The premiere of Serebrennikov’s opera “Lohengrin” took place in Paris

The premiere of the opera “Lohengrin” by Richard Wagner by the Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov took place in Paris.

In his debut on the stage of the Paris Opera, Serebrennikov thinks about war – a machine that crushes body and soul, says the description of the production. French critics, calling Serebrennikov an opponent of Putin’s regime, noted the gloominess of the performance, writes the French radio station RFI.

The action of “Lohengrin” in Serebrennikov’s reading takes place in a madhouse. The main character Elsa is sick: the knight Lohengrin exists only in her imagination. In reality, all the characters have war, pain and post-traumatic syndrome.

During the opera, “staged reports from the Ukrainian fields – using homoerotic optics” were demonstrated in the background, writes The New Times. In the last act, the stage is littered with corpses in plastic bags.

Serebrennikov himself called the production a “blockbuster opera.” “The characters will find themselves in difficult circumstances and will be forced to behave in a certain way due to strong and hard reasons. The heroes will face questions of faith, love, blood, madness, betrayal: to be or not to be a traitor? But the main motives will still be war and peace”, – said the director in March 2023.

• Kirill Serebrennikov is a famous Russian theater and film director. In response to the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, he publicly took an anti-war position. In March 2022, Serebrennikov left Russia for France.
• After Serebrennikov’s departure, Russian theaters canceled performances of his authorship or excluded the director’s name from posters and programs – as well as other cultural figures. The general director of the Bolshoi Theater, Vladimir Uryn, admitted that this was done because of the anti-war position of the creators of the performances.