1/ Sorry 2b late - I was out owning this opera’s villainess Ortrud by going to an evening Mass. So we’ve got LOHENGRIN: mid-career Wagner, his last opera b4 embarking in THE RING. It’s a clash of Christian and pagan forces in early 10thc Duchy of Brabant. Elsa von Brabant
https://twitter.com/MetOpera/status/1338982525121699840
2/ is accused of killing her brother, Godfrey, the rightful Duke. She asks God to send her dream-knight to defend her - and He does! What’s more, they can get married if only she’ll refrain, forever, from asking his name or origin. This is a tall order, but Elsa promises it
3/ willingly, and it’s reason has to do with the inscrutable rules of the Grail, which this knight serves: if they become known, they must return. This condition provided the perfect entry point for Ortrud to play on Elsa’s doubts. Ortrud is a proud descendant of Radbod, the
4/ pagan prince of Frisia who once ruled these parts, and she knows how to do stuff like turn Duke Godfrey into a swan - which she did, and that, not any wrongdoing by innocent Elsa, is why he disappeared! However she does not sense any incipient plot-twist in the fact that
5/ Elsa’s knight, Lohengrin, was transported to Brabant on a boat pulled by - a swan! A fourth major character is the proud and renowned knight Frederick of Telramund, who was supposed to marry Elsa, but met up with Ortrud, married her, and to his cost bought her tale about
6/ Elsa having killed Godfrey. He’s dishonored by losing the duel to Lohengrin, but later when he reproaches Ortrud, she tells him it was rigged, I’m sorry, that it was sorcery, and he shd just recommit himself to her neo-Radbodian counter-revolution.
7/ Our Lohengrin is matinée idol heldentenor Peter Hoffmann. Elsa is Eva Marton, who had sung Ortrud the previous season and is a little the worse for wear for it. Ortrud is Leonie Rysanek, veteran of many but not all Wagner soprano roles: not Brünnhilde or Isolde but definitely
8/ Sieglinde, Senta, and to a lesser extent, Elsa. Got a story. Leonie once sang Elsa with my great friend and “aunt” Nell Rankin as Ortrud. Afterwards Leonie told her, “If I sing in this opera again I want to do *your* role, and just like you, I’m going to wear a red wig!”
9/ Divas don’t get to pick their own costume accoutrements any more, but Nell was old school, and well, here’s Leonie as Ortrud, and dammit she’s got a red wig! Appropriate - the “Celtic woman” look.
10/ Ortrud is a role that we call “zwischenfach,” or, in between vocal categories. It goes high, and Wagner seems to have wanted a soprano, albeit a more “dramatic” one than the more lyrical Elsa. In time great dramatic mezzo-sopranos did it with great success: Kerstin Thorborg,
11/ Nell Rankin (aforementioned), Christa Ludwig, and Mignon Dunn, who was in this production’s debut season. It’s opinionable whether Rysanek’s Ortrud counts as a soprano in the role or as a soprano switching to mezzo roles towards the end of her career.
12/ The production is the beautifully realistic one designed by the recently-departed Ming Cho Lee - very much *early* medieval, not highly-colored late - that debuted in 1976 and replaced Wieland Wagners’s colorful but static “stained glass” vision from 1966.
13/ In 1998, Everding/Lee (this one) was replaced by one by Robert Wilson that - well, motionless? It made Wieland’s approach look like St. Audrey’s fair by comparison. It was aptly called a Kabuki production. Well, I saw it in the house (as I had the two previous prodns), and
14/ It had its moments. Well, it’s been ash-heaped, and yet another prodn is in the works. Director is chosen, but I don’t remember who or know what path he plans to take it. We’d have it now if it hadn’t been for COVID. As it is, it’s not in the planned 2021-22 season.
15/ So, maybe in fall ‘22? And maybe it won’t suck? Doubt it’ll be as good as what you see on the Met’s site tonight/tomorrow.
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