The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera by Rupert Christiansen Page A

sections: Lohengrin was the first to be consecutively written, in draft form, starting at the beginning and ending at the end.This gives the opera a unity of style and dramatic continuity which had previously been lacking in his work.
    The plot is based on an episode in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, a medieval poem to which Wagner would return for his last opera.
    Plot
    Antwerp, in the tenth century.King Henry rallies the Brabantines to defend Germany against the encroaching Hungarians.Telramund accuses Elsa of murdering her vanished brother, Gottfried, heir to the dukedom.In league with his sorceress wife Ortrud, who has secretly used her powers to bewitch Gottfried, Telramund claims the succession for himself.
    Elsa needs a champion to defend her honour.To answer her call, a mysterious knight appears in a boat drawn by a swan.This knight promises to defend Elsa, and then to marry her, on condition that she does not ask his name or origin.After she agrees, the knight defeats Telramund in a duel, but spares his life.
    A furious Ortrud poisons Elsa’s mind against the nameless knight.King Henry proclaims that Telramund has been banished and that the knight will marry Elsa and then march against the Hungarians.But Ortrud and Telramund disrupt the wedding procession with accusations that the knight defeated Telramund by sorcery.The knight still refuses to reveal his name.
    In the bridal chamber, Elsa gives way to her burning curiosity and asks the knight the fatal question – at which point Telramund aggressively breaks in.The knight kills himand announces that he will answer Elsa’s question by King Henry’s judgment seat.There, in public view, he explains that he killed Telramund in self-defence and finally reveals his identity.He is Lohengrin, a knight of the Grail, son of Parzival, invincible only while anonymous.Now his secret has been revealed, he must return to Monsalvat, home of the Grail.The swan boat returns.Ortrud reveals that the swan is in fact Elsa’s vanished bother Gottfried, transformed by her magic.Lohengrin kneels in prayer, and as a sacred dove descends, the spell is broken and the swan is turned back into Gottfried’s human shape.Lohengrin names him Protector of Brabant and leaves in the boat, now drawn by the dove.Ortrud’s magic is destroyed, but Elsa, heartbroken at Lohengrin’s departure, collapses lifeless.
    What to listen for
    In the way that particular characters, emotions or dramatic elements (such as the question forbidden to Elsa) are associated with specific melodic themes (often known as leitmotivs), Lohengrin may rank as Wagner’s first mature opera.In many passages of the score (notably the highly charged duet between Ortrud and Telramund at the beginning of Act II), he seems to break away from conventional length and shape of phrase and make the characters ‘speak in song’, the rhythm and melody being moulded by the text and its implications rather than by any fixed tune: Elsa’s ‘Einsam in trüben Tagen’ and Lohengrin’s ‘In fernem Land’ are not so much arias as narrations.Both roles (for soprano and tenor) are among the most vocally gratifying in Wagnerian repertory, even if the loudest applause often goes to the mezzo-soprano singing Ortrud: her confessional rant in the final minutes brings an opera sometimes punningly described by its detractors as ‘Slow and Grim’ to an electrifying climax.
    The famous bridal chorus occurs in Act II – in the opera, it is intended to convey a certain foreboding and hesitation on Elsa’s part.Note also the contrast between the radiantly shimmering and diaphanous Prelude to Act I (the sound ofwhich gave the poet Baudelaire the sensation of weightlessness and vision of white light that he otherwise obtained from hashish) and the brassily triumphant Prelude to Act III.
    In performance
    The clash between the Christian world of Lohengrin and the pagan world of Ortrud has fascinated many directors, but the most successful