The Year of Magical Thinking: Emanuele Senici is deeply touched by Jonas Kaufmann’s Lohengrin at La Scala, but finds Italians unconvinced by attempts to stir up a bicentennial controversy

Review of Lohengrin, directed Guth, conducted Barenboim, Milan, 2012.  

July 2013, Volume 7, Number 2, 44–8.

The brief from the editor of the present issue of The Wagner Journal was to review Claus Guth’s new production of Lohengrin staged at La Scala in December 2012, and at the same time to report on the media debate that preceded it about the company’s choice of a work by Wagner to open the Verdi–Wagner bicentenary season. Thinking about these two events at a few months’ remove, I was reminded of the title of Joan Didion’s acclaimed memoir of the year following the sudden death of her husband in 2003, The Year of Magical Thinking. Not only, I would argue, did Guth place magical thinking and its effects at the core of his staging; I would also suggest that the attitude toward opera and nationalism that emerged from the press debate also betrayed a significant amount of magical thinking, and that this attitude may well last until the end of this bicentenary year – and possibly even beyond.