Would you travel 7000 miles to watch a stage full of pink and white mice singing the Wedding March from Lohengrin?
Well I did, and my reward—in addition to hearing sumptuous music performed in an acoustically perfect hall—was watching the reigning Lohengrin underscoring his stardom.
Gifted with a perfect stage name, Klaus Florian Vogt also has the looks and the voice to go with it. I’d been told that I was in for a treat by several of Vogt’s global devotées, but I was not prepared for the tenor’s ravishing opening notes as the mythic knight who arrives in time to save a medieval town from its political rivals.
The voice began high in the tenor register, in a long shimmering phrase and simply spun outward into the entire hall, celestial and pure. Unearthly in fact. Vogt’s voice is lieder light, and yet it has a gorgeous crystalline tone and relentless power. His voice stayed strong and clear to the very end, where in Hans Neuenfels’ brilliant production, Lohengrin rejects human society and moves on to find a better world.
Looking and sounding exactly as a Wagnerian hero should, the blonde, rockstar handsome Vogt was beautifully set within Neuenfels’ once-controversial production. The villagers are costumed as lab rats—visually dazzling in ranks of grey costumes, which become pink and white for the wedding of Lohengrin and his duplicitous love Elsa (Edith Haller, with a heavy, rather awkward stage presence and a vibrato-laden voice). As the production evolved, the “rats”—actually the astounding Bayreuth Opera chorus who sang like robust angels—changed into more human forms, although amusingly the tails remained.
Matching Vogt, and then some, in terms of acting ability was Thomas J. Mayer, as the villainous Telramund. Mayer’s dynamic stage presence was equalled by Petra Lang, in the part of his Lady Macbethesque wife Ortrud, a role Lang owns completely. Together, storming, loving, fighting, and plotting Lang and Mayer literally chewed up the stage, the music, and each other in an indelible argument for why this sort of living Gesamtkunstwerk—total work of art—can’t be matched by any other artform.
Crisp and austere, the black and white set provided the right backdrop for the handsomely choreographed chorus of rats, as well as the opulent costume changes of Elsa and Ortrud as the good and bad sides of female wiles. Only the incomprehensible ending with a grotesque foetus presiding over the “rats” in place of Elsa’s magically revived brother threatened to mar the overall effect.
But Vogt’s gorgeous voice helped transform the production into something almost unearthly in its musical beauty.
