Wagner finally gone to the RATS!
German tenor Jonas Kaufmann in the title role of “Lohengrin,” directed by Hans Neuenfels- Bayreuth Festival, photo- Michaela Rehle
It has become practically a part of the tradition at the Bayreuth Festival for the director of an avant-garde Wagner production to be vociferously booed on opening night. So it was on July 25, when the festival opened with the new Hans Neuenfels production of “Lohengrin,” which I saw here on Tuesday, the second performance.
If regie-opera (productions driven by a director with an imposing agenda) has a ringleader, it is probably Mr. Neuenfels, especially notorious for a 2001 “Fledermaus” at the Salzburg Festival that turned this frothy, waltzing comedy into a festering exposé of kinky sex and proto-Nazism.
What is mostly inciting the ire over Mr. Neuenfels’s “Lohengrin,” with sets and costumes by Reinhard von der Thannen, is his depiction of the nobles and commoners of 10th-century Brabant as rats in a sterile modern-day laboratory. Get more from writer extraordinaire, Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/arts/music/05lohengrin.html?_r=1
