At the heart of Wagner's revolution is the dissolution of conventional operatic forms — aria, duet, ensemble, chorus — into a more or less unbroken stream of dramatic discourse. Those forms are still unmistakably present in Tannhäuser, but in Lohengrin, the last work Wagner completed before going in exile in 1849, they begin to disappear. There are extended solos for the principal characters, but they emerge organically from the surrounding musical fabric and then melt back into it, without inviting bursts of applause. We are caught in a continuous musical web while the dramatic screws are turned. The opera's Prelude is also a departure from the norm. Until this point, Wagner had followed convention in beginning his operas with an overture — an orchestral précis that sets forth principal themes and establishes contrasting moods. The Lohengrin Prelude is a free-standing composition that takes the form of a long crescendo and a long diminuendo: a mass of sound gathers in the air and then dissipates again, like a sumptuous mirage. It is an evocation of the Holy Grail, which we do not see in the opera but which hovers behind the titular knight. The orchestration at the start creates a mesmerizing shimmer: four solo violins playing harmonics, other violins divided in four groups, an echoing gleam of flutes and oboes. In his 1861 essay on Wagner, Baudelaire describes the overpowering effect that this otherworldly music had on him: with it, more or less, Wagnerism began.
Notwithstanding its forward-looking aspects, Lohengrin became immensely popular in the wake of its 1850 premiere, achieving thousands of performances around the world by the end of the nineteenth century. Its chivalric setting was undoubtedly at the core of its appeal: the title character embodies an unblemished nobility of character that, as the scholar Thomas Grey has pointed out, no other Wagnerian leading man can claim to possess. The action unfolds in the area of tenth-century Antwerp. King Henry the Fowler is visiting the area and is presented with a confusing crisis: the Duke of Brabant is dead, and Friedrich von Telramund has accused Elsa, the duke's daughter, of murdering her younger brother. Elsa protests her innocence and describes a dream in which a mysterious knight comes to her defense. This knight duly arrives, on a boat drawn by a swan. He wins Elsa's hand, imposing the condition that she never ask his name. In Act II, the outcast Telramund schemes with his wife, the pagan witch Ortrud. As the duchy prepares for the Lohengrin-Elsa wedding, Ortrud will insinuate herself into Elsa's company, seeding uncertainty about Lohengrin in her mind. The wedding goes off, but in the bridal chamber a doubt-ridden Elsa cannot help popping the fateful question. Lohengrin, after dispatching the would-be victorious Telramund, discloses his name and story: he is the son of Parsifal. Because his anonymity has been broken, he must go. His swan boat arrives. and it is revealed that the swan is Elsa's vanished brother, enchanted by Ortrud. He is freed, but Elsa cannot live without Lohengrin, and falls dead.
John Singer Sargent, "A Dream of Lohengrin," 1890.
The first scene of Act I is taken up with ceremonial utterances, brass fanfares, and mass pageantry of a kind that features in so many nineteenth-century grand operas. Wagner is not so revolutionary that he is prepared to do without such crowd-pleasing spectacle, although it is a foil against which his main drama will play out. In the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, many German listeners found a chauvinistic thrill in the patriotic sentiments voiced by King Henry in his opening address: "Must I tell you of the scourge that has so often visited German soil from the East . . . never again shall anyone abuse the German Empire!" This kind of vocabulary will resurface in even more threatening form at the end of Die Meistersinger — see Chapter 6 of Wagnerism.
Gottlob Frick in Rudolf Kempe's Lohengrin (EMI).
Elsa sings of her dream: "In splendid shining armor a knight approached, a man of such pure virtue as I had never seen before..." The phrase "knight in shining armor" had occurred in English before Lohengrin became popular, but the opera fixed that image in the public mind. See, for example, the uncomfortable 1947 comedy The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, in which the seventeen-year-old Shirley Temple fantasizes about a much older Cary Grant in shining armor while Lohengrin plays on the soundtrack.
When Lohengrin arrives in his swan boat and bids the swan adieu, the ethereal music of the Prelude resurfaces, bringing with it the atmosphere of the Grail Temple. It is a magical moment in musical terms, but the stagecraft provoked a great deal of merriment from Wagner's time onward. "Mein lieber Schwan" became a catch-phrase with a campy ring; Brecht uses it in his early play Baal (see Chapter 11 of Wagnerism). The tenor Leo Slezak made a famous joke when he missed his exit in Act III: "What time does the next swan leave?" At the same time, the image had much sentimental appeal. The swan boats in Boston Garden were Lohengrin-inspired, and King Ludwig tried to re-create the magic for himself in his various fairy-tale palaces, one of which was called, not incidentally, Neuschwanstein, or New Swan Castle. Here is Lohengrin's entrance as directed by Werner Herzog, at Bayreuth:
Lohengrin's warning: "Nie sollst du mich befragen..." : “You must never ask me / Nor should you care to know / Whence I made my way / Nor my name and kind.”
Lauritz Melchior in Erich Leinsdorf's Lohengrin at the Met, 1940 (Pristine).
Wagnerians have long cherished the first part of Act II, the scene between Telramund and Ortrud, as the composer's real breakthrough into his mature manner. The voices leave behind the conventional division between recitative and aria — expository dialogue and solo vocal display — and are carried along in a continuously seething orchestral fabric. Lohengrin's motif is heard in the orchestral introduction, sounding rather more ominous before. As Ortrud unveils her plot of revenge, the motif is heard again, and the sinister implication is clear: Ortrud will inveigle Elsa into asking the fatal question, causing her protector Lohengrin to draw away. At the end of the duet, at 19:00, the two voices fall into a malignant unison. It says something that Wagner achieved this breakthrough as he sought to put Unheil, disaster, on the stage. The division between good and evil in his work is always unstable, and here the villains achieve a perverse grandeur that threatens to overshadow the hero and heroine. Here are Tómas Tómasson and Evelyn Herlitzius in Claus Guth's 2012 production at La Scala, with Daniel Barenboim conducting:
The unfailingly hair-raising Leonie Rysanek, as Ortrud, invokes the pagan gods in "Entweihte Götter!" There is a preview of the dramatis personae of the Ring: "Wodan! I call on you, strong one! Freia! Hear me, exalted one!"
No music by Wagner is as famous as the Bridal Chorus that appears at the beginning of Act III. The composer's knack for catchy little tunes should not be underrated, and, like his Italian counterpart Verdi, he could put those tunes to ironic dramatic use. Just as the Duke's insidiously hummable "La donne è mobile" in Rigoletto is the anthem of a predatory cynic, the Bridal Chorus is a prelude to marital catastrophe. Wagner was no fan of conventional marriage, and his innocent, prim melody is the deceptive façade of an institution that easily turns into a trap. Far from blaming Elsa for asking her question, he wrote that the question must be asked if men and women are to be led to a higher form of love. Reflecting on the opera in 1851, he went as far as to say that there was something revolutionary in Elsa's act. Although Wagner's scheme was very far from being any sort of feminist critique of marriage, contemporary directors have often pushed the opera in that direction. In Yuval Sharon's 2018 production at Bayreuth, Ortrud actually becomes the hero of the piece, bringing down a corrupt, sexist system of power. Here is how the act begins in the Guth production:
"In fernem Land," Lohengrin's climactic revelation of his identity, as sung by the incomparable Heldentenor Lauritz Melchior at the Met in 1941: "In a far-off Land, inaccessible to your steps, there is a castle by the name of Montsalvat . . . I was sent to you by the Grail: my father Parzival wears its crown, I am its knight — Lohengrin is my name."
Wagner wrote a second verse for what is known as Lohengrin's "Grail Narration," but cut it just before the première. The cut portion is seldom revived. One occasion was opening day of the Bayreuth Festival in 1936, with Franz Volker in the lead, Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting, and Adolf Hitler in attendance. According to Winifred Wagner, then the head of the festival, Hitler was initially confused when Volker launched into the second verse, clutching Winifred's hand in alarm; then he understood what was happening, and afterward expressed appreciation. If true, the episode is somewhat chilling evidence of Hitler's intimate knowledge of the Wagner operas.
