The Prelude to Lohengrin is about The Grail, and nothing but The Grail. It contains no thematic references to anything else, not even the antagonistic forces that are of determinative importance in the work. In a good program note, Christopher Browner reproduces Wagner’s own visualization of the Prelude’s development, of the gradual approach of an angel host bearing the golden chalice, which is almost too radiant to behold, and then of its gradual recession, its task of purification accomplished. Wagner did not intend his description to be made visible in the theatre; he meant it for the mind’s eye of each receptor, as evoked by the ear in communion with the miraculous music. But no operatic auteur of our time will allow such communion—the eye must rule. Girard summons the circling planets and moons from his Parsifal, where cosmic doings had at least a rusty artificial leg to lean on in the form of Schopenhauerian spacetime concepts, at once numinous and noumenonymous, that Wagner had by then embraced. This spectacle is observable through a ragged opening in a set we can’t yet make out. The flying objects accelerate, and about three minutes in, the most prominent of them explodes like a bursting tomato, timed to the same shattering climax at which Bob of Bob^(I) chugged his tall glass of milk, evidently his personal Grail. The Bob occurrence, though, was much the more powerful of the two, for in it an excellent mimetic performer stood perhaps fifteen feet from me, quaffing a mysterious but clearly sacred draught, while someone’s excellent recording of the Prelude resounded in a small theatre on Fourth Street. Here, we had only tacky sci-fi in a huge space that gobbled up the supposedly galactic one. Far better that we had all sat in the darkened auditorium, listening.

At “rise,” I feared for a moment I’d stumbled into yet another revival of Zeffirelli’s Turandot (see 12/31/21 and 05/06/22). There was the dark, cowl-like set, with huddled masses of oddly dressed people mawing about. And here, in place of The Mandarin with his pronouncements, came The Herald with his! I snapped to quickly enough to realize that this Lohengrin was to take place in a half-ruined world detached in both time and place from that of the work, yet—unlike Wilson’s—not fully abstracted. Several possible times are suggested in its costuming ^(II) and several possible places in its settings; it’s just that none of them coincide with the indicated ones. This is again more easily gotten away with in Parsifal, which takes place in a realm that, though worldly, is “unnahbar euren Schritten“—inaccessible to all but the knightly noble who are pure of heart, or perhaps to someone so unworldly as to be utterly innocent, a holy fool. Lohengrin, though, like Tannhäuser, is historically grounded, and meant to be played in a “realistic” manner, i. e., one that is believable to its audience in recognizable, real-world terms. This production has no such intent, either in its depressing physical setting (the Bridal Chamber Scene being the nadir, played under the cowl before a screen of torn metal) or in its Personenregie.