Lohengrin

Composer: Wagner Director: David Alden Conductor: Andris Nelsons Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London WC2 (020-7304 4000). Until 1 July Running time: 4hrs 30mins (including intervals)

Wagner’s 1850 opera – best known for the Bridal Chorus still heard at weddings today – has always struck a chord with “those who have a thing about strong leadership”, said Richard Morrison in The Times. How could it not, given the way it exhorts the German nation to get behind a new “Führer” and slaughter the hordes from “the east”?. Mussolini once “had it staged by 10,000 singers on a 300ft-wide stage”. The director of this thrilling and “unmissable” new staging for the Royal Opera House, David Alden, “flirts dangerously” with such ideas by relocating Wagner’s folkloric Knight of the Holy Grail plot to an unspecified 20th century authoritarian state. Yet he wisely resists making the piece into an anguished commentary on the rise of Hitler. Instead, the multistoried sets, vast crowds and “platoons of trumpeters” serve as a spectacular backcloth to what is ultimately a “very human story: a naive girl’s deluded love for a hero too self-absorbed to love her back”.

It’s 41 years since the Royal Opera produced a new Lohengrin, said Andrew Clements in The Guardian – and everything about the evening is “vividly detailed and thoughtfully cogent”. The focus is very much on the “power politics” of the piece, rather than the Dark Age Christian and pagan symbolism. The action is beautifully lit from low angles to produce “looming expressionist shadows” and sharp contrasts. Each of the protagonists is sharply defined. And Andris Nelsons’s “gloriously comprehensive” conducting of the excellent orchestra – quiet, rapt intensity, followed by soaring excitement – is superb.

As Lohengrin, the experienced Klaus Florian Vogt gives a “gracefully assured reading”, said Rupert Christiansen in The Daily Telegraph. But the real joy of the evening is Jennifer Davis’s consummately sung and beautifully acted performance as his beloved, Elsa. There are few things more exciting in theatre than “watching a star being born”. The deafening “big-bang roar” that greeted Davis’s curtain call on opening night “was one such magic moment”.