by Patrick Summers
One of the enigmatic, maddening, stimulating, and irresistibly fascinating operas of composer Richard Wagner (1813 – 83), Lohengrin, launches a longawaited return to German opera at HGO. Wagner’s operas have been absent from the Wortham stage since 2001, for a complex but purposeful set of reasons. They are among the largest works written for live performance in any medium in terms of their massive orchestral demands, their superhuman expectations of the quite human singing voice (Lohengrin is the largest choral opera in the active repertoire), and for their formidable expectations of modern attention spans.
The dense symbolism running through Wagner’s operas, particularly Lohengrin, is a musical rendering of the philosophical ideas that obsessed Wagner through the 1840s, the decade in which he encountered all of the themes on which he would spend the rest of his creative life. The texts of Schopenhauer, Hegel, Feuerbach, and, later, Nietzsche penetrated Wagner’s psyche very deeply: he combined elements of their contemporary thoughts with his own broad knowledge of ancient legends, writing works that are highly controversial and revolutionary still, as they were in his lifetime and as they are likely to remain. No other composer demands such active — nearly hallucinatory — listening on the part of the spectator.
Wagner’s revolutionary ideas about music drama centered on the use of the orchestra. The vivid pyschological underpinnings of his characters and much of the scenic symbolism come from the music: from the orchestra. To take just one example, and there could be dozens in Lohengrin alone, the famous swan on which Lohengrin arrives is heard, potently and constantly, and is thus subconscious, making its visual reality relatively immaterial. More than a century of Wagnerian stage performances and the dawn of the cinematic age have shown that literal interpretations of his scenic demands can often stand at odds with the expansive symbolism hidden in the music itself. It is only in listening that Wagner’s uniquely reflective and expansive power reveals itself.
Richard Wagner cleaved music in two; there was a time before him and after him. Large orchestras today play in a configuration largely devised by Wagner and on a few instruments designed or modified by him, that is relatively unchanged in the 119 years since his death. Largely, it is for Wagner, Mahler and Richard Strauss that orchestral musicians are now trained. All other music can be played by any skilled orchestra, of course, but they require specific “interpretation”; it is the large scale works of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that have remained the highest pinnacle for orchestras to this day.
Every composer who followed Wagner lived in his shadow, either emulating him or reacting passionately against him. It is quite impossible to say anything brief about Wagner, because any attempt to distill ideas about him into simplicities are quickly bedeviled. This is as it should be, since Wagner raises questions that should never be easy. So it is with describing and preparing for his operas: Lohengrin, on the surface such a simple tale of chivalric heroism, the knight come to save the damsel, comes to us in 2009 as so much more: The plot of Lohengrin perfectly illustrates, in mythic form, the dilemma of the role of art and artists in modern society, and the current dichotomy of the famous vs. the accomplished (sometimes they are one and the same, often not). The hero (artist) Lohengrin, arrives to save Elsa (the innocence of art itself), as long as his origin is unknown; he is thwarted by jealousy and hatred (the role of commerce in art, and dueling ideologies for how resources are spent), only to reveal that he is one of the guardians of the Holy Grail (pure art). This is, of course, only one way to view the opera; there are as many ways to view it as there are minds thinking about it.
Lohengrin is one of the most profound of spiritual works, drawing together strands of many faiths and traditions, and a religious person can see the opera Lohengrin in a fascinatingly different light from the secular view. And Lohengrin, the knight who demands anonymity, may be the perfect metaphor for Wagner himself, for one cannot possibly admire his extraordinary operas separate from complications of the man himself, whose abhorrent anti-Semitism cannot be explained away as “typical of the era.” Any thought about Wagner is accompanied by some polarizing idea; he is one of the single most contradictory figures in all of history in that he perfectly illustrates a contradiction about humanity that is terribly hard to accept: that a person for whom we could never feel empathy is indeed capable of creating works of staggering beauty and profundity.
Why this break from German operas at the Wortham, the last being Wagner’s Tannhäuser in 2001? The esteemed conductor Christoph Eschenbach conducted a wide range of Wagner and Strauss operas during his justifiably acclaimed tenure with the Houston Symphony in the 1990s, and the bulk of HGO’s presentations of those works centered around that era. The Houston Symphony’s decision to stop playing with Houston Grand Opera in the mid-1990s necessitated the growth of Houston Grand Opera’s own orchestra, a move that reflected the maturation of both organizations; Houston Grand Opera’s own orchestra needed time to grow and attain its own identity; Houston Grand Opera’s audience, most of whom see opera only in Houston, have rightly come to expect their varied diet of operas that have always been the hallmark of the company, and there were many non-German works the company committed to present. Between 1990 and 2001, eleven German operas (two by Richard Strauss) were performed, and for a company that presents only six large-scale works a season (the Metropolitan Opera and Vienna State Opera, for just two examples, present more than twenty-eight operas annually), this clearly pointed to a break from that repertoire. An orchestra well schooled in the musical traditions that preceded and were concurrent with Wagner, like Verdi and the bel canto works (it’s convenient to forget that Bellini was a favorite composer of Wagner’s) will be well equipped to cope with his demands. And, perhaps for the most important reason, Wagner deserves and posthumously demands the special “event” status that only time can create. Now HGO rejoins a perpetual journey into one of history’s true, if disquieting, visionaries.
