Lohengrin ( in German), WWV 75, is a Romantic opera in three acts composed and written by Richard Wagner, first performed in 1850. The story of the eponymous character is taken from medieval German romance, notably the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach, and its sequel Lohengrin, itself inspired by the epic of Garin le Loherain. It is part of the Knight of the Swan legend.
King Ludwig II of Bavaria, whose patronage later gave Wagner the means not only to complete the epic cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen but also to build the monumental Bayreuth Festspielhaus upon which to stage it, named his own Neuschwanstein Castle after the Swan Knight.
The most popular and recognizable part of the opera is the Bridal Chorus, colloquially known in English-speaking countries as "Here Comes the Bride," usually played as a processional at weddings. The orchestral preludes to Acts I and III are also frequently performed separately as concert pieces.
The autograph manuscript of the opera is preserved in the Richard Wagner Foundation.
Literary background The literary figure of Lohengrin first appeared as a supporting character in the final chapter of the medieval epic poem Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach. The Grail Knight Lohengrin, son of the Grail King Parzival, is sent to the duchess of Brabant to defend her. His protection comes under the condition that she must never ask his name. If she violates this requirement, he will be forced to leave her. Wagner took up these characters and set the "forbidden question" theme at the core of a story which makes contrasts between the godly and the mundane, and between Early Middle Age Christendom and Germanic paganism. Wagner attempted at the same time to weave elements of Greek tragedy into the plot. He wrote the following in Mitteilungen an meine Freunde about his Lohengrin plans:Who doesn't know "Zeus and Semele"? The god is in love with a human woman and approaches her in human form. The lover finds that she cannot recognize the god in this form, and demands that he should make the real sensual form of his being known. Zeus knows that she would be destroyed by the sight of his real self. He suffers in this awareness, suffers knowing that he must fulfill this demand and in doing so ruin their love. He will seal his own doom when the gleam of his godly form destroys his lover. Is the man who craves for God not destroyed?
Composition Lohengrin was written and composed between 1845 and 1848 when Wagner worked as Kapellmeister at the Royal Dresden court. The opera's genesis, however, starts some years earlier when Wagner was living and working in Paris. By late 1841, Wagner had conceived a five-act historical opera based on the Hohenstaufen dynasty entitled Die Sarazenin (The Saracen Woman) and, although he lavished on it all the trappings of Grand Opera, his attention was soon distracted by a Volksbuch that he obtained through his friendship with the philologist Samuel Lehrs. The book in question was Ludwig Bechstein's 1835 anthology of legends Der Sagenschatz und die Sagenkreise des Thüringerlandes. As well as being the means by which Wagner first became aware of the Lohengrin legend, the anthology also retold the tale of Tannhäuser.
Seeking a more authentic picture of the Tannhäuser legend, Lehrs then provided Wagner with the annual proceedings of the Königsberg Germanic Society which not only included C.T.L. Lucas's critical study of the "Wartburg war" but also included a piece of criticism about the poem Lohengrin, together with a lengthy narrative of the rambling epic's principal content. Thus, Wagner admits, with one blow a whole new world was opened to him, and although unable to find the form to master the material for his own dramatic purpose, he could clearly visualize Lohengrin and it remained as an inextinguishable image within him.
Stewart Spencer neither regards the abandonment of the Hohenstaufen projects during the 1840s at this time nor, more specifically, in the musical and formal dissimilarities between Rienzi and Der fliegende Holländer as symptomatic of a fundamental turn from history towards myth. Instead Spencer argues that Wagner did not draw any fundamental distinction between history and myth, and that Wagner's response to myth is dynamic and dialectical. History per se might be arid and reductive but it contained within it the potential for a categorical interpretation allowing Wagner to make use of Leopold August Warnkönig's (1835–42), three volume Flandrische Staats- und Rechtsgeschichte bis zum Jahr 1305 to be mined for an accurate evocation of 10th century Brabant. It would be nearly four years before Wagner's image of Lohengrin would again manifest itself to his creative imagination.
Writing retrospectively in his 1865 biography (even if its royal patronage diminishes its reliability), Wagner tells the story of how Lohengrins libretto was written. In the summer of 1845 Wagner with his wife Minna planned their annual hydrotherapeutic visit to Marienbad. Putting his work as Kapellmeister at the Royal Dresden court out of his mind, Wagner's intention was to abandon himself to a life of leisure. He had chosen his summer reading with care: the poems of Wolfram von Eschenbach, and the anonymous epic of Lohengrin with an introduction by Joseph von Görres. Although he had not planned on writing an opera at the time, he was inspired by his reading to create the opera Lohengrin:
Lohengrin stood suddenly revealed before me in full armour at the centre of a comprehensive dramatic adaptation of the whole material. ... I struggled manfully against the temptation to set down the plan on paper. But I was fooling myself: no sooner had I stepped into the noonday bath than I was seized by such desire to write Lohengrin that, incapable of lingering in the bath for the prescribed hour, I leapt out after only a few minutes, scarcely took the time to clothe myself again properly, and ran like a madman to my quarters to put what was obsessing me on paper. This went on for several days, until the entire dramatic plan for Lohengrin had been set down in full detail.
By 3 August 1845 he had worked out the prose draft. Wagner wrote to his brother, Albert, the following day, 4 August 1845:
...it was in this frame of mind yesterday that I finished writing out a very full & detailed scenario for Lohengrin; I am delighted with the result, indeed I freely admit that it fills me with a feeling of proud contentment. ... the more familiar I have become with my new subject & the more profoundly I have grasped its central idea, the more it has dawned upon me how rich & luxurious the seed of this new idea is, a seed which has grown into so full & burgeoning a flower that I feel happy indeed. ...In creating this work, my powers of invention & sense of formal structure have played their biggest part to date: the medieval poem which has preserved this highly poetical legend contains the most inadequate & pedestrian account to have come down to us, and I feel very fortunate to have satisfied my desire to rescue what by now is an almost unrecognizable legend from the rubble & decay to which the medieval poet has reduced the poem as a result of his inferior & prosaic treatment of it, & to have restored it to its rich & highly poetical potential by dint of my own inventiveness & reworking of it. – But quite apart from all this, how felicitous a libretto it has turned out to be! Effective, attractive, impressive & affecting in all its parts! – Johanna's role in it (Albert's daughter – see illustration below) – which is very important & in point of fact the principal role in the work – is bound to turn out the most charming & most moving in the world.
Between May and June 1846, Wagner made a through-composed draft for the whole work that consisted of two staves: one for the voice, the other just indicating the harmonies. Simultaneously, Wagner began work on a second draft of the poem, beginning with Act III. The complete draft of Act III was completed before the second draft of Acts I and II. This has sometime led to the erroneous conclusion that the entire work was completed from the end to the front. On 9 September 1846 Wagner began to orchestrate the harmonies and write out the choral parts, which, along with the Prelude, was completed on 29 August 1847.
Numerous changes to the poem, particularly Act III, took place during work on the second draft. At this time Wagner was still trying to clarify the precise nature of the tragedy, and the extent to which he needed to spell out the mechanics of the tragedy to the audience. On 30 May 1846 Wagner wrote to the journalist regarding the relationship between Lohengrin and Elsa. It is apparent from the letter that Wagner and Franck had been discussing Lohengrin for some time, and Wagner refers back to an earlier argument about the relationship between Lohengrin and Elsa, and in particular whether Elsa's punishment of separation from Lohengrin at the end of the opera is justifiable. Wagner uses the letter firstly to argue in favour of his version and secondly to expand upon the more general mythical structure underpinning the relationship between Lohengrin and Elsa – a theme he would publicly develop in his 1851 autobiographical essay A Communication To My Friends. Elsa's punishment, Wagner argues, cannot be chastisement or death but that her separation from Lohengrin: 'this idea of separation- which, if it were left out, would require a total transformation of the subject and probably allow no more than its most superficial externals to be retained'. Franck's concern appears to be that this particular punishment of separation will make the opera incapable 'of being dramatically effective in a unified way'. Wagner confesses that Franck's concerns have forced him to look objectively at the poem and to consider ways of making Lohengrin's involvement in the tragic outcome clearer than had previously been the case. To this end, Wagner decided not to alter Act I or II but to write new lines in Act III:
(Wagner wrote five additional lines here but they were rejected in the final draft).
Later, in the same act, when Elsa calls on Lohengrin to punish her, the latter replies:
Wagner asks Franck if he should explicitly mention the specific rule associated with the Grail which, although not expressly forbidding the Grail knights from committing such excesses, nevertheless, discourages them from acting in this way. Wagner's opinion is that it should be sufficient for the audience to deduce the Grail's advice. Readers of the libretto in English will note that in Amanda Holden's 1990 singing translation for the English National Opera, the Grail's advice is transformed into an explicit commandment, with Holden acknowledging, on her website, that translating a libretto is effectively writing a new one "despite its compulsory faithfulness to the original".
There's one atonement, penance for your crime! Ah! I as you suffer this cruel pain! We must be parted! You must understand: this the atonement, this the Grail's command!
Having completed the second complete draft of Act III ten months later on 5 March 1847, Wagner returned to the beginning of Act I and began work on the second draft of Act I on 12 May and which was complete on 8 June 1847. The second complete draft of Act II was started on 18 June and complete on 2 August 1847. In a letter to Ferdinand Heine dated 6 August 1847, Wagner announced that he had completed the Lohengrin opera:
I feel pleased and happy as a result, since I am well satisfied with what I have done.
As outlined to Heine, Wagner's plan was to build on the success of the premiere of Rienzi in Berlin on 24 October 1847 with a follow-up performance of Lohengrin. As it turned out Rienzi in Berlin was not a success and Lohengrin was not performed there until 1859.