From www.laopera.com

The duty of a stage director in opera is to present a musical score and its story to a given audience in the most honest and immediate manner possible. As tastes and technologies evolve, so too must methods of honest presentation. The character Hamlet states, in his speech to the players in act three of Shakespeare’s play of the same name, we are called upon “to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” In opera, where we are sometimes dealing with music that is centuries old, and stories that can be even centuries older, the challenge is always to dignify that magical combination of music and story that are so timeless as to have justified the work’s performance in our modern times, whilst holding up the mirror to show our time its form and pressure. There is the breath of the eternal in these works, a richness that begs us to reexamine their meaning in our own world.

The key to the 2010 production of Lohengrin at LA Opera is the issue of dogma: religious dogma and militaristic dogma, centrally. It is about the sort of dogma that implies disambiguation in its strictest form-creating a system of beliefs, which are held stubbornly and without evidence. The necessary counterbalance to dogma is doubt. Doubt moves debate away from good-and-evil rhetoric. It replaces high-contrast black-and-white with a grayscale landscape. It dismantles the unassailable systems of political dogma, in the best of worlds. In the worst cases doubt, dogmatic doubt even-prevents us from trusting in grace, beauty or faith.

The miracle of the title figure’s arrival-of his very existence lies at the core of Lohengrin. I began my work on this opera asking the question: what is a miracle? If a miracle were to occur now, today, in Los Angeles-how would we behave? I suspect that we would not have the wisdom or grace to understand the nature of a miracle. There would be those among us who would seize upon him as a symbol-a kind of cultural dogma, blind to the possibility of any disingenuousness. On the other side there would be those incapable of seeing the possibility of the sublime, seeing only their own doubt, skepticism and scorn. There might also be a third category: those who would understand the currency in such a miracle, the way it can move and inspire people, and cynically use the symbol of such to motivate the faithful for their own causes.

To set Lohengrin in a literal representation of now, today, would not aid in the honest presentation of this work. It would have immediately created a wedge between the audience and the work itself that would have been counterproductive in bringing the opera closer to us, and making it more immediate. Instead, the contextual bridge chosen to connect us to the themes examined in this production is the Franco-German border in the wretched last days of World War I. Although the forms, shapes and atmosphere of this period are somewhat remote to modern eyes, they provide for an aesthetic distance necessitated by the pace and scope of the score, while providing the possibility for an audience to draw certain parallels between the murky, brutal yet slightly romantic militarism of this bygone era and the sober realities of today.

So much of our world in 2010 is also colored by the last near-decade of constant conflict, both political and military. Here, contextually speaking, we share a distinct similarity with Richard Wagner’s world at the time when he wrote Lohengrin. He was a passionate supporter of the Nationalversammlung (National Assembly), which met in St Paul’s Church in Frankfurt from May 1848, calling for a constitutional monarchy to rule a new, united German nation. “Germany” at that time was an uneasy confederation of Kingdoms and Duchies that were cleaved and re-cleaved together for profit or military advantage. Wagner had to flee the Saxon capitol of Dresden after his participation in the May Uprising of 1849. In the years preceding his exile, at the same time he was composing Lohengrin, he also wrote fiery articles for the leftist Volksblätter. King Heinrich’s proud call to the chorus’s refrain in Act 3 of Lohengrin: “Für deutsches Land das deutsche Schwert! So sei des Reiches Kraft bewährt!” (For German land, the German sword! Thus will the Kingdom’s strength be proven!) is an explicitly political statement, the meaning of which would have been understood clearly by those attending performances of the opera in 1850.

On stage, we find ourselves within the three remaining walls of a bombed-out church, which has been reappointed as an improvised field hospital for the sick and injured men of Brabant. Row after row of cots supporting men broken on the battlefield are traversed by set-faced nurses moving from one man to the next.

This is a conflict-weary people with spiritual wounds at least as deep as their physical ones. The landscape surrounding the church has been leveled from repeated attacks. During one particularly awful night, while shelling can be seen bruising the sky along the horizon, a soldier is restrained by medics in the lazaret’s surgical tent. He struggles and eventually dies during an operation to remove his leg. It is a damning, “last straw” moment for the faith of those performing the surgery, including Telramund, who has been attending the men of Brabant as a medic, advocate and leader. The light in the surgical tent is extinguished. The story of yet another soldier has ended.

It is this very soldier who later appears in this production as Lohengrin, knight of the grail. He emerges from the surgical tent whole again. Healed. Replacing his ruined leg is one of perfect, otherworldly silver. He died a wretched soldier, and was reincarnated through the grace of God as a perfect knight. A leader. A miracle.

Although Lohengrin is a knight of the grail, a living saint, a gift from God-the other figures in the story are all too human. King Heinrich, seeing the joy and wonderment on the faces of the Brabantian soldiers after the arrival of the miracle, realizes that the mysterious knight could be a potent front man for his campaign to conscript the men of Brabant for battle, despite their injuries. Lohengrin, at least the symbol of Lohengrin, is thus quite useful for the Saxon conquest. This symbol proves effective and, despite their desperate condition, the men of Brabant rise as if miraculously healed, swearing their allegiance to the mystery knight.

Ortrud and Telramund, consumed by the specter of Telramund’s lost honor, devote their faith only to that which can accelerate his rehabilitation in the eyes of his countrymen, as well as their revenge against Lohengrin and Elsa. For reasons of Telramund’s pride and Ortrud’s own privately held religious dogma, they are incapable of recognizing or understanding the miracle of Lohengrin.

And Elsa-perhaps it is through Elsa that we can best see ourselves in the story of Lohengrin. She is a woman in difficult circumstances who truly and deeply believes. Even despite this, she must question the object of her faith-the object of her love. She is certainly encouraged to do so by Ortrud and Telramund, who clearly have their own agendas. She is also motivated by her own observations of the oddly fanatical zeal of her countrymen in following Lohengrin, or more accurately, the symbol of Lohengrin. Like Orpheus emerging from Hades, she is not content to simply trust that the mystical object of her passion is truly there, truly hers. She must understand its nature and origin. She asks. Orpheus turns. Both are condemned to misery for their moment of doubt.

At the end of the opera the figure of Lohengrin-truly pure, God-sent, miraculous-departs, dejected, having been betrayed by she whom he came to protect. Elsa is not alone, however, in her wretchedness. Lohengrin had been misunderstood and misappropriated by all sides-a cynical, self-serving belief on the part of the Saxons, a selfish, dogmatic doubt from Telramund and Ortrud, and an unseeing, brainwashed and utilitarian form of devotion on the part of the Brabantians.

As a parting gift to Elsa and the citizens of Brabant, Lohengrin invokes one final miracle before departing: restoring the young Gottfried, brother of Elsa, and rightful Duke of Brabant. The living saint departs, leaving a human in his wake.

This is a relief, with melancholic implications. We are flawed-human-and can only be lead by those who share these most human of flaws. Those who doubt. Those who believe disingenuously. Those who replace the miracle of faith with blind dogma. Those with agendas and special interests. We are too prideful, lustful, boastful, jealous and suspicious to look upon a true miracle with the grace necessary to even recognize the possibility of its significance.

This imperfection marks the tragedy of our existence-the reason we are human and not gods or living saints-the Brabantians. Saxons. Us.