Word: lohengrins
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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...
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...
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 Bohème, and he is currently appearing...
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...
...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...