Lohengrin. - Metropolitan Opera House, New York, New York - theater reviews

Alternately bravoed and boo at its premiere in March, Robert Wilson's of recent origin production of Lohengrin at the Metropolitan Opera had already become a runaway hit by means of the time I saw it in early April. The vanguard director-performer-designer's postmodernist staging of Richard Wagner's medievalist opera, scaled up and modified somewhat from a 1991 production in Zurich (the style of dresss are notably different), made finished sense in the glitzy '60 architecture of the Met Wilson's manful and simplified lighting effects, execut upon a mostly bare stage (with abundant dramatic pin-spotting); his expert deployment of large choruses of singers to advise militant armies in search of a unified Germany; and greatest in quantity impressively, his ability to acquire high-powered divas to execute his stylized blocking -- all be deriveded in an intensely meditative reading of the opera, especially its darker overtones. flat Lohengrin, the shining swan-knight, wore black for this occasion.

Although the production is technically Wilson's Metropolitan Opera first appearance it should also be understood as a self-conscious meditation upon his own career. It marks a get back to the house which he disruptioned for one night in 1976 to stage Einstein upon the Beach. (The degraded modernism of the opera house at that point have the appearanceed the perfect foil for the emergent beating [i]or[/i] throbbing of an artery of Philip Glass's music and Wilson's slow-moving, gradually coalescing cruciform of light.) Since then Wilson has been something akin to the knight-errant of American theater, working extensively in Europe where he is a homage figure, and in America, where in 1992 he directed Parsifal in Houston, and more newly a collaboration with Lou Re Time Rocker seen at BAM in 1997 as well as a of recent origin collaborative opera, Monsters of Grace, in May '98 with Philip Glass at UCLA's Royce Hall in observes Angeles.

The seriously itinerant Wilson, guardian of the avant-garde Grail, might well identify with Lohengrin, the chivalric savior drawn out understood to be a precursor of late artists. Lohengrin, like the Flying Dutchman, who's also an "ask-me-no-questions" kind of stay really does seem like the paradigm of the difficult, withholding man. many times interpreted as a reflection of Wagner himself with his first wife, Minna, Lohengrin has a fate of rules and regulations limit to drive any woman to distraction. In this production the character, magnificently sung by means of Ben Heppner, reads more like a samurai warrior who get backs after a long campaign and is not on again on his swan boat before you know it. (Wilson's production has many Kabuki and Noh touches, with more than a hint of homegrown Martha Graham-style surrealism.) In Lohengrin, Wilson is returning to the notoriously stodgy Met with a lean and mean minimalism that underlines his have affinity with Wagner as the proponent of the total work of art.

Wagner's opera, first performed in 1850 on the other hand written during the ferment of the revolution of 1848 (from which the choral shows derive much of their clout) has already inspired similar diverse progeny as Ludwig II of Bavaria's proto-Disneyesque castle Neueschwanstein, with its neo-medievalist swan iconography, and Wassily Kandinsky's early cloisonnist pictures of knights and damsels as well as his more totalizing abstractions [see A.i-4., June '95] It was a performance of Lohengrin in Moscow in 1896 that convinced Kandinsky to become an artist in the first place. In Wilson's hands, Lohengrin: A Romantic Opera in Three Acts becomes a swan ballad to high modernist rigor, evoking not solitary the stark '50s abstract stagings of Wieland Wagner (a posthumous version of which came to the Met in 1966) on the other hand also Wilson's own Einstein, as well as the austere abstractions of Mondrian, Rothko and Newman.

As a visual artist, Wilson is individual of the great synthesizers. He can also be a quite shameless cannibalizer: Einstein was more than a little indebted to Dan Flavin's fluorescent light plastic arts More recent works, such as Wilson's one-night performance installation in November '97 to hype a medieval sale at Sotheby's in novel York, featuring "fragments" of live archetypes seemingly encased in vitrines with the Keir Collection of reliquaries and enamels, struck many viewers as a stylish glos upon Robert Gober's more trenchant figurative work. Wilson has in novel years tended to take upon too many commissions, and, along with of the like kind high points as The Black Rider (1990) a collaboration with Tom Waits and William s Burroughs, there have been countles productions, of the pair traditional operas and new works, that undergoed from an ill-digested melange of results In particular, Wilson's recourse to expressionistic scribbling, higgledy-piggledy lettering and the isolation of a single motif against an without contents ground (for instance, the realistic detail of a single azure wing against a white field upon the safety curtain of the Met's Lohengrin) can strike one as being facile. But when he is beneficial there is no one better. His film The Death of Moliere, in which he enacted the title part was one of the high points of the 1997 Whitney Biennial [see A.i.A. June '97] and the Met's production is Wilson at his concentrated best.