Lohengrin

In the organizer's words:

Soon after the failure of the revolution of 1848, the political refugee Richard Wagner wrote his LOHENGRIN: an opera about a hero who tries in vain to pacify a divided people. Kasper Holten's production deliberately leaves open whether this leader fights by fairer means ... Conductor: James Conlon; Director: Kasper Holten; With Ryan Speedo Green, David Butt Philip, Jennifer Davis, Jordan Shanahan, Yulia Matochkina, Dean Murphy et al.
Election campaign in Brabant - Kasper Holten stages Wagner's LOHENGRIN as a timeless political power play in times of mediocracy, in which images often achieve more than a thousand arguments. And even if the clichés used are well known, they still have an effect, whether in democracy or dictatorship: as a sovereign man of action, fighting the floods with a sandbag and rubber boots, as a caring father with a toddler in his arms, or as a hero with a burst of potency, diving, climbing, or in the cockpit of a fighter jet. Whether you can actually fly it is secondary, but it still looks good ... What counts is the pose, the staging of the hero - and the associated message: the radiant victor at the head of the state leads you to salvation. The question of how to get to the top of the state, however, is often ignored. And so quite a few politicians who had shone brightest, most confidently into the cameras in this country, are no longer in office after the question about their past has brought unpleasant truths to light. "If you recognize him, he must depart from you".

If one imagines Lohengrin as one of these politicians who has mastered the media gesture and uses the most powerful images and legends to build a salvation myth around himself, one can easily understand him as a power-political dazzler who senses his chance to establish a new state, a new system, a new ideology in broken German lands. One can find an astonishing number of passages in Wagner's text and music that would support such a reading. Take, for example, the interrogative ban: Elsa is in mortal danger, accused of the murder of her brother Gottfried. Lohengrin offers her his help, but by no means unconditionally. Before he fights for her, he proposes a deal: She should marry him, but never ask who he is. Of course she agrees, what else can she do? A true hero would probably have chosen a different order. At another point, too, Lohengrin proves to be a not entirely fair partner for Elsa: He placates her panic that he might leave her again: She need not worry if she only does his bidding. A little later, he reveals that he intended to stay only a year and then return to his homeland. He was not concerned with the woman, but with the position she could give him. His goal was the political game. Elsa was the stage on which he made his grand entrance. It was quite simply electioneering in Brabant.

Of course, the tendency to political calculation does not per se make Lohengrin an intriguer of the ilk of Iago; this role is rather assigned to Ortrud, who as the adversary of the young ambition fights for the preservation of the old order in the state - with her husband Telramund at its head. To see the swan knight as a full-blooded politician whom one idolizes despite his obvious tricks, however, illustrates that strategic political manipulation is often perceived as a necessary method in statecraft. Even blatantly hypocritical demonstrations of steadfastness, vitality and strength can be far more valid to the easily influenced fearful citizen than righteousness and utopian do-gooderism.

One could find the media hero Lohengrin sympathetic and the power struggle sporting, were it not for the threat of war and the already devastating battle cries. In view of the bloodthirsty belligerence that becomes loud in Wagner's work, and in view of the fact that the victor of the election - whoever it will be now - will lead thousands of men into war and turn women into widows, in view of the delusion that war could be an honorable undertaking, a worthy adventure for young men, any trivializing gesture immediately pales in comparison to publicity-grabbing misdirection. When, according to the motto "Whoever is not for us is against us," a war is instigated and a fight to the death is called for, principles of reasonable political insight are put to the test, whether it is a democratic state or an authoritarian state that pretends to be concerned about the social welfare of its citizens.

Elsa understands this. She sees through Lohengrin, she questions him, exposes his self-absorbed striving for power, even if she sees no alternative for her country, even if there is no successor for the ruler of Brabant in view of Gottfried's disappearance. If the convicted hero wants to stay in power, he must develop serious intentions and prove himself as a self-proclaimed protector of the people or, in other cases, as a "flawless democrat," because from now on he is under observation. He must assert himself without the armor of myth and renounce the charisma of being led by the foreign power. And then let's see. This content has been machine translated.