Left alone at last, Elsa and the knight express their love. She confesses how unequal she feels to him, unworthy even to know his name! He clumsily tries to comfort her, assuring her that she need not worry about him having base origins. In fact, he has left behind great splendor and joy to be with her. This really sets her off. Were his origins really all that glorious? What could she offer to such a creature, other than the simple love of a pure maiden, to keep him happy? How long before he will want to return to such splendor and joy? “Stop torturing yourself so!” he tells her, but she responds, “Yet how you torture me!” She imagines the swan returning to carry him away. He will leave some day—she is sure of it! Unable to contain herself, Elsa demands his name and his origin.
Just then, Telramund and the four grumbling nobles rush in to kill the knight. Elsa hands the knight his sword, with which he kills Telramund in one blow. The others drop their weapons. Sadly, the knight orders the corpse brought before the king. There he will give a full account of the death, and tell his name and his story.
Comment: Wagner achieves great psychological perception with the words and music of this superb scene, the only truly intimate one in the whole opera. While Elsa’s about-face reads with laughable suddenness in the synopsis, the gradations of her unraveling are quite believable and even inevitable on stage. Lovers often turn hostile for no better reason than fear that they are not good enough for the beloved, who will certainly leave one day. The most pathetic character here is not Elsa, whose insecurities are perfectly human and understandable, given the circumstances, but Lohengrin, who has lived his life on a separate plane. Now that it is time for him to comfort another human being with justifiable concerns, he simply cannot do it. Throughout the scene, he tends to say little more than “Oh, Elsa, please don’t!” The truly great tenors manage to convey a palpable sense of guilt over their inability to console Elsa.
Act III, Scene 2
Setting: On the banks of the River Scheldt. Dawn.
Distant trumpet calls are heard, separately at first, then in response. The armies assemble, region by region, on the stage. All greet the king as he appears, declaring his pride at the unity of the German lands.
Comment: Wagner intended this to be a scene of chest-swelling magnificence, even advising smaller theaters that could not stage it appropriately to cut it altogether. The various trumpet fanfares from onstage, backstage, the orchestra pit, and even, sometimes, from different places within the auditorium, are undeniably thrilling. The union of different German armies, represented by Saxons, Brabantines, and others, under one leader, was little more than a dream when Wagner wrote it, but has come to mean something very different in our century. Most productions settle for the pageantry while eliminating the nationalism. Besides, does anybody really know, or care, about differences in costume and armor among various Germanic knights of the tenth century?
Elsa enters, dejected and silent, with her ladies. The knight appears to the cheering crowd, but he tells them he cannot lead them into battle. Producing Telramund’s body, he explains that he was attacked in his chamber, and asks the king to judge him. He is declared innocent. He then accuses his bride of being lured into betraying him, demanding to know his name contrary to her oath. Let everyone hear his story.
In a distant land stands the castle of Monsalvat, in whose midst is the most glorious shining temple in the world, containing a vessel of wondrous power. The purest men take care of it, and once a year a dove descends from heaven to renew its power. It’s called the Grail, and those who serve it have supernatural power. When a knight of the Grail is sent into the world to defend the right, he remains all-powerful as long as he is unknown, but must flee when he is revealed. “The Grail sent me to you,” he declares. “My father Parzival wears its crown. I am its knight—and Lohengrin my name.”
Elsa stumbles, Lohengrin catches her, sadly reproving her. She begs him to stay. He cannot. He prophesies victory for the king, and eternal safety for Germany from the Eastern hordes. Suddenly, the swan returns to the shore still towing the boat in its beak. Lohengrin says farewell to Elsa, leaving his sword, horn, and ring to give to her brother when he returns. Ortrud bursts on the scene, screaming that the swan is Gottfried, who will never be transformed now. Thus do the gods punish those who abandon them! Lohengrin falls in prayer, and the swan transforms into Gottfried, causing Ortrud to drop dead. Lohengrin proclaims the young duke as the leader of Brabant, and departs on the boat. Elsa falls lifeless.
Comment: In the hands of an able cast, Lohengrin and Elsa’s separation can be devastatingly sad on a human level, despite all the hocus-pocus surrounding the situation. Ortrud’s brief but intense scene is generally played to the hilt. The music is loud and shrill, she curses, fumes, and usually does everything but bite the head off a bat. It can be shocking and disconcerting or campy and hilarious. Gottfried sometimes appears, but often is merely “indicated” by some stage technique.
BASICS: WHEN TO EAT, DRINK, AND VISIT THE RESTROOM
Lohengrin is medium-long by Wagnerian standards. It’s shorter than the major workouts like Götterdämmerung and Meistersinger, but longer than Tannhäuser or most standard operas. Performances of Lohengrin usually begin at 7:00 p.m.
The first act of Lohengrin lasts about an hour, the second is close to an hour and a half, and the third is just over an hour. This means that people who have rushed from home or work to make the seven o’clock curtain will invariably eat at the first intermission, gulp a cocktail with their sandwich, and sleep blissfully through the longish last scene of Act II, with its lack of action and narcotic choral ensembles.
Be smarter than they are. Eat a reasonable meal before getting to the opera house, save the first intermission for a trip to the restroom, and then eat again and have that drink at the second intermission. Horns and sopranos blare through Act III, so none but the narcoleptic will fall asleep there.
ROUGH SPOTS AND HOW TO GET THROUGH THEM
The painfully beautiful Prelude may lead you to believe the first act will remain on the same ethereal plane throughout. This is not the case. The first scene is all about heraldic proclamations, Telramund stating his case, and King Henry directing traffic. It’s less than thrilling to most people. Try to focus on Telramund. He gets to display his voice best in this scene, even if he isn’t singing any “arias,” so to speak. See what he is conveying by his gestures or, if you’re lucky, vocal nuances. Is this a weak man or an evil one? Telramund can be played either way. If the baritone is conveying nothing at all, get comfortable and wait (about eleven minutes) for Elsa to appear, after which everything will be fine until the curtain comes down.
The first scene of Act II may not be the best music Wagner ever wrote, but it’s good operatic fun, with its two evil plotters contrasted with Elsa’s little ditty. Ortrud, of course, will wake the dead before she leaves the stage, so no problems here. The next little episode, with Telramund and the four Brabantine knights, is very brief and shows that Wagner could move characters quickly when he was so inclined.
There are some longueurs in the final scene of the act. Do not, under any circumstances, expect anything in particular to happen on stage. The action is interior here, not exterior. We are witnessing the beginnings of doubt and faithlessness in Elsa. If she manages to convey this with her voice or in some other manner, the first scene of Act III will be very powerful and convincing. If she does not, then just prepare yourself for a tableau vivant with sumptuous choral accompaniment rather than the usual operatic confrontation, and you’ll be fine.
As is usually the case with Wagner, the third act is bang-’em-up from start to finish. Laugh at those wimps who left the theater after Act II, and enjoy yourself.
PERFORMANCE HISTORY AND ESSENTIAL LORE OF LOHENGRIN
First performance (1850) Franz Liszt had found himself a cushy position at the court of Weimar, a pleasantly small town in Germany, which happened to have been the home of the great German poets Goethe and Schiller. Liszt was hire
d to reignite Weimar as a cultural gem, and he set about his task diligently. As part of this project, he introduced Lohengrin to the world in 1850. The resources at hand were painfully small; the orchestra consisted of thirty-eight musicians.
Cygnophilia (1858) Prince (later King) Ludwig of Bavaria had a “thing” for swans from earliest childhood. Much of his youth was spent in the castle of Hohenschwangau, whose lake was teeming with the graceful birds and whose walls were covered with depictions of swans and the various medieval legends of Lohengrin. When his nurse attended a performance of Wagner’s opera at Munich in 1858, he was transported by her description of the evening and fell in love with the work before he ever heard a note of it. He badgered his father, the very undreamy King Maximilian, into ordering a performance of Lohengrin at the Court Opera so he could attend, and the rest is history. After he came to the throne in 1864, he indulged this love even further: one evening he posted bands in the hills around the lake at Hohenschwangau to play themes from the opera while his trusty aide, Prince Paul von Thurn und Taxis, was tarted up as the Swan Knight and floated about the lake in a swan boat. King Ludwig was so pleased by this little divertissement that it was repeated the following night.
At least Ludwig kept his Lohengrin escapades in the private sphere. Kaiser Wilhelm II had himself photographed in full Swan Knight drag, and circulated this grotesque image all around Germany. He then made an official entrance into Hamburg in a boat drawn by swans. Unfortunately, the kaiser was never reviewed by the same board of experts that declared Ludwig insane.
The Unheard Opera Wagner, having been exiled from Germany in 1849, was not present at the Weimar premiere of Lohengrin, despite Liszt’s best diplomatic efforts to find a way for him to attend. In fact, Wagner did not hear the work played by an orchestra (except for a few concerts of excerpts he, Liszt, and Bülow gave in Switzerland in the 1850s) until he attended a performance at Vienna in 1862. In 1875, he conducted a single performance, also at Vienna, marking the one time in his life he conducted the piece himself.
“The next swan …” (1922) It’s hard to believe now, but people once took Wagner’s stage instructions very seriously. This meant, among other things, that Lohengrin was expected to make his entrance on an actual little boat drawn by a cut-out, papier maché swan. It always presented a problem. The great tenor Leo Slezak (father of the Hollywood actor Walter) once missed his cue, only to see his swan boat “sail away” without him. Unperturbed, he asked the stage crew, “When does the next swan depart?”
I’m not sure why, but this pleasant little story has achieved the status of the Funniest Thing That Has Ever Happened among opera fans, and even among some normal people. It is a universal rule that someone will tell this story if you mention Lohengrin. Endure it, and don’t admit you already know the punchline.
The Millennial Lohengrin (1936) The year 1936 marked the thousand-year anniversary of the death of King Henry the Fowler. Hitler wanted a particularly monumental production of Lohengrin, and Bayreuth complied. Also, this was the year of the Berlin Olympics, and all the foreigners who had avoided the festival since 1933 were expected to return (fewer than one hundred of them did). Although the 1936 production by director Tietjen and designer Preetorius looked like typical Third Reich monumentalism, everybody, including a few bona fide anti-Nazis who were there, agreed that it was one of the finest Wagner performances in history. Hitler was said to be moved to tears, and offered to send the production to London as a gift for the projected coronation of Edward VIII. It would be nice to record that Edward rejected the offer out of a sense of ethics, but, in fact, his only reservation was that all opera bored him, and he hoped he wouldn’t have to attend himself. Fortunately, the coronation never took place.
“Revenge of the Chinamen” (1950) The Chinese language and musical idiom have served European critics as an instance of incomprehensibility often employed against new music. The following is quoted from Nicolas Slonimsky’s Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers since Beethoven’s Time (Seattle: University of Washington, 1969):
The Musical World of June 30, 1855 gives this account of the music of Lohengrin: “It has no more real pretension to be called music than the jangling and clashing of gongs and other uneuphonious instruments with which the Chinamen, on the brow of a hill, fondly thought to scare away our English blue-jackets.” Ninety-five years later, by an ironic turn of history, the Chinese actually played Lohengrin music to British and American soldiers in Korea, to scare them away! An International News Service dispatch from the northwest Korean front, dated December 5, 1950, quotes Henry Roose, twenty-year-old private from Lima, Ohio, as saying: “I was one of five hundred men who fought their way out of a Chinese Communist trap…. Around 9 p.m., an eerie sound sent shivers along my spine. A lone bugler on a ridge one hundred yards away was playing Lohengrin’s Funeral March.* A Chinese voice speaking English floated across the valley, saying: ‘That’s for you, boys—you won’t ever hear it again.’”
PRODUCTIONS: WHAT YOU MIGHT EXPECT TO SEE
Lohengrin, as we have seen, is a fairy tale. That can mean several different things to people, but what you will probably see on stage is someone’s idea of what a fairy tale is. For the past several years, fairy tales have been understood as myths explaining developmental phenomena of the subconscious—which means, for staging purposes, that you can expect to see Elsa and Lohengrin deployed more as psychic symbols than flesh-and-blood types. The score backs this up with a great deal of stasis. A lot of the time, Elsa and Lohengrin don’t really move—even their bedroom scene calls for little physical action! A production that moves in this direction will probably also have the chorus standing still most of the time. The result will look like Greek drama, which works well.
Sometimes, although less frequently with this opera than other Wagner works, someone will have a dreaded political concept to put forth here. The inherent nationalism in the work demands some response in German productions, if not in others. There has been no single towering success of this type that has earned an important place in Lohengrin annals.
Details of decoration tend to take precedence over political theory with this opera. In years gone by, audiences liked to think of the Middle Ages in terms of high romance, like Robin Hood, and productions went in for high (anachronistic) kitsch. Then everyone thought of the Middle Ages more in terms of Monty Python, and we were presented with a generation of grim, drab, “bring out your dead!” impressions of the Dark Ages. We await the next wave.
Lighting always plays a primary role in a production of Lohengrin, showing the intrusion of Lohengrin’s celestial world on the gritty reality of Ortrud and Brabant. Thomas Mann once called the score of Lohengrin “silver and blue,” which is a lovely metaphor, but it’s surprising how many designers have taken Mann at his word. Nine productions of Lohengrin out of ten are studies in silver and blue.
In March 1998, the Met unveiled a much-anticipated production of Lohengrin by director Robert Wilson, famous for his work with such contemporary composers as Philip Glass, David Byrne, and Tom Waits, as well as for some interesting takes on Romantic opera in Europe. A brouhaha occurred on opening night, where opponents booed the production lustily while supporters railed against those they perceived as stuck in “traditional” productions. Indeed, except for a few interesting Dutchmans, the Met had never presented any very daring productions of Wagner operas. Oddly, the Wilson production was quite traditional in its own way: the director used Wagner’s own sketches for blocking and stage deployment, and Wilson’s “Blank stage” was positively baroque compared with Wieland Wagner’s early productions. Even the color scheme of the Wilson production was—what else—blue with silvery-white fluorescent highlights! Hardly a complete reassessment of the work in question. Unfortunately, debate devolved to the reductive all-pro or all-con level one hears in German theaters (where their historical legacy demands such a politicized approach), and the final word on this production is yet to be written. The goo
d news is that New York was abuzz with Wagner controversy for a while, and even the New York Post, of all papers, got its licks in with the priceless front-page headline “Bronx Cheers at the Met!” (March 11, 1998).
One last note: Do not, at this point in history, expect to see the tenor hauled on stage by a mechanical swan unless the production is being very sarcastic.
LOBBY TALK FOR LOHENGRIN (WHAT’S IN A NAME?)
A surprising number of people find the basic premise of Lohengrin to be contrived and alienating; that is, who would marry a man without even knowing his name? We have looked at the psychological considerations. Do we ever really know the people we love? How much of ourselves should we reveal if we want to retain “power” with people? In this light, the issues of Lohengrin appear very modern indeed, but there is no doubt that the emphasis on the name itself as the key to the hero’s identity strikes many as little more than a gimmick.
Actually, the idea that power is connected to a person’s name is common to all cultures. It is something of a fetish among primitive peoples, and persists in civilized cultures. Saint Augustine taught that “names are the consequences of things,” implying a direct causal relationship between an object and its name. Most of the medieval legends of Lohengrin use the central idea of his namelessness. We all know the fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin, whose “guess my name” and missing child motifs are strikingly close to Lohengrin’s. Carlo Gozzi’s “Chinese” fairy tale Turandote, with its hero-suitor with a secret name, became the other famous “name” opera, Turandot, by Giacomo Puccini. Another of Puccini’s operas employs a subtler, more “realistic” use of the name game. In La fanciulla del West, the characters must decide whether the hero is Dick Johnson, in which case he is a fine gentleman from Sacramento, or Ramirez the Bandit, in which case he is all bad. In fact he is the latter, and is only saved from “himself” and from the ire of the chorus by the redeeming love of a pure woman. She is aided in her task by a striking and heavily orchestrated “redemption theme” in the orchestra. The psychological and musical handling of the situation is extremely Wagnerian.
Wagner Without Fear Page 13