication that physical sex is the way to nirvana, and the cautious, rational voices of Brangäne, Kurwenal and Marke are all given their due.
Should we regard Tristan and Isolde as heroic witnesses to the ultimate truth, or a self-centred pair locked into suicidal folly?
The greatness of the opera is that it allows both possibilities.

Plot

A prisoner of war, Isolde is being brought from Ireland to Cornwall to marry Tristan’s uncle, King Marke.
On board Tristan’s ship, she furiously tells her servant Brangäne how Tristan, disguised as Tantris, murdered her lover Morold and then came to her in search of balm to heal his wounds.
Overcome by his pitiful pleas, she could not bring herself to kill him: but now she hands him what she believes to be a death potion which she too will swallow rather than marry King Marke.
But Brangäne, fearing Isolde’s suicidal impulses, substitutes a love potion, and when Tristan and Isolde have drunk it, they fall rapturously into each other’s arms.
The ship reaches Cornwall.

Isolde is forced to marry King Marke, but while he is out hunting one night, she resolves to meet Tristan.
Brangäne, who repents of her substitution of the love potion, warns her against the machinations of the envious courtier Melot, but Isolde is oblivious and commands Brangäne to extinguish the torch at her door – the signal for Tristan to approach.

Through a long and ecstatic duet, Tristan and Isolde reflect on the meaning of their love and aspire to a dissolution of their individual identities at the ultimate level of sexual passion.
As the music rises to an orgasmic pitch, King Marke returns from the hunt and is led to the lovers’ lair by the treacherous Melot.
Marke mourns his nephew Tristan’s betrayal of his trust, but Tristan is oblivious.
He asks Isolde to follow him into eternal night, and she assents.
Tristan throws himself on Melot’s sword.

Tristan is dying in disgrace in his castle in Brittany, attended by his bluff but loyal servant Kurwenal.
He can think of nothing but the prospect of being reunited with Isolde and waits day and night for her ship to arrive.
When it is finally sighted, he deliriously tears the bandages from the fatal wounds inflicted by Melot, and as Isolde rushes to his side, he dies.