On 17 March 2025, the Gran Teatre del Liceu premiered a new production of Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin, conducted by Josep Pons and staged by Katharina Wagner, great-granddaughter of the composer. Originally created for the Bayreuth Festival, the production was presented outside Bayreuth for the first time.
Premiered in 1850, Lohengrin occupies a pivotal place in Wagner’s output, combining medieval legend with profound reflections on trust, power, faith and identity.
Katharina Wagner’s production offered a contemporary reading of the drama through powerful symbolic imagery and an intense psychological approach to the characters. Rather than recreating the medieval setting, it focused on the mechanisms of power, manipulation and the fragility of ideals.
The cast featured Klaus Florian Vogt, Elisabeth Teige, Mihoko Fujimura, Ólafur Sigurdarson, Günther Groissböck and Roman Trekel, together with the Gran Teatre del Liceu Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, prepared by Pablo Assante.
Josep Pons highlighted the transparency of Wagner’s orchestration, the lyricism of its most intimate passages and the grandeur of its great choral scenes, shaping a performance distinguished by its orchestral balance, dramatic continuity and richness of colour.
Critics particularly praised the performances of the orchestra and chorus, together with Josep Pons’s command of the score’s large-scale architecture and expressive detail.