A knight's tale

When American tenor Bryan Register was in his early 20s he was offered a place at the Manhattan School of Music to study singing. And he received a full scholarship. But there was a mystery: they wouldn't tell him the name of the person who was sponsoring him. Then, in the week of his graduation, he was handed an envelope and told that he should probably write a thank you letter to his sponsor.

"And I said of course I will … and I opened the envelope and it was [world-famous Swedish soprano] Birgit Nilssen … I thought I was going to die," he recalls.

The story has a curious parallel with the opera that will have its Hong Kong premiere at the 2014 Arts Festival, in which Register will play the title role. (Advance bookings for next year's festival opened on Thursday.)

On one level the story of Lohengrin, based on the same Arthurian German epics that inspired J.R.R. Tolkien to write his The Lord of the Rings trilogy, is like a medieval mystery thriller.

A girl and her young brother go into the woods; she comes out without him, and finds herself on trial for fratricide. And through the rest of the opera there is a question that remains to be answered: what did happen in those woods that day?

Elsa is not an ordinary girl, and her missing brother Gottfried is not just any boy. He is the heir to the dukedom of Brabant, and she, as his only sibling, is standing in the way of their uncle and aunt, who want the title and lands to themselves. So far so thriller. Then the story veers into fantasy fiction when a huge, powerful knight arrives. He will defend Elsa's right to a fair trial with his life.