He must have been pleased, then, to find that the Bayreuth designers had found one of those clever analogies to deflate the whole business of the knight with superhero powers, renewed in him annually by the mysterious Christian force of the Grail. Lohengrin can now be ‘Lectricman, or, in the original, ‘Lektrikmann.^(I) Upstage center is a transmission tower with a radiating clockface emblem like those seen on early radio sets. Down in the playing area is a cluster of (I am informed) Tesla Coils, crucial to the development of wireless transmission and sometimes called the Holy Grail of that once-miraculous technology—miraculous but, like Picasso’s paintings, manmade. Sharon is thus able to sidestep the mythic/religious aspects of the opera, though, ironically, at the cost of losing all the ambiguity that adheres to the supernatural. An electric blue is the prevalent color, the principals’ hair included—a choice that for us in New York recalls the abstract, often beautiful imagery of Robert Wilson’s Met production. ^(II) From the Bridal Chamber Scene on, a strong orange selectively intrudes. The Coils hold out the hope of rescue: The accused Elsa snuggles up to one and caresses it. When the signal gets through to her hero, he comes arcing in on a flash of light, wielding a lightning-bolt sword. He’s dressed in a blue service uniform, your local repairman come to save the day. The principals get wings, too, insect wings. They’re like military stripes of rank: Lohengrin is awarded one and Telramund stripped of one after their duel. Maintaining straight-faced dignity while sporting blue hair and bugs’ wings cannot have been easy. But performers have learned to buy in.

All this is by way of macro interpretation, the framework within which Sharon is staging and guiding his performers. With the exception of a baffling, embarrassingly acted tussle between the Herald and factions of the King’s subjects, most of that is quite conventional, at least up until the inversion of meaning late in the show. No one will say it, but it’s funny, Theatre of the Ridiculous funny. As parody goes, it’s a step above Opera Man, and must fight every step of the way against the staunch opposition of Wagner’s words and music, but its basic posture remains comedic, the things young fans giggle about brought to pass on the Festspielhaus stage. And the more solemnly such things are presented, the funnier they are. The interpretation begins to turn in the Ortrud/Telramund scene, though we don’t quite pick up on it till a little later. When Friedrich has finished his anguished rant and Ortrud has settled him down, somewhere around “Weisst du, wer dieser Held,” slowly circling, she ties him up with cord she happens to have about her. He submits passively as she instructs him. We could take this metaphorically—she’s working her wiles, enmeshing him in her coils—but no, it’s actually happening, a sort of Mickey Mousing of the symbol, of which there’s a fair amount in the production. She lets him go, of course, to do her bidding. Cut to the Orange Glow wedding night, and we have Lohengrin binding Elsa to one of the coils with some cord he also happens to have about him (he’s an electrician, after all). “Höchstes vertrau’n” is, for some fifteen bars, quite stern-sounding, so there’s our musical analog. He turns lasciviously monstrous while she struggles—is she trying to free herself, or having an orgasm? Or trying to free herself and having an orgasm in the process? Ambiguous. The hilarity is nearly cut short by Harteros, whose writhings are quite convincing, and here we could say truly that Sharon has found strong actions and obstacles for his characters, although in a perverse cause. Elsa finally feels the force, and the bonds pop.