In Wagner’s “Lohengrin,” the German province of Brabant is beset by the threat of foreign invaders but finds itself leaderless thanks to intractable internal turmoil. And they say opera is irrelevant to the realities of contemporary life.

San Francisco Opera General Director Matthew Shilvock introduced the opening performance of the company’s magnificent new production on Sunday, Oct. 15,  from the stage of the War Memorial Opera House by drawing parallels between the opera’s “militaristic underpinnings” and the current conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine. Director David Alden’s production, set in what seems to be a war-torn European city around World War II, is steeped in the iconography of midcentury fascism.

Yet, perhaps paradoxically, the effect of Sunday’s performance — rich in vocal splendor and conducted with tender specificity by Music Director Eun Sun Kim — was to relegate the work’s military and political conflicts to the background. Instead, the audience was welcomed into a sleek romantic drama about love and faith, betrayal and redemption.

The mannered, rather elusive staging by Alden and associate director Peter Relton told us relatively little of importance about what the characters were going through. The music told us everything.

Wagner’s music is too often thought of as thunderous, even bombastic. But the truth is that his aesthetic outlook was firmly based, at least in part, in the melodic lyricism of the Italian bel canto style.

“Lohengrin,” with its long-breathed, fluid melodies and shimmery instrumental world, is the most Italianate of the composer’s works, and Kim and the orchestra caught that character perfectly. The radiant orchestral prelude that opens the piece seemed to blossom from thin air, in an early allusion to the celestial power of the Holy Grail from which the title character’s heroism derives. The bumptious prelude to Act 3 rolled forward with sinuous force.

Throughout the opera’s 4½-hour span, Kim maintained a rhythmic control that was at once propulsive and free, giving individual singers the space they needed to let their artistry register while keeping the drama proceeding at a healthy clip. 

“Lohengrin” marks the first installment in Kim’s plan to conduct a Wagner opera in each season, and it suggests that she will bring a distinctive transparency to the composer’s orchestral textures, which can become densely clotted without a conductor’s care.

On this occasion, Kim was blessed with a strong cast at nearly all the key points. In particular, all the principals were fearless and unstoppable in meeting the basic challenges of Wagner’s vocal demands — not a sufficient recipe for success, but a key component.

In the title role, New Zealand tenor Simon O’Neill combined heroic power and clarion phrasing to create a gleaming portrait of this otherworldly adventurer. If O’Neill didn’t quite muster the vein of intimacy and pathos that other artists can convey (most strikingly Brandon Jovanovich, the company’s previous Lohengrin in 2012), his ringing delivery at key moments was thrilling, and he brought an expansive sense of scale to the character’s final farewell.

American soprano Julie Adams, one of the most gifted Adler fellows to come through the San Francisco Opera in recent years, followed through on that early promise in her role debut as Elsa. By turns fiercely dramatic and winningly expressive, Adams’ vocalism illuminated everything that is important about the character, from the naïve faith of her first extended solo (“Elsa’s Dream”) to the restless, insatiable curiosity that shatters her hopes.

In a ferocious and unstoppable U.S. debut as the malevolent Ortrud, Romanian mezzo-soprano Judit Kutasi seemed to be delivering a master class on how to make the opera’s only unambiguous villain into a believable human figure. Ortrud’s devotion to the old Norse gods (the ones who would later figure as protagonists in the “Ring” Cycle), along with her fierce outrage at seeing them displaced by latter-day Christian fecklessness, sets her entire character into motion, and Kutasi’s ringing, note-perfect delivery conjured up that outrage.

Baritone Brian Mulligan, whose appearances in San Francisco are a regular delight, made a full-voiced, aptly pitiable figure as Friedrich von Telramund. The venerable Icelandic bass Kristinn Sigmundsson returned as King Heinrich with his mighty sound a little dimmed but his command of the stage still unimpeachable. 

The San Francisco Opera Chorus, led by John Keene, also made essential contributions throughout.

The staging, meanwhile, made certain feints in the direction of topicality without ever quite sealing the deal. Paul Steinberg’s sets, including a rubble-strewn street scene and a pristine white bedchamber, were visually arresting, and the presence of massive loudspeakers serve as a counterpoint to the trumpet blares and pronouncements by the King’s Herald (baritone Thomas Lehman) that Wagner wrote into the score.

But the encroachment of fascism is a tricky subject, one that calls for a more concrete point of view than Alden offers here. There are quasi-Nazi banners emblazoned with the figure of the swan (Lohengrin’s totem animal), and hand gestures that are coy analogs of the Nazi salute.

Still, none of it tells a story as detailed and morally persuasive as Wagner’s score, especially in a rendition this robust and beautiful. The length of the performance feels like a blessing.

Reach Joshua Kosman: jkosman@sfchronicle.com

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the timing of the opera's livestream. It will be available at 7 p.m.