Short Summary
Once upon a time there was a king who died and left behind two children, a son and a daughter.
But the daughter was a year older than the son. And one day the two royal children argued with each other about which of them should be king, for the brother said, 'I am a prince, and when there are princes, princesses do not get to reign But the daughter objected: 'I am the first-born and the eldest, I should take precedence
During our preparation, we came across a fairy tale that begins like this: "Once upon a time there was a king who died and left behind two children, a son and a daughter. But the daughter was a year older than the son. And one day the two royal children argued with each other about which of them should be king, for the brother said: 'I am a prince, and when there are princes, princesses do not get to reign But the daughter said: 'I am the first-born and the eldest, I should take precedence'." Folklore research has been able to prove this story in countless variations. In most cases, the rivalry leads to the brother murdering his sister; in some cases, however, it is the older sister who rebels against the patriarchal gender order by murdering her younger brother. It is precisely this concealed and repressed conflict that triggers the events of the opera: Elsa is the first-born daughter of the Duke of Brabant, but as a woman is excluded from the succession to the throne in favor of her younger brother Gottfried. In addition, she is to be forcibly married to her guardian Telramund in order to maintain patriarchal power. Sufficient good or bad reasons, therefore, to free herself from the humiliating gender role assigned to her through an act of violence. (Jossi Wieler, Sergio Morabito, Anna Viebrock)
Formally, Lohengrin is Wagner's first truly through-composed work. Here, he relies more heavily on the art of transition than in Tannhäuser : the motivic and harmonic material of the three acts is so densely interwoven, the orchestral writing so symphonically organized, that any "numbers" such as Elsa's somnambulistic entrance in the first act or the wedding march, the love duet and the Grail narrative in the third act are self-evident. Wagner also makes characteristic assignments: The key of A major belongs to Lohengrin and the Grail world, the dark, wild F sharp minor (the parallel key) belongs to the antagonist couple Ortrud/Telramund, and everything that refers to the king comes out in C major, which is as striking as it is ultimately empty. This is interwoven with the instrumentation: the King has the brass on his side, Ortrud/Telramund are underpinned by woodwinds and low strings and Lohengrin is surrounded by a glistening halo of multiply divided violins. At the same time, Lohengrin's and Elsa's motifs are reflected in each other, and even Ortrud's sphere can be found within them. (Christian Thielemann)
Wagner's Lohengrin, the pinnacle of artistic Romanticism, also provides a glimpse into the abyss of political Romanticism: The narcissism of an entire nation was reflected in the ideal image of the enigmatic swan knight, who rushes to the aid of a distressed maiden and knows how to strengthen the unity and defensibility of the empire against internal and external enemies; whose mission fails because the rescued maiden is not up to the demands of his love, which requires unquestioning devotion, and is seized by doubts about his purity and unquestionability; who - misunderstood - withdraws from the human world into the mountain air of his tragic loneliness. Wagner has created a projection surface here in which rulers and leaders from Ludwig II to Adolf Hitler believed they could recognize themselves and whose aura at the same time strives to mythically transfigure the role models of patriarchal bourgeois marriage. No other work by Wagner has received as much devout devotion and endured as much critical derision as Lohengrin(Sergio Morabito)
