"The sound of the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra is unique in itself, and we must add to it the sonority of the theatre's pit where it usually plays," comments Katharina Wagner (Bayreuth, 1978), great-granddaughter of the composer of the tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelung and controversial stage director, who has found a gap in her extremely tight schedule – the 150th edition of the Bayreuth Festival, which she currently directs, kicked off on July 24 – to visit the Palau de la Música Catalana, where she has presented the "exceptional" tour that will begin in Barcelona on August 29. This is a co-production between the Palau and the Peralada Festival, which this year celebrates its fortieth anniversary.

Lohengrin is a sensational work, an unqualified masterpiece that serves as a hinge between historicist romanticism and the timeless conceptualization of the myth that Richard Wagner would undertake from then on. At this point, hardly anyone approaches it from a historical realist perspective, although Wagner based his work on events dating back to the 10th century and in 1850, when the piece premiered in Weimar, the scenery and costumes had to reconstruct that High Middle Ages. Times have changed and today the best option is to leave behind the cardboard cutouts and resort to the conceptualization of the Regietheater, of which we have had good examples at the Liceu, even in this opera: the brilliant (and controversial) production by Peter Konwitschny seen at the Rambla theatre in 2000 and 2006 is a good example.

"Only Katharina Wagner could allow herself to reinterpret Lohengrin in a new dramaturgy in which the good are bad and the bad are good," says the artistic director of the Liceu, Víctor Garcia de Gomar. To put it with Wagnerian grandiloquence, blood would legitimize Richard Wagner's great-granddaughter to turn history upside down and transform the immaculate hero of the opera into a production of Lohengrin with stage direction by Katharina Wagner, which will premiere at the Liceu on March 17, and which will have six performances until March 30. It is the same production that was due to premiere in March 2020, but was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic. "It was already very well-developed then," says Josep Pons, who will conduct the Liceu Orchestra in all six performances. Incidentally, among other elements, the production includes a robotic swan and an artificial lake, which are adding complexity to the rehearsals.