Going for the Grail at the Met

By Michael Walsh

Placido Domingo triumphs in Wagner's Lohengrin

Thanks to the proliferation of summer festivals, opera, like football, is practically a year-round proposition these days. Even so, the fall openings of major international companies like New York City's Metropolitan Opera still have a glamorous cachet, and provide the occasion to muster a spectacular vocal show. Last week the Met did just that with a starry production of Wagner's Lohengrin.*

It was a night devoted to singing, and the cast, conducted by the company's music director, James Levine, was a rich international assemblage that included the splendid Bulgarian soprano Anna Tomowa-Sintow as the gentle maiden Elsa, the fiery Hungarian soprano Eva Marton as the scheming Ortrud and the hearty Danish bass Aage Haugland as King Henry the Fowler. Most notable of all, as Lohengrin, the mysterious knight of the Holy Grail, it featured Placido Domingo on one of his rare forays into the German repertoire. What looked at first like a mismatch turned out to be a gamble that paid off handsomely.

Since the death of Wolfgang Windgassen in 1974, Wagnerites have bewailed the dearth of stalwart voices to tackle parts like Lohengrin, Tristan and Siegfried. Although he has said that he would some day like to sing Parsifal and perhaps Tristan, Domingo's natural territory is the lyric roles of Italian and French opera. It is too much to expect him to become a true Heldentenor: he lacks the sheer force to surge over Wagner's complex orchestral writing, his German diction is heavily Latinized, and his phrasing belongs to the Mediterranean, not the Teutonic, school. But as an example of pure vocalism, his Lohengrin was a stunning success.

Domingo began slowly, pacing himself for the nearly five-hour evening. His singing in Act I was careful but not tentative; he infused Lohengrin's valedictory to his swan with the wistful Italianate warmth of a love song. In the second act, he sang passionately as Lohengrin tries to protect Elsa, his betrothed, from Ortrud's Iago-like machinations. By the third act, he was in full command, delivering the difficult Grail narration, in which Lohengrin sorrowfully reveals his identity and his obligation to leave Elsa, with power and poignancy. It may not have been idiomatic, but it was elegant and persuasive.

This was not the first time Domingo has tried Wagner. In 1968 he sang Lohengrin in Hamburg, and in 1976 he recorded Walther von Stolzing in Die Meistersinger. Despite the beauty of the singing, his voice was too light then to be fully convincing. Today, at 43, his tenor is darker and more baritonal, and he thus is open to experimentation with new roles and even with new careers. Later this month, for example, Domingo makes his Met debut as a conductor, leading Puccini's La Boheme, and he is currently appearing as Don Jose in Francesco Rosi's film of Bizet's Carmen (see CINEMA).

Domingo notwithstanding, the Met's Lohengrin was far from a one-man show. Marton, a dazzling Wagnerian soprano who is equally adept at setting off such potent Italian fireworks as Turandot, made a gloriously fearsome opponent as the evil sorceress. Her blazing fury as she confronts her weak husband Telramund (Baritone Franz-Ferdinand Nentwig) near the start of Act II won a spontaneous ovation that stopped the show. Providing a worthy foil for Marton's villainy was Tomowa-Sintow, a lyric soprano with a pure, unforced voice that improved after a somewhat shaky first act; her fateful exchange with Ortrud in the second act's balcony scene evoked the stark contrast of light and dark that Wagner wanted. Alas, Elsa is not the most dramatically complex of Wagner's heroines, and Tomowa-Sintow was content to play her one-dimensionally. Although somewhat uncertain of intonation and raspy of tone, Nentwig admirably portrayed Telramund's moral degeneration.

The 1976 production by August Everding, general manager of the Bavarian State Theater, follows the contemporary European fashion of outfitting Wagner's operas in morally ambiguous shades of gray. His 10th century Brabant is a dour place; pageantry blossoms only during Lohengrin and Elsa's wedding, and the famous swan is banished to the world of the imagination. While this approach has a certain intellectual and historical validity, perhaps the time has come again for a romantic, representational Lohengrin, for Everding's interpretation is fundamentally at odds with the A-major radiance of the score.

That radiance is fully celebrated by Levine. At 41 already a brilliant conductor of Parsifal, he views Lohengrin as a kind of musical prequel to Wagner's last work. He adopted a daringly slow _ tempo for the Act I prelude, letting it burn with a fervid religiosity, but gave the chorus and onstage "brass players thrilling free rein in the opera's frequent boisterous moments. Levine has mastered the sense of timelessness so crucial to successful Wagner performances in general, and static works like Lohengrin in particular; one looks forward to the day, two seasons hence, when he takes on the more overtly dramatic Ring. May he be blessed with a collection of voices that equals the splendor of last week's. But it will not be easy to find. --By Michael Walsh

* This week the company will announce that Bruce Crawford, 55, president of the BBDO International advertising agency, will succeed Anthony A. Bliss as Met general manager in 1986.