Wagner’s great -grandson, Katharina, is choking his own production of ‘Lohengrin‘. It had to be released in the Lyceum in 2020, just when the first confinement by the pandemic was decreed. Then the premiere moved to Leipzig, but there the theater … He ended up renouncing the assembly due to its technical complexity. The Lyceum was programmed again for this 2025: the functions will begin next Monday, March 17. In full essays, it was announced that the soprano Iréne Theorina goddess for the Liceo public, would not participate in the function of the day of the premiere, “for artistic discrepancies” with Katharina Wagner, according to the official statement. Yesterday, when the day of showing off his staging at a press conference finally arrived, the illustrious great -granddaughter decided, at the last moment, to plant the high school and the press and not appear to the appointment.
The slim artistic director of the Lyceum, Victor García de GomaA, he went to the way with a little convincing explanation, in which he tried to make the creative’s attitude pass by professionalism: «Creative processes bring scarce moments of euphoria and others that can be more frustrating. We are all sure that on Monday we will release. Saving these challenges and activating the necessary levers is what makes all good professionals, and I have no doubt that the problems that may be will be solved in favor of production, in favor of the Lyceum and favor of Katharina Wagner, of the singers, etc. A production, incidentally, has had a cost of 1.2 million euros for only six functions.
García de Gomar also explained that the disagreement between Wagner and Théorin comes before the production of ‘Lohengrin‘, and is totally oblivious to the theater, although it has ended up splashing it by being in the midst of this “discrepancy” between Divas. “We have sought a solution that would overcome obstacles,” he said. The solution is that Theorin will sing five of the six functions, but the night of the premiere will not take the stage. A maneuver with few precedents for which the complicity of another great Wagnerian soprano has been needed, MERINA-LIISA Väreläwhich will assume the role of Ortud a single function, Monday’s.
Katharina Wagner’s ‘lohengrin’, like everyone who has previously done with his great -grandfather’s operas, promises to generate controversy when he finally opens. The stage director has decided to turn bad characters, and vice versa. So much so that even the swan, traditionally of an unpolluted white, is here of black. Precisely the poor Anáido has erected as one of the “challenges” of the assembly, since the one that appears on the scene is a robot with remote control that, according to García de Gomar’s explanations, has given problems of a diverse nature to move along the stage and open the wings.
On the changes in the character of the characters, the tenor Klaus Florian Vogt He points out that “it is the first production in which I have to do wrong, and I love it, because I have found colors in the score that I had never found before.” To the cast are added Elisabeth Teige like Elsa and Günther Groissböck in the role of King Heinrich.
The musical director, Josep Ponshe says that in the Wagner libretto he deliberately left “cracks” that are those that allow more or less free readings, as is the case. Pons stressed that, chronologically, ‘Lohengrin’ is closer to the last classicism, “like Beethoven’s ‘fidelio’ and Schubert’s works” than from the works of maturity of Wagner himself. Written at a time when “what was carried was the Belcanto”, the score of the German baby from those sources at the same time that advances some of the features that will characterize its subsequent production. A masterpiece, then, of opulent instrumentation and semantic use of the ‘leitmotiv’ as never before had any other composer.
Now we need to see whether Katharina Wagner will be present or not on the day of the premiere, to receive the applause or boos of the public. Asked about this issue, García de Gomar could only answer, resigned: “I am not Katharina Wagner, and I cannot assure anything right now.”
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