It is not often that one sits down in the Costanzi knowing one is about to witness something that has not happened there for half a century. The second performance of Lohengrin begins in a surprisingly quiet atmosphere: no manufactured sense of occasion, no excitement of a “first night”, rather the feeling of re-entering a room that the theatre had kept closed for far too long.

I chose to be there for the second performance, as I do whenever I can, because the first is the snapshot of the premiere and the second is the moment when the production allows itself to be observed more honestly. What I found was not the triumphant return of an absent title, but the patient movement of a theatrical machine that takes Lohengrin seriously as a story about people before it is a story about symbols: a fragile community, a woman who wavers, a man who arrives to save and ends up opening wounds.

The production chooses the path of internal coherence and of a close dialogue between stage and pit. On the podium, Michele Mariotti, in his first Wagnerian outing, builds a musical discourse of great clarity; on stage, Damiano Michieletto, with Mattia Palma as dramaturg, Paolo Fantin for the sets, Carla Teti for the costumes and Alessandro Carletti for the lighting, shapes a compact, recognisable reading that does not allow itself to be seduced by chivalric folklore and instead prefers to question what Lohengrin has to say today: the need to entrust oneself to someone and the almost immediate fear of that very act of entrusting. It is a strong reading, which puts classicism away in a drawer and, in its place, sets before the spectator’s eyes a series of questions that let the unease of our time shine through.

At the heart of Michieletto’s work is his gaze on the community. The people of Brabant become a compact assembly, almost a provincial Greek chorus: they look, they judge, they tighten the characters into a circle that widens and narrows, they literally place them at the centre. The story seems like a trial that never ends: more than redemption, what dominates is the mixture of guilt, suspicion and the need to believe. The mystery of Lohengrin’s identity is only one of the knots in a broader conflict between the desire for faith and the fear of the unknown.

Fantin translates all this into a single large curved space, not disturbing but even luminous: a wooden structure that evokes at once a courtroom, an enclosure, a womb. In the first act the yellowish wood is a closed shell, warm and oppressive: it frames the groups, defines the pathways, naturally creates places of isolation and siege. In the second act the scene concentrates around a large dark egg, a sign of origin and ambivalence: it is cradle and threat, promise and danger. In the third act, when the forbidden question is finally spoken, the material is transformed: silver floods the space, the egg opens, the surfaces become reflective, slippery, almost impossible to grasp. The interplay between wood and metal is not a simple visual effect: the wood belongs to the human dimension, porous, finite; the silvered surfaces, cold and fluid, allude to another realm, akin to Lohengrin’s world, which attracts and repels at the same time.

The element of the egg appears as a strong sign, but not as a hammering allegory: it is an object that inhabits the stage and concentrates gazes, more than an interpretive key imposed from above. Far more decisive, in the test of performance, is the way this space constrains bodies: it is enough to look at Elsa when the community closes in around her, or at Telramund slipping to the margins of this shell, to understand where the staging wants to direct the gaze.

The famous motif of the swan is deliberately toned down on the illustrative level. There is no big stage animal to steal the eye: the image survives as a trace, as a detail, as a sign to be deciphered, while the direction insists on the concrete consequences of its appearing and disappearing in the bodies of the characters and in their power relations. The actors’ direction is handled with precision: Elsa is constantly placed at the centre of a system of opposing vectors – the desire to abandon herself to a promise of salvation, the need to understand and name what is happening to her; Lohengrin is not the monolithic hero, but a man who bears the weight of his own status; Ortrud acts as a strategist of doubt, lucid and insinuating; Telramund is a marked figure, driven more by resentments and frustrations than by a simple instinct of domination.

Carla Teti’s costumes seal this suspension of time: we are neither in a storybook Middle Ages nor in a strictly naturalistic present. The lines are essential, with accents that suggest twentieth-century memories and political allusions without turning into didactic illustration. Alessandro Carletti’s lighting works on the alternation of sharp cuts and shadowy areas, sudden dazzlements and half-light like an interior chamber: it illuminates and erases, reveals and wounds, contributing decisively to the perception of a world that, little by little, becomes less and less stable.

On the musical side, Mariotti offers a Lohengrin of great transparency. His reading avoids any monumental temptation and shapes a Wagner that is limpid, tense, chiselled with care in its internal relationships. The conducting never abandons itself to excesses of volume; it prefers detail to mass and musical line to sheer impact. The orchestra responds with precision, with a clearly defined play of sound planes and a constant balance between strings and winds. What surprises is the naturalness with which Mariotti approaches a title that requires a sense of dramatic breath that is anything but obvious: his interpretation maintains an almost crystalline orchestral clarity at key points, with a thinning out of the sound planes that allows Wagner’s structure to emerge with rare clearness.

This is not a weak transparency, nor an aesthetic lightening: it is a work of fine chiselling, of constant lucidity, which restores to the score an internal balance often sacrificed elsewhere. In more than one moment this clarity proves more convincing than recent performances heard in theatres far more traditionally associated with the Wagnerian repertoire. There is an unostentatious maturity, a confidence without self-indulgence, which places this reading on a high, truly high level. Mariotti has worked on narrative clarity without losing the inner tension of the score, and he supports the voices without covering them and without leaving them exposed.

The orchestra of the Teatro dell’Opera, as we were saying, responds with a compactness that never turns heavy: the strings maintain a soft but not blurred profile, the woodwinds emerge in their full narrative function, the brass are present and controlled, without any blaring excesses. Attention to theatrical breathing is constant: the tempi have an underlying tension that avoids stasis, but remain elastically anchored to the needs of the sung word and the timing of the stage. The overall design is, in the end, luminous, layered without being opaque: a Wagner in which the interweaving of inner voices is audible, in which the leitmotifs emerge as natural lines of force rather than as superimposed signs.

The Chorus of the Teatro dell’Opera, prepared by Ciro Visco, is one of the principal instruments of this production. Managed with dynamic flexibility, it moves from compact masses of sound to more delicate filigrees without losing precision of intonation or compactness of attack. In a production that makes the community a decisive character, this level of performance becomes essential: in both the large ceremonial blocks and in the moments when the crowd becomes almost a whisper, the chorus underpins and amplifies the directorial choices.

In the title role, Dmitry Korchak shapes a lyrical, focused Lohengrin, far from the exclusively “heroic” model. His line benefits from his bel canto experience: unbroken attention to the arc of the phrase, careful dynamics, intelligent rapport with the orchestra. The figure that emerges is that of a less granite knight, more inclined to fragility, in keeping with an idea of the character who does not simply dominate events, but at times is overwhelmed by them.

Jennifer Holloway offers an Elsa of great inner coherence. Her clear timbre, sustained legato and control of half-tones allow her to traverse the character’s journey without stylistic lapses: from the initial dream narrative to the third-act duet, one senses a deliberate design, in which the progressive cracking of trust is reflected in colour and inflection, not only in gesture. The integration with the staging – especially in the long stretches where Elsa is literally surrounded and observed by the community – is one of the strengths of the evening.

Ekaterina Gubanova is an Ortrud of great impact. The breadth of her middle register, secure projection and command of dynamic shading allow her to shape the role freely, without ever losing definition. The pagan invocations have an almost ritual force, yet remain controlled; the dialogues with Telramund are carved with a precision that makes the manipulative nature of the character perceptible. In the second act, her presence shapes the overall perception of the stage: every gesture and every glance helps to raise the level of tension.

Tómas Tómasson, as Telramund, combines vocal solidity with a strong stage presence. The character acquires an almost tragic dimension: not a simple stock antagonist, but a marked man who is drawn, together with Ortrud, into a spiral of resentment and defeat. His ability to shape the word, to bring out the different nuances of the text, makes this trajectory credible.

Clive Bayley lends King Henry a natural authority, made up of measure and control rather than emphasis. The voice retains a core of noble colour that suits the directorial outline: a sovereign who moves in and out of a world he is unable fully to mend, a guarantor of an order that is more evoked than truly enforceable.

Andrei Bondarenko, as the Herald, delivers an exemplary performance in terms of clarity and musicality: each appearance is clear, well supported on the breath, with a diction that makes immediately comprehensible the role of “voice of power” assigned to him by the score. The result is a figure minor only on paper, but crucial in the balance of the dramatic weights.

The young artists of the “Fabbrica” – Alejo Álvarez Castillo, Dayu Xu, Guangwei Yao, Jiacheng Fan as the nobles, and Mariko Iizuka, Cristina Tarantino, Silvia Pasini, Caterina D’Angelo as the pages – slot very naturally into the fabric of the evening. Their voices are homogeneous, musical, already well oriented stylistically; the staging uses them intelligently, enhancing their freshness on stage.