Lohengrin

Often regarded as the grand finale to the long tradition of German Romantic opera—composed just before Richard Wagner revolutionized music and drama with transcendental masterpieces like Tristan und Isolde, Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Parsifal—Lohengrin centers on a valiant knight who saves a virtuous maiden, on the sole condition that she never ask his name. During the 2022–23 season, Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin took the podium to lead the premiere of an atmospheric new production of the opera by director François Girard, who approached the piece as a quasi-sequel to his 2013 staging of Parsifal. (In the opera’s climactic final moments, Lohengrin proclaims himself as the son of King Parsifal and is, like his father, a Knight of the Holy Grail.) In this performance from the company’s Live in HD series, tenor Piotr Beczała gives a career-defining performance in the title role, graduating from the lyrical Italian and French roles for which he is so well known. Soprano Tamara Wilson is the noble Elsa, going head-to-head with powerhouse Wagnerian soprano Christine Goerke as Ortrud, and bass-baritone Evgeny Nikitin and bass Gunther Groissböck complete the extraordinary principal cast as Telramund and King Heinrich.