OPERA
Loh comedy
RODNEY MILNES
Critical superlatives are meaningless at either end of the spectrum, but I have been racking my brains to think of an opera production
more wrong-headed than that inflicted on Lohengrin at the Coliseum. Beside this, the Royal Opera's Salome, until now my lode-stone of horror, is a model of perception and insight. What is so depressing is that the producer is Colin Graham, who has been responsible, to compound the meaninglessness, for some of Sadler's Wells's very best productions : The Mines of Sulphur, From the House of the Dead and The Force of Destiny to name but three. Furthermore the conducting by Charles Mackerras is extremely distinguished, certainly the best thing, ironically, that he has done so far in his term as Musical Director.
I may have once rather flippantly referred to Lohengrin as an early articulation of the Batman myth, but never expected the back-handed revenge of seeing it mounted as a strip cartoon. Here are costumes for principals and chorus that are an uneasy mixture of Asterix the Gaul and comic book mediaeval, and many of the things they do in them are on the same level : the knights' chairing of Lohengrin in Act 1, which reduced the first round of the duel between darkness and light to the status of a rugger club brawl; the king's sword and shield bashing, with that sickening thud of pasteboard on pasteboard; Telramund's Tod Slaughter disguise — these are the sort of naIvetes that audiences do not deserve today, any more than Wagner does. More seriously, the parading of the chorus with eagle standards and raising their right arms in open-palmed salute is something very, very seriously to be avoided in Wagner productions, and if the best you can do with the musical magic of Act 2's dawn interlude is to have a chorus boy coming on yawning, then brother you're in the wrong business.
Lohengrin, opening and closing as it does in A major, the brightest key in the sound spectrum, is one of the cleanest of operatic myths, a musical distillation of the purity and strength of classical drama on the same level of achievement as Handel's oratorios, and it requires a correspondingly clear directional and visual approach. It certainly requires a great deal more than Colin Graham's tired naturalism, which affects even the more intimate duologues, conducted as they are less on an epic level than on that of Mrs Lohengrin's Diary. And you need something of an entirely different order from the chi-chi of Peter Jones-cry of Michael Knight's fussy settings, complete with wobbly mechanical swan. Both suggest without foundation that Wieland Wagner, that arch restorer of his grandfather's works, lived and worked in vain. Musically, though, this was a stimulat
ing evening. Mackerras achieved that mixture of tension and expansion so essential in Wagner, and ensured a finely judged balance both within the orchestra and between pit and stage; this was on a much higher level than his ill-advised
Valkyrie last season. And the Sadler's
Wells Wagner team acquitted themselves confidently. Although got up to look like a toothpaste advert in knightly search of dragon decay, Alberto Remedios sang with taste and feeling and managed to convince.
Margaret Curphey's Elsa grew in stature as the evening progressed, though she scarcely suggests the lonely visionary.
Raimond Herincx's superb diction as Telramund makes up for his mannered acting, which is always the same whatever the opera and most irritating. You know Ann Howard is the villainess at the start because she shows a mass of cleavage — still one of opera's basic signals, though its onlie begetter, Hollywood, dropped it years ago — and is costumed a la Charles Addams. Miss Howard is a mezzo, and the part of Ortrud is for a dramatic soprano; she has a good stab at it, and only loses out on word audibility.
Gordon Kember's straightforward translation is mostly audible. Part of me misses such gems from the old Novello text as the chorus's reaction to Ortrud's accusations: " Revile him not; all is perversion," which is what I would say to anyone under the age of thirty who would quite reasonably come away from this production thinking that Wagner was a totally out-dated, expensive and ever-long joke.
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