I will have a couple of sad notes to append to today’s article, but first a cheerier one: Joseph Horowitz, author of the recent award-winning Dvořak’s Prophecy and The Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music and many other books, is now publishing a novel, The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York. The sojourn (1907-1911) of Gustav Mahler and his ever-intriguing wife Alma in New York, first with the Metropolitan and then with the re-organizing Philharmonic, has  been given relatively slight attention by his biographers. So a book dedicated to this period, so crucial in the history of both organizations and so close to the end for Mahler himself, is self-recommending to opera and classical music devotees—all the more so for providing a close-in view of the intimate life of this extraordinary couple. The Marriage is being published in late April by Blackwater Press, and can be pre-ordered here. 

The first thing to be recorded about the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin is that it replaces the one designed and directed by Robert Wilson in 1998, which in any case had not been in the repertory for 17 years. That effort was abstract, emotionally cold, executed in a glacially slow-motion mimetic style and governed by a theory of the “separation of elements” (above all, of music from action) that was specifically and intentionally anti-Wagnerian, and occasionally beautiful, though for the most part in ways unrelated to the opera. At the time, it was the longest step the company had yet taken in the direction of postmodern, auteurial, eye-over-ear production. I wrote about it, about Wilson’s aesthetic, and about a species of companion piece called Bob (we might think of it as a comic intermezzo to the opera seria called Lohengrin) at length in Opera as Opera, to which I refer any interested parties.

The new Lohengrin is directed by François Girard, with the collaboration of a design team headed by Tim Yip (set and costumes), and is conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. I will get to it, and to thoughts about the work itself, in “Lohengrin, Part 2: Production,” next week. But first, in line with my insistence that just because most contemporary productions stand opera’s natural balance of elements (between ear and eye, action and environment) on its head doesn’t mean I have to follow suit, let me give due attention first to performance. In experienced time, as distinct from clock time, this was the longest Lohengrin I’ve ever seen or heard. This had nothing to do with redactions or restorations. Unless some cut slipped past me amid other distractions, the score was rendered complete except for the extension to “In fernem Land,” wherein Lohengrin explains Gottfried’s enchantment and his own selection in Grail Land to answer the call from Elsa, and the choral responses. This is musically one of the score’s lesser passages, and it clogs up the progression from the Narrative to the climax, for which reasons Wagner decided it should be eliminated. Nearly all productions, and even most recordings, have followed his advice.

Nor was the experienced duration due to the tempos chosen by the conductor. In fact, throughout Act 1 I was hopeful that this might be the best of N-S’s readings I’d yet heard.  In the Prelude there were places I wished had been given more definition, as with the ascending violins over a pp tremolando in Bar 15 (the violins are in eight parts here), marked as phrased staccati and later echoed in Lohengrin’s Act 3 Narrative to the words “um neu zu stärken seine Wunderkraft” (“to strengthen afresh its [the Grail’s] miraculous power”—referring to the Heavenly Dove’s yearly descent). N-S glided through this as if to tamp that thought down, and indeed the strings were, in terms of sonority, the weakest element throughout the evening. Still, the Vorspiel was at least sweetly played, and gathered climactic force where needed. The action started at a decent clip, if without any real sense of a mustering forth, and throughout the act all that trumpet work, onstage and in the pit, was crisp, the short punctuating chords under the Herald’s proclamations precise, and things in general swang along nicely right through the finale. So far, so good in the bright, smoothed, high-center-of-gravity Late Modern manner, to which the only antidotes we have had in this century in big German scores have come from Christian Thielemann and Daniele Gatti. From there on, however, the pit fell into a swoon, if not a coma. The problem was signaled with the ominous opening phrases of Act 2, where those groaning cello and low woodwind depths had nary a hint of their wonted grating buzz and the subsequent build-up into the Ortrud/Telramund scene had none of the brooding tension, the anguish, it must have. And so it went to the end: nothing wrong with the tempos, and nothing technically wrong with the playing, either, save that it lacked the essential quality of an operatic orchestra, that of suspenseful dramatic action, and therefore of meaningful engagement with the singers, under whose work there was not the web of thematic development and summoning of atmosphere needed to establish an interactive sonic environment. Then, two or three times, we got a great obliterative blast from the brass, far out of the proportions otherwise observed. At this point, we have heard enough of N-S to realize that this is his predilection, and that the longer he remains the shaper of the Met orchestra, choosing new players and grooming the lot, the more that predilection will prove determinative. The soundstage came to life periodically through the work of the chorus (Donald Palumbo, Chorus Master), whose excellent balance among choirs, exactitude of rhythm and attack, and sheer numerical sufficiency provided what grandeur there was to be had.