Lohengrin

Art in America, Sept, 1998 by Brooks Adams

Alternately bravoed and booed at its premiere in March, Robert Wilson's new production of Lohengrin at the Metropolitan Opera had already become a runaway hit by 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 costumes are notably different), made perfect sense in the glitzy '60s architecture of the Met. Wilson's bold and simplified lighting effects, executed on a mostly bare stage (with much dramatic pin-spotting); his expert deployment of large choruses of singers to suggest militant armies in search of a unified Germany; and most impressively, his ability to get high-powered divas to execute his stylized blocking -- all resulted in an intensely meditative reading of the opera, especially its darker overtones. Even Lohengrin, the shining swan-knight, wore black for this occasion.

Although the production is technically Wilson's Metropolitan Opera debut, it should also be understood as a self-conscious meditation on his own career. It marks a return to the house which he rented for one night in 1976 to stage Einstein on the Beach. (The degraded modernism of the opera house at that point seemed the perfect foil for the emergent pulse 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 cult figure, and in America, where in 1992 he directed Parsifal in Houston, and more recently a collaboration with Lou Reed, Time Rocker, seen at BAM in 1997, as well as a new collaborative opera, Monsters of Grace, in May '98 with Philip Glass at UCLA's Royce Hall in Los Angeles.

The seriously itinerant Wilson, guardian of the avant-garde Grail, might well identify with Lohengrin, the chivalric savior long understood to be a precursor of modern artists. Lohengrin, like the Flying Dutchman, who's also an "ask-me-no-questions" kind of guy, really does seem like the paradigm of the difficult, withholding man. Often interpreted as a reflection of Wagner himself with his first wife, Minna, Lohengrin has a lot of rules and regulations bound to drive any woman to distraction. In this production the character, magnificently sung by Ben Heppner, reads more like a samurai warrior who returns after a long campaign and is off 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 own affinity with Wagner as the proponent of the total work of art.

Wagner's opera, first performed in 1850 but written during the ferment of the revolution of 1848 (from which the choral scenes derive much of their clout), has already inspired such 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 song to high modernist rigor, evoking not only the stark '50s abstract stagings of Wieland Wagner (a posthumous version of which came to the Met in 1966) but also Wilson's own Einstein, as well as the austere abstractions of Mondrian, Rothko and Newman.

As a visual artist, Wilson is one 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 sculptures. More recent works, such as Wilson's one-night performance installation in November '97 to hype a medieval sale at Sotheby's in New York, featuring "fragments" of live models seemingly encased in vitrines with the Keir Collection of reliquaries and enamels, struck many viewers as a stylish gloss on Robert Gober's more trenchant figurative work. Wilson has in recent years tended to take on too many commissions, and, along with such high points as The Black Rider (1990), a collaboration with Tom Waits and William S. Burroughs, there have been countless productions, of both traditional operas and new works, that suffered from an ill-digested melange of effects. In particular, Wilson's recourse to expressionistic scribbling, higgledy-piggledy lettering and the isolation of a single motif against an empty ground (for instance, the realistic detail of a single blue wing against a white field on the safety curtain of the Met's Lohengrin) can seem facile. But when he is good, there is no one better. His film The Death of Moliere, in which he enacted the title role, 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.