Medieval Murder Mystery

Kasper Holten’s production of Lohengrin for the Deutsche Oper – it opened in 2012 and has since been revived twice – is the sort of pleasingly minimal, thoughtfully conceived staging that manages to accomplish a great deal with reasonably little. The setting is not intrusive, yet the absence of medieval pageantry never robs Wagner’s knightly drama of its emotional and spiritual force. When combined with a great cast – and it is difficult to imagine a greater cast than the one which features Günther Groissböck, Waltraud Meier, Anja Harteros and Klaus Florian Vogt, all on top form – it can make for a thrillingly memorable evening. Indeed the most recent performance was every bit as exceptional as one might have hoped, despite one potentially disastrous technical problem: the swan, which appears in this production as a backlit screen, could…