It is only four years since the director David Alden placed Wagner’s Lohengrin firmly inside an oppressive and febrile wartime setting for the Royal Opera. Today, Alden’s approach, now in the hands of Peter Relton in this first revival, feels disturbingly prescient in light of current events in Europe; the opera’s setting in a divided society threatened by war from the east has shed its historical trappings and instead become unexpectedly contemporary.
Not everything works entirely persuasively in Alden’s visceral presentation of Lohengrin’s Brabant as a quasi-fascist society, its public square dominated by an Albert Speer-style swan monument. Not least Lohengrin’s own music, especially in act three, which shows him to be anything but a fascist leader, and the militarism and red-and-black flag-waving of the production feels overdone as a consequence.
