If Piotr Beczała was on guard against appearing too human, he need not have worried. On the other hand, if he wished to impress as “strange” or “almost like a god,” that didn’t happen, either. The production gave him plenty of cover in both respects, for no one dressed in fitted black pants and a white shirt with a long tail hanging out (a carryover from the Grail Knights get-up of the Girard Parsifal), and with no face or hair other than his own to show, stands any chance of conveying godliness; and no one asked to stand in an unfurnished space for the duration of the Bridal Chamber Scene, singing at his beloved across the bare expanse, can hope to convey his hunger for love (unless, in both instances, the performer is himself a person of magical voice and presence). Remaining cool does not constitute a characterization. None of the other principals fared better, being allowed no scope for anything resembling behavior. Goerke, not a theatrical adept in any case, was made to stand down center for the Act 3 Prelude, executing black-magic invocational gestures of party-trick quality to music brilliantly descriptive of the postnuptial festivities. Wilson, an oversized woman, had to kneel, then rise, during the Act 2 procession, and at my performance did not succeed in maintaining her balance. These are avoidable embarrassments.

Consider the fates of the protagonists of Wagner’s three early masterpieces, the ones that mix a historical reality with the miraculous. The Holländer is condemned for blasphemy against an angry God to an eternal life outside the human community, to which he longs to return. If he cannot, he would rather die.Through the unquestioning love of a woman who knows of his sin, he and she are redeemed in death, the Christian vision of an afterlife invoked in the apotheosis. In Tannhäuser, the hero is specified as an artist—an artist of superior (but not magical) gifts who sins by rebelling against piety, against the pretense that love has no sensual component. This opera also introduces a pre-Christian goddess, embodiment of that sensual love, as an antagonist (the co-antagonist being the merciless Pope), indicating that the old gods still live—they are only hidden. Tannhäuser is also redeemed by the unflinching love of a woman, who in this case not only knows of his sin, but sees it publicly enacted. The Christian afterlife is again understood, and represented onstage. In Lohengrin, our male protagonist’s identity takes a metaphorical, transcendent shape. He doesn’t just win song contests, he’s in another realm altogether. Nor has he sinned—exactly the contrary—and his redemption would be a sort of reverse redemption: surrendering immortality in exchange for acceptance. But because the old gods, with their magic, are still about though concealed, and his potentially redemptive woman is only human and therefore open to doubt, there can be no redemption. He is condemned to return to his chaste brotherhood, and our heroine to die, her only afterlife that of her restored younger brother. He will still have to contend with the old beliefs, because though Ortrud has collapsed (or, in Girard’s telling, simply exited, like Beckmesser), she has not died.