Lohengrin

“ But Lohengrin heard these words, though they were not intended to reach him, and sinking on his knees, he prayed for power to overcome Ortrud's magic. His prayer was graciously answered; for as the people gazed in wonder, the fair white Dove of the Holy Grail flew softly down and hovered over the skiff, whilst Lohengrin quickly loosened the golden chain that bound the swan. Instantly, the swan sank into the water, and presently there arose in its place the young prince, Gottfried, Elsa's brother. ”

“ She sees in her mind's eye the swan-boat approaching to take him away. Lohengrin speaks reassuringly; but the spell is upon her, and nothing—nothing can give her peace but to know the truth. With mounting tones, the last one of which is like an outcry, she asks the fatal question. Lohengrin gives an exclamation of grief.
At this moment the door is burst open by Frederick, who with drawn sword has come to wound the hero, or, more probably, to kill him. Elsa at once recognizes his intention, and frantically bids Lohengrin defend himself. With a single thrust he kills his would-be assassin. ”

“ What they sought for in him was doubtless the revolutionist of the days in May, 1849; the deep thinker, the powerful and energetic man of action, marching toward progress and the liberation of thought. And what hatred! Banished, pursued, and not knowing where to take refuge. Thus came about this almost incredible thing, that, at one time, he might be thought the only German who had not seen the representation of Lohengrin. ”

“ The last scene introduces us once more to the meadow on the Scheldt, where Lohengrin appears before the King and his vassals. In their presence he reveals himself as the son of Parsifal, in a scena of consummate power ("In fernem Land, unnahbar euren Schritten") , wherein the Grail motive reaches its fullest development. It is followed by his touching farewell, "O Elsa! nur ein Jahr an deiner Seite," the melody of which can hardly be surpassed in dignity and impressiveness. The dénouement now hastens, and Lohengrin disappears, to the accompaniment of the Grail motive. ”

“ It grew louder and louder the farther it traveled, and its sound called the knights into the temple, where Lohengrin received his orders from the Holy Grail.
The day appointed for the duel dawned, and just as the heralds sounded the last call for Else's champion to appear, the swan boat glided up the Rhine, and Lohengrin sprang into the lists, after thrice blowing his magic horn.
[Sidenote: Else rescued by Lohengrin.] With a God-sent champion opposed to a liar, the issue of the combat could not long remain doubtful. ”

“ My ideals are broken, my faith in humanity is gone for ever. Would I could die or enter a convent! I can write no more to-day—I have naught but tears and sighs to record. I only ate two apple-dumplings for dinner; they all noticed it.
May 14.—No one knows what I suffer. This terrible secret of my poisoned youth shall follow me to my grave. Lohengrin! How absurd the name sounds now, like a cruel irony of Fate.
What would the girls at school say if they knew that Lohengrin, my interesting exiled Count, my Knight of the Swan—oh, horrors!—is nothing but a waiter? ”

“ Lohengrin received a horn from his father, who bade him sound it thrice on arriving at his destination, and an equal number of times when he wished to return to Montsalvatch. Then he also reminded him that a servant of the Grail must reveal neither his name nor his origin unless asked to do so, and that, having once made himself known, he was bound to return without delay to the holy mountain. ”

“ Richard Wagner, more than any other contemporary, as we conceive, has re-awakened in the sphere of the intellectual life of his German people its inborn feeling for the grand and profound, for the pure and the sublime—in one word, for the ideal. May we who follow prove this in life by gratefully welcoming this grand deed! Then Lohengrin, who sought the wife that believed in him, need not again return to his dreary solitude. He will be forever relieved of his longing for union with the heart of his people. ”

“ The four girls turned around quickly. It almost seemed to them that Lohengrin himself must have made a rapid change from his silver armor to evening clothes and walked into their box. But on second glance, they saw that Lord Glenarm was older than the stage Lohengrin and much finer looking, too. His brown hair was slightly gray at the temples; his gray eyes had blue lights in them; he had rather a beaked nose and a fine, square chin. He was very tall, and his shoulders stooped a little. The girls could not tell why he reminded them at first of the tall blonde young Lohengrin. ”

“ Its most important motives belong to this mythical cycle: Lohengrin floats in a skiff upon the water, and is brought ashore by a swan. No one may ask whence he has come: the sexual mystery of the origin of man must not be revealed but it is replaced by the suggestion of the stork fable: the children are fished from the water by the swan and are taken to the parents in a box. Corresponding to the prohibition of all enquiries in the Lohengrin saga, we find in other myths (for example, the Œdipus myth) , a command to investigate, or a riddle which must be solved. ”

“ Lohengrin does-278- not fell Telramund "with one mighty stroke," as the stage direction in the score says he should, but holds his sword on high, while Frederic, without being struck at all, falls, overcome by the mysterious power which emanates from it. Of course this belittles the knightly character of Lohengrin, who conquers not by his prowess, but by the intervention of supernatural power, and furthermore it is opposed to the text. The Herald in his address to the combatants just before the King's prayer says:
"By evil magic's cunning and deceit distort not the nature of the judgment." ”

“ The narrative of Lohengrin is suggested by Wolfram's "Parzival."
One more note must be made before we pass to a brief examination of the music of Wagner's most popular work. There is a strange resemblance between some of the fundamental features of the story of "Lohengrin" and those of "Der Fliegende Holländer." Senta and Elsa are both dream-haunted maidens. Both dream of lovers. About each of the lovers there is something mystic or supernatural. Each of the lovers is to come to the maiden from the water. ”

“ The cyclic character of the Lohengrin saga is referred by him to the fantasy of being one’s own son, as revealed by Freud (p. 131; compare also pp. 96 and 990) . This accounts for the identity of father and son, in certain myths, the repetition of their careers; the fact that the hero is sometimes not exposed until he has reached maturity, also the intimate connection between birth and death, in the exposure-motive. (Concerning the water as the water of death, compare especially chapter IV of the Lohengrin saga.) ”

“ Kardeiss and Lohengrin,
Whom thy wife, e'en as thou didst leave her, for her joy and her hope must win—
For children thus born in wedlock, the pledge of a love so pure,
I ween are a man's best blessing, and a joy that shall aye endure!
New strength did he win, the Christian, and he thought, none too soon, I ween, 165
On his love so true and faithful, on Kondwiramur, his queen,
How he won his wife at the sword's point, when sparks from the helm did spring
'Neath the mighty blows he dealt him, Klamidé, the warrior king. ”

“ He is accepted by Elsa as her champion and lover on the condition that she shall never attempt to ask his name. If she should violate her promise, Lohengrin—for it is he—must return at once to his father's kingdom. Telramund is worsted in the fight, having no power to fight against Lohengrin's sacred sword, and the act ends with rejoicings over the approaching marriage of Lohengrin and Elsa.
In the second act it is night; Telramund and Ortrud are crouching upon the steps of the Minster, opposite the palace, plotting revenge. ”

“ The story is on the whole simpler than that of Tannhäuser. Lohengrin is son of Parsifal, head of the mystic Montsalvat monastery where the Holy Grail is kept; where the monks never seem precisely to die; and where, without marriage and even without women, children are somehow born to the favoured ones. He comes in a magic boat drawn by a swan to aid Elsa against Telramund and his wife, who falsely accuse her of having murdered her brother; he fights for her and overcomes the accusers, first exacting a promise that she will never ask him his name nor where he comes from. ”

“ It is Parzival's failure in the spirit of charity, in the love due 'as a man to men,' that constitutes the sin of the omitted question. Mr. Nutt well remarks that 'It is the insistence upon charity as the herald and token of spiritual perfection that makes the grandeur of Wolfram's poem.'
Page 283, line 1038—'If a land be without a ruler.' Here we have the germ of the well-known story of Lohengrin, related in Book XVI. We learn from this passage that Lohengrin's mission was no isolated instance, but a part of the office of the Grail knights. ”

“ Lohengrin was also to be produced there. Although this was very gratifying, I did not in the least know what to do with the good man at such close quarters. Fortunately I was able to hand him over to Tausig, who understood my embarrassment, and kept Tichatschek to himself pretty well the whole day, by playing cards with him. The young tenor Niemann, of whose great talent I had heard so much, soon arrived with his bride, the famous actress Seebach, and owing to his almost gigantic frame, he struck me as being just the man for Siegfried. ”

“ How much that amounted to I really do not know, but that it was a large sum I am sure, for Lohengrin must have been very wealthy. He couldn't have afforded to dress in solid silver-tinsel tights if he had been otherwise. I had the tights assayed before returning them to their owner, and even in a country where free coinage of tights is looked upon askance they could not be duplicated for less than $850 at a ratio of 32 to 1. ”

“ Page 184, line 610, and seq.—'The Lohengrin myth.' This legend of a supernatural benefactor or deliverer, who arrives at the land which he is to benefit in a boat, miraculously guided, and leaves it in the same way, is extremely widely spread, and may be regarded rather as the property of the Aryan race as a whole, than of one nation in particular. In its earliest forms, such as the legend of Sceaf among the Anglo-Saxons, and Höni in the Faroe Isles, the hero is undoubtedly of divine origin, and the second of these seems to be the first in which the swan element is introduced. ”

“ Ernest Newman suggests that perhaps Wagner was using the savage's notion that in giving up your name you are placing yourself in some one's power; but there is not a hint of that in the drama. The thing to me is simply a fairy story. We must accept Lohengrin and the conditions in which he lives, moves and has his being. He is not his own master: somewhere far away he has an all-powerful over-lord who, for no useful purpose to be comprehended by mortal, sent him to rescue Elsa under these conditions. ”

“ On his sixteenth birthday the Crown Prince of Bavaria had been present at a representation of Lohengrin. This opera had made the deeper [26] impression on him from the fact that the legend of the swan knights was connected with Hohenschwangau, which, as we know, had been from his childhood his favourite place of residence. During the years preceding his ascent of the throne his interest in the “musician of the future” increased. ”

“ Lilli Lehmann in the principal part, I have always been ready to present. I was the first manager to translate Wagner's Tannhäuser and Lohengrin into Italian, and the only one out of Germany who has been enterprising enough to produce the entire series of the Ring des Nibelungen. ”

“ She too complained bitterly of the general apathy of the influential classes in Berlin, which effectually prevented any artistic aims from being realised. It was her opinion that the King found a sort of satisfaction in knowing that the theatre was badly managed, for though he never opposed any criticisms which he received on the subject, he likewise never supported any proposal for its improvement. She expressed a wish to know something of my latest work, and I gave her my poem of Lohengrin for perusal. ”

“ Wagner again took his material from the old legend, which tells us of the mystical knight Lohengrin, (Veron of Percifal) , Keeper of the "Holy Grail".
The scene is laid near Antwerp, where "Heinrich der Vogler," King of Germany, is just levying troops amongst his vassals of Brabant, to repulse the Hungarian invaders. The King finds the people {173} in a state of great commotion, for Count Frederick Telramund accuses Elsa of Brabant, of having killed her young brother Godfrey, heir to the Duke of Brabant, who died a short time ago, leaving his children to the care of Telramund. ”

“ His pamphlet, “German Art and German Politics,” had directed the attention of the narrower circle of Wagner’s friends at least to the great fact that the artificial French civilization which had prevailed during the last generation could be banished by a real intellectual [Pg 126] culture, and that in this work the highest form of art, the stage-festival-play, would take a prominent and important part. A masterly performance of Lohengrin in the spring of 1868, in honor of the Crown-Prince of Prussia, was a striking illustration of this, especially to Munich circles. ”