Backstage with Matthew: The Creative Journey of Lohengrin 

There is a wonderful interview with Eun Sun in the Lohengrin program book in which she talks to her journeys through both Wagner and Verdi, which I encourage you to read. Lohengrin also marks the return of director David Alden to the company. He debuted with us in 2005 with Handel’s Rodelinda and we’re excited to have him back with this co-production of Lohengrin, a production that originated in London at the Royal Opera House in 2018 in a co-production with Opera Vlaanderen (Antwerp and Ghent in Belgium). I sat down with David recently during rehearsals to learn more about his creative process in bringing this production to life.

An image from the Royal Opera House’s production of Lohengrin (photo: Clive Barda)

I love the moment of inception of creative projects—the moment where the seed of an idea is planted. This production’s inception is beautifully synergistic. David was at a party in Antwerp in a venue that overlooked the main river in the city, the Scheldt. The river is important in Lohengrin lore because it’s the river that Lohengrin journeys down on the back of a swan. Looking out over this river, the then-intendant of Opera Vlaanderen, Aviel Cahn, asked David if he would create a new Lohengrin. It was the perfect place to ‘pop the question’ for this particular opera!

The River Scheldt in Antwerp (photograph Peter Köves)

It was an opportunity David jumped at. Not counting Wagner’s early operas like Die Feen, Das Liebersverbot and Rienzi, there are ten mature operas by Wagner that form the canon of his works. David had already directed eight of the ten operas at this point, so was eager to take on Lohengrin (he has since added the tenth - The Flying Dutchman this past summer in Santa Fe). Working through the operas has been something of a life journey for David—a life journey that began at age 16.

Well, maybe it began even before David was born. A life in the theater was maybe pre-destined for David and his twin brother, Christopher. Christopher is also a revered opera director and will be back with us in June with Partenope. Their mother, Barbara Gaye, was a dancer, working in ballet and in Broadway musicals. She danced in the original Annie Get Your Gun with Ethyl Merman, and was dancing in the show up to her 8^th month of pregnancy, carrying David and Christopher! They spent almost every day in the womb listening to Ethel Merman singing “There’s No Business like Show Business”. It clearly rubbed off!

At age 15, David and Christopher started going to the Metropolitan Opera on their own. They thought they should go because the Old Met was closing that year and it was their last chance to see operas there. They were hooked, and they both soaked up as much opera as they could. It quickly became their shared passion in life—the way through which they both made sense of the world. And, for David, Wagner became a particular passion. He knew at age 16 that Wagner was going to be a very important part of his life.

So, back to the River Scheldt, and the offer of a new Lohengrin. It was a very easy yes, particularly because it would be a co-production with the prestigious Royal Opera House in London. David knew the piece intimately already—he collects historic recordings, and has at least thirty historic recordings of Lohengrin. His favorites are the Rudolf Kempe recording, and the recording featuring Lauritz Melchior and Lotte Lehmann conducted by Artur Bodanzky.

One of David Alden’s favorite recordings of Lohengrin

So how does the creative process unfold once you’ve been offered a new production? For David, it is a very iterative process. He invited his long-term designer colleague Paul Steinberg to work on this with him. David and Paul have worked together since the late 1970s and so have a wonderful fluency and ease of process together. They work for a year or two finding the right way into an opera like this, developing a concept and framework, and then creating the architecture, the logistics, and the specifics of the set, going back and forth with models as the concept crystalizes.

For David, while Lohengrin is a tale of wish fulfillment—a knight in shining armor rescuing a damsel in distress, it has a much darker, political overtone to it. Wagner wrote the opera in the mid-19^th Century at the height of political fervor around the unification of the German city-states. Wagner himself was exiled to Switzerland after his own political activism. The rhetoric in the opera around political unification ultimately made the opera an easy target for appropriation by the Third Reich as they proselytized a much scarier idea of unification.

An image from the Royal Opera House’s production of Lohengrin (photo: Clive Barda)

The political element is very important in David’s interpretation of the piece. David wanted to bring it into a more modern context—a world in the midst of war, bombed, shaken-up, being militarized. A world in which the population is at once in need of rescue, but is also being pulled into the insidious evil of darkness, represented by the iconography of fascism. And even a person who comes into this world from a place of light, goodness, and even holiness (a Knight of the Holy Grail), still risks becoming dragged into the ugliness of war.

Paul Steinberg’s set becomes a European city, bombed out, destroyed, with people being herded together, trying to survive. The huge bombed out buildings are off-kilter, imposing, shells of their former selves, reconfigured throughout the opera to take us into different aspects of this world at war.  The production originated before Russia invaded Ukraine, but the resonance with what is happening in Ukraine now has become incredibly pertinent as we see damaged apartment buildings, displaced populations, and the hopelessness of war. In Lohengrin, a ruler (in this case a King) is forcing the population to participate by joining a massive army, and it is into this world that the knight, Lohengrin, enters to save Elsa, who is being held prisoner.

Rehearsing Lohengrin during our summer tech weeks. David Alden is on the front edge of the stage, fourth from the right.

In David’s conception of the work, Lohengrin gets pulled deeper and deeper into the darkness of the war. Lohengrin is a man of responsibility—his duty as a Knight of the Grail is to help those beset by evil—but he cannot insulate himself fully from this world. He is gradually pulled into it, up to the point at which he is charged with leading this new mega army of the King, and to the point where he suddenly has blood on his hands after killing the insidious Telramund (admittedly in self-defense). For David, it is not just Elsa asking the forbidden questions (who are you, and where are you from?) that send Lohengrin back to Monsalvat; it is also Lohengrin’s realization that he is in too deep—he has to extricate himself to protect himself from the world that is sullying him and pulling him in against his oaths as a Knight of the Grail.

David is passionate about the creative process with the singers. It is often the case when productions travel internationally that a director will entrust revivals to an associate director. But for David, it is critically important to stay connected to revivals, particularly when there are new casts. He notes that productions develop and mature over time—when you only have six weeks in rehearsal (particularly for these long Wagner operas), there are things that you just can’t get to the first time around. Staying connected with the productions allows David to keep developing and refining. But then there is also his love of crafting the show afresh for new singers—it’s not just recreating what happened before, but rather interpreting anew based on the specific personalities of a new cast.

David Alden (lower left) working with Julie Adams, Simon O’Neill and Kristin Sigmundsson.

As an example, David talks about the character of Lohengrin. All the other characters go on dramatic journeys in the work—they have motivations, back stories, ambitions—interesting dynamics that can frame their character development. But Lohengrin is an oddity—he is intentionally a conundrum, a mystery. No-one knows where he’s come from; both Elsa and the community embrace him on blind faith. David’s sense is that Lohengrin himself doesn’t really understand who he is beyond being a man of duty, of responsibility. He’s there to a do a job, and he does so with a certain remove from society. But that is a huge challenge for director and singer alike—how to play someone of such ambiguity without those foundational motivations so important for character development? This is a great example of why David likes to stay connected to his productions—each tenor playing Lohengrin will approach this ambiguity differently, and it’s important to tap into each singer’s strengths, and build that language of ambiguity up in the rehearsal room. David has loved doing this with our Lohengrin, Simon O’Neill—he brings such imagination and positivity to the role.

David Alden (left) working with Julie Adams (Elsa) and Simon O’Neill (Lohengrin)

Elsa’s journey is no less complex. It’s important to David that he find a way past the 19^th-century cliches of what a woman should be, i.e. not asking certain questions and subjugated to her male protector (much as in Bluebeard’s Castle). As with many of Wagner’s heroines, despite this superficial subjugation, they are the heart and moral force of the opera. It’s that very complex image of a Wagnerian hero who on the surface has no power, but in reality lifts up all those around her and drives forward the action.

The swan plays an important role in Lohengrin as both the means by which the knight enters, but also ultimately the transformation into the new hope and promise for this city state as the swan is transformed back into Elsa’s brother Gottfried. I love how David’s production incorporates the swan. It’s not the easiest of things to do: how do you bring in a grown man on the back of a swan without it becoming hokey? I don’t want to give it away here, but it is a spectacular coup de theater—an incredibly impactful effect in which you feel the beating wings of the swan arriving. David muses on that fine line between the real magic of a fairy tale, and the possibility that it’s a mass hallucination—everyone wishing so much for something to be so that they believe it. That question also extends to Lohengrin himself—like so many of Wagner’s more mythic heroes—the Dutchman or Kundry being two others. Are these truly characters that exist in some other realm, able to exist across millennia, or are they manifestations of some form of psychosis?

In that is the power of Wagner’s operas, and of great opera in general—works that at the same time allow us to experience vast archetypes and the immediacy of our own lives. Wagner himself demanded an idolatry that can at times make him feel almost archetypal, whether in his relationship with his wife, Cosima, or even his patron King Ludwig II of Bavaria. Interestingly, the opera that introduced Ludwig to Wagner at the age of just 15 was Lohengrin.

David talking with directing and stage management colleagues: left to right – Roy Rallo, Peter Relton, David Alden, Dan Wallace Miller, Darin Burnett

I’m so excited for you to see our Lohengrin on stage. It is a work of so many incredible layers and with the musical leadership of Eun Sun Kim and the direction of David Alden, we will have something that connects us to Lohengrin in deeply resonant ways. And, in a synergistic return back to where this production all started, looking out over the River Scheldt, the third act of the opera features the beautiful artwork of August von Heckel and the arrival of Lohengrin into Antwerp on that very river.

Detail from August von Heckel’s The Arrival of Lohengrin in Antwerp. The original is in Neueschwanstein, King Ludwig II’s fairytale castle in Bavaria.