Wagner discovered the story of Lohengrin in his Dresden library, where he worked as a court musician. Fascinated by its medieval and magical background, he decided to embark on this project in 1845, creating one of his most lyrical and metaphysical operas: the romantic tale of a pure noblewoman and a supernatural knight that ends in tragedy due to an indiscreet question.
There are several aspects that are often recurrent in Wagner’s work: a medieval setting that generally serves to achieve a mythological dimension, the theme of love as a force of nature—which can both regenerate and destroy—and the tensions generated by the ambition for power. But in Lohengrin, another theme also emerges strongly: pure fantasy. It is said that this opera, the last of Wagner’s Romantic cycle, is a fairy tale that ends badly—unlike stories like Snow White or Sleeping Beauty—but in which all the tropes of magical tales are present. Here, we have a kind-hearted young woman in distress, a miraculous knight—a prince charming shrouded in mystery—a wicked witch, and a dense atmosphere of unreality. One could say that the fantastic is common in Wagner—Tristan and Isolde’s love potion, the magical power of the Grail in Parsifal, the Venusberg in Tannhäuser, and the entire story of Der Ring des Nibelungen show the composer’s fascination with the supernatural—but in Lohengrin, all of this takes a much more defined shape as a popular fable, a bedtime story read to children.
«The work is not presented as a medieval fable or a nationalist statement, but as a psychological drama in which doubt or ambition corrupts the characters.»
The story is set in the 10th century, at a time when the borders of the Holy Roman Empire were threatened by incursions from Hungarian invaders. On the banks of the River Scheldt, in what is now Antwerp, King Heinrich's troops gather, but there is a power vacuum in Brabant, one of the most important duchies: the heir, Gottfried, has disappeared, and the noble Friedrich von Telramund accuses his elder sister, Elsa, of murdering him. This accusation is false, as Telramund desires control of the duchy, but Elsa must defend her innocence. When the king decides that the dispute should be settled by a duel, Elsa calls upon a knight whom she has only seen in dreams: suddenly, a boat drawn by a swan arrives on the river, carrying a man bathed in light. The warrior agrees to defend Elsa on one condition: that she must never ask him his name or origin. When the knight defeats Telramund, Elsa is named Duchess of Brabant and marries her champion.
But there can be no fairy tale without an evil witch, and in this case, it is Ortrud, Telramund’s wife, a sorceress who seeks to regain power with an insidious strategy: she will try to convince Elsa to ask her lover the forbidden question. After many intrigues and the interruption of the wedding, Elsa begins to doubt in the third act and decides to ask her mysterious husband his name: to love him fully, she needs to know everything about him. In doing so, she breaks the spell: the knight reveals that he is Lohengrin, son of Parsifal, a knight of the Grail on a mission to defend the weak, but always under total anonymity. Now, he must return to his place of origin, leaving Elsa alone and exposing Ortrud’s scheme—she had made young Gottfried disappear with her black magic. In the end, both Ortrud and Elsa die, for in a perfect world, there is no room for evil or doubt.
Wagner discovered the story of Lohengrin in a 12th-century medieval text he kept in his library in Dresden, where he had been the court’s musical director since 1842—a true treasure trove of references that also inspired his later works: Tristan und Isolde, the Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung) cycle, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg), and Parsifal. According to his own account, it was in 1845, while taking a bath at the Marienbad spa, that he had the spark of inspiration to write his opera, his sixth composition. He completed it in two years but was unable to premiere it, as in 1849, he had to flee Dresden for participating in that year’s uprising against absolute power. It was his friend Franz Liszt who finally conducted its premiere in 1850, in nearby Weimar, with a success that spread to other cities—Lohengrin is as dense as it is lyrical, the most melodic of all the composer’s operas—and sparked the phenomenon of Wagnerism, the collective obsession with the revolutionary power of the musical dramas of the man who would become the new god of European music.