steve's notebook

(March 27, 2011)

A question of values impacts our understanding of the action. Gracie thought Lohengrin’s demands upon Elsa ridiculous: “Do everything I ask and I shall esteem you above all women.” But it’s not really that. His condition that she never ask his name or home, the concerns surrounding his condition, it’s all about honor. He arrives to defend Elsa’s honor, no questions asked. In return, he demands that she not question his honor. The problem is not whether or not he can defend his background, but that it is a blow to his honor even to question. Likewise, Telramund’s motivation to destroy Lohengrin is all about losing his honor in the duel. Without that he’s Snidely Wiplash. But what does honor mean to us now? Fuck up? Get a reality show. Fuck up on the reality show? Get a magazine cover. Honor, as it exists in the opera, has vanished from our vocabulary. So of course Lohengrin seems absurd. We need that lens.

Elsa’s a little confusing, too. Naturally she would have some misgivings here, but she swings so easily from agreeing not to question Lohengrin to letting Ortrud shatter her confidence. They key moment in her change occurs when Ortrud suggests that Lohengrin might leave, never to be found again. What we see in this moment is that at the core of Elsa’s concern are her abandonment issues. She’s without family. She’s only just lost her brother, and mysteriously at that. The thought of another loss is what gets to her, makes her susceptible to Ortrud.

The first act put me in mind of McCarthy-esque hearings. Elsa as the “free spirit” who thinks a little differently. The court as starched and pressed 1950s America. Lohengrin as the outsider defender. This frame wouldn’t sustain well through the rest of the piece. Also, parallels Peter Grimes: outsider put on trial by the community, only one friendly voice for support. In a different look at the role of the outsider, Tony joked that they want to see Lohengrin’s birth certificate. Wagner’s Birther opera.

What is the role of the chorus here? They’re instantly changeable. One minute they’re suspicious and appositional. Two bars of character response and they’re now behind the singer. In the Horowitz book, Sondheim speaks to the problems of a chorus–they can speak with once voice–and here those problems are amplified because that one voice has no constancy.

Perhaps this is a problem with middle-period Wagner. He hasn’t yet fully let go of operatic conventions: he is led by convention to use a chorus, but doesn’t shape it as a particular force, instead as merely a reflection of whatever point of view we’ve just heard. He sticks also within a traditional sequence of ensembles and choruses. The second act could easily have ended after the ensemble if we didn’t have to throw that chorus in there to top it off. We hear him harmonically beginning to make the leaps into Ring/Tristan/Parsifal territory even though dramatically he’s still bound within these very formalized structures.