For the Study and Enjoyment of Wagner's Art
Lecture given at "Wagner in der Wildnis", June 2007
by Jim Holman, Chairman, Wagner Society of Washington DC
The first thing I want to say, lest there be any mistake, is this: I love this opera,
Lohengrin. It has a very special place in my life; it was not only the first of my
immersions into Wagner, as a college undergraduate, it was also linked to a mutual immersion
with the woman who would become my wife nearly 42 years ago. So the opera has meaningful and --
how can I put this? -- intimate associations for me.
It is also a masterpiece. Had Wagner died in 1849, or been executed, or simply stopped
composing, as nearly happened, Lohengrin would still be a mainstay of the operatic
repertoire. It has an abundance of melodic achievement that Wagner never matched, before or
after. How could we not be disarmed by passages such as this, among the most lovely in the
nineteenth century.
EXAMPLE 1 (orchestral tag-end to the Elsa/Ortrud duet, Act 2)
How proud Bellini would have been to have written that!
I have conceived my job here at this 7th "Wildnis" as stage-setter, to offer
up some issues involved with Lohengrin, and some observations -- amateur observations
to be sure -- that may stimulate, and I hope provoke, your examination of the opera, as well as
your rebuttals. I have also intentionally fashioned these remarks as fodder for the more learned
reactions of our resident "Dream Team", Jeffrey Swann and Simon Williams. So I am
deliberately wearing a bulls-eye on my back!
When we talk about Wagner, declarative analysis generally provokes a "yes, but ...."
That is, conventional wisdom is requires qualification. That is part of the endless fascination
of our patron composer.
For example, I said that Lohengrin is a masterpiece. "Yes, but" -- compared to the
seven masterpieces that Wagner was to write after it, Lohengrin can be viewed as a piece
very much of its time and place, a minor masterpiece, the culmination of what has been called
High German Romanticism.
"Yes, but" -- Lohengrin is much more than just the end of a musical period, because
it, as well as the Dutchman and Tannhäuser, inevtiably suggest themselves as
precursors of those seven transcendent masterpieces to follow. In terms of thematic material,
it's just too easy to find in the first three operas nothing less than a hodge-podge of
material that will be sorted out in the later works. For example: Senta is Wagner's first
heroine to display the potentially redemptive power of Woman, and there is also the powerful,
brooding Dutchman as proto-type of Wotan in The Ring.
Tannhäuser has even more of these incipient themes: the song contest which
later appears in Die Meistersinger; seductive Venus re-appears as Kundry in Act 2 of
Parsifal; there is a curse, too, and the Holy Father's condemnation of
Tannhäuser is muscially identical to Alberich's curse in Das Rheingold.
Lohengrin, too, has its fair share of these thematic seedlings:
-- the Grail, of course, which is at the heart of Parsifal, who's hero is
Lohengrin's father;
-- there is the challenge to German integrity, an underlying theme in Meistersinger;
-- there are the symbols of sword, horn and ring, all vital to the Ring Cycle;
-- on a trivial level, the Swan motive famously re-appears in Act 1 of Parsifal, and
then all those hunting horns in Lohengrin are echoed in Tristan, Act 2;
-- and on a far from trivial level: the metaphysical question of the nature of reality itself,
unquestionably suggested by the dream-soaked Elsa, and perfected in the entire fabric of
Tristan.
Simon may agree that it one of Wagner's greatest accomplishments as dramatist that he
was able to transform so much traditional, almost melodramatic material from the first three
operas into coherent and universal statements in the final seven.
And that brings us to another cliche about Wagner -- the so-called "five-year
gap". I think most of you are aware of the chronology -- the absence of musical composition,
from 1848 until 1853, from the end of Lohengrin until Wagner began the composition of
Rheingold, and so began the process of inventing modern music. Well, not quite. The musical
break during the five-year gap is not quite as clean as has sometimes been described, and I want
to focus on that for a moment.
Many of you were courteous enough to come to a lecture I gave at the Kennedy Center
last year on Das Rheingold. My principal theme was that Rheingold is still a work in
transition, struggling in some ways to shake off the musical and dramatic conventions of
German Romanticism, not yet quite in full command of the harmonic elaboration and motivic
invention so patent in Die Walküre.
That lecture looked from Das Rhinegold backward, over that five-year bridge
toward its links with the first three operas. Tonight I want to cross that same bridge, but
starting from the other end -- beginning at Lohengrin -- and look at a couple of ways
a Romantic masterpiece points to the music dramas of the future.
Here are just two musical examples, which you may or may not agree, reverberate into
Wagner's musical later works.
The first is from one of those many -- Jeffrey might say ubiquitous -- brass fanfares.
This one opens the third scene of Act 2. I am struck by the middle section of this passage.
Here is just that middle portion, built around a single major chord, rising in volume and and
by octaves. Tell me if you think this evokes a Wagner moment yet to come:
EXAMPLE 2 (Act 2 transition -- horns)
If you arpeggiate and roll this passage into three-four time, what have you got? Yes,
exactly! Whatever epiphany Wagner claims to have had in that hotel room in Spezia, he had
already written, here in Lohengrin, the proto-type of the Rheingold Prelude.
Let's look at another example of the way Wagner foreshadows his musical development
in Lohengrin. A couple of years ago the New York Times critic, Anthony Tomassini, made
a trenchant point about Wagner's mature musico-dramatic style, specifically the passage, or
leitmotiv if you like, describing Brünnhilde's descent into sleep in the last scene of Die
Walküre. To be sure, the seductive harmonies are in themselves magical and compelling, but
what gives the passage its almost transcendental impact is that Wagner uses a RISING line in
the bass, so that we, like Brünnhilde, have the sense simultaneously of descending, but also
ascending to what will become, for her and us, a higher state of consciousness. Here is one of
the "Sleep" passages in Die Walküre, and again, please note the rising line in the bass:
EXAMPLE 3 (Brünnhilde's Sleep)
Now let's look at a passage that occurs early in the second act of Lohengrin,
in the long scene between Friedrich and Ortrud. At both the beginning and end of this excerpt,
the falling harmonies in the treble are here -- as in Die Walküre -- counter-poised
against a rising line in the bass.
EXAMPLE 4 (Friedrich/Orturd -- Act 2)
You may or may not agree, but to me this is a precursor to Brünnhilde's Sleep -- Ortrud
even talks in this passage about "revelers ... plunged in sleep." So, maybe the break in
Wagner's musical development between 1848 and 1853 may not be so clean after all.
I want to talk about another transitional aspect of Lohengrin. We have already
noted Wagner's mastery of German Romanticism, and especially in Lohengrin, his complete
and genuine command of the material. Nevertheless, I was, as I prepared this talk, powerfully
struck by how much Lohengrin sounds like an ETUDE, a study, an exercise for the future.
There is a quality in the music that is deliberate, careful, schematic, almost plodding. I got
the impression that these qualities -- deliberate, careful, schematic, almost plodding --
suggest that Wagner was beginning to work out the great orchestral and harmonic innovations of
the mature operas.
These qualities are present at the outset, in the Prelude, and we could look at any
number of other examples in this regard -- Elsa's Dream, the Swan Farewell, several of the
choruses, and the conclusion of the Ortrud/Elsa duet we heard earlier. Let's listen to just
one minute from the pre-nuptial procession from Act 2, a passage that lasts for more than five
and a half minutes. It is a lovely passage, and builds as a thrilling crescendo, but what I
want to emphasize here is the metronomic regularity of the rhythm as it relates to the harmonic
changes.
EXAMPLE 5 (pre-nuptial procession -- Act 2)
It strikes me that Wagner -- if only subconsciously -- is working out here in an almost
text-book way, the harmonic progressions which will roll out so seamlessly, effortlessly, and
rapidly in the later operas.
As an aside, I would have to guess that Robert Wilson, consciously or not, absorbed
this deliberate, static element into his recent direction of Lohengrin, which featured
iconic, virtually hieroglyphic postures in characters who seemed to act, if at all, with
exaggerated, nearly glacial movement. Whether you liked the production or not -- and I did --
I think Wilson gave us a compelling insight into the state of Wagner's musical development.
At the same time, those stylized figures in the Wilson production also exposed one of
the glaring weaknesses, if that's not too strong a word, in Lohengrin vis-à-vis
the later operas, and that is the relative paucity of development, both in the characters
themselves, and let's face it, in the story itself. Can we really trace much complexity,
depth or change in any of the characters (other, perhaps, than in Elsa)? And in all honesty,
there is only one real dramatic hinge in the entire piece, and that is the psychological
vulnerability, flamed by Ortrud into a compulsion, that leads Elsa to ask the forbidden
question.
And while I'm at it, let me say that, while I understand the precedent in medieval
literature, I have never been able much to fathom or buy into Lohengrin's proscription
against revealing his name, race, or home. I am hoping, with your help, that by the end of the
weekend I will have a better understanding of that! In the meantime, it seems to me that
Wagner puts the flighty Elsa in a hopeless, if not cruel, position -- grist for the mill of
those feminists who claim Wagner as misogynist.
Of all the ten operas, the Lohengrin characters strike me as the least complex
or three-dimensional, and most of all the Grail Knight himself. His dramatic dilemma, and his
crucial choices, are less developed than either Tannhäuser's or the Dutchman's. Lohengrin
appears to be a fellow who is above all duty-bound, almost grimly going through his assignment
of redeeming the lady in distress. I actually had to be reminded, while going back to my Ernest
Newman, that Lohengrin has actually loved Elsa from afar long before he was ever called upon
to save her. And of course, it is duty, in the end, that makes him keep his pledge and abandon
her. Tristan, Siegfried, Sachs, and Parsifal are made of very different stuff.
And while I am declaiming the negatives, let me say that there is music here that sounds
out of place, un-integrated with the drama, in a way that never happens in the later operas. I
am thinking of the Prelude to the third act, exciting stuff -- Marx Brothers stuff -- that has
at least for me, no motivic or emotional connection to the thread of the drama.
EXAMPLE 6 (beginning of the Prelude to Act 3)
The transition in Act 3 after the Bridal Chamber Scene to the the opera's finale is
musically one of Wagner's most glorious passages. But its noble anticipation seems out of
place in between the tragic conversation between Lohengrin and Elsa that precedes it, and the
intense denouement to follow. There is certainly dramatic logic here -- the King has called
the Brabantian knights to present themselves for the campaign ahead -- but the effect, to me,
is more interlude than integration.
EXAMPLE 7 (gathering of the knights, act 3)
Finally, Wagner seems to have difficulty composing high quality action music. The sword
fight in Act 1 never fails to bring to my mind Saturday afternoons at the movies, and the
"Perils of Pauline."
EXAMPLE 8 (sword fight -- Act 1)
Of course, even the later Wagner had trouble here -- Siegfried's fight with Fafner,
and Siegfried-as-Gunther's tussle with Brünnhilde for the Ring have always struck me
as the two weakest musical passages in The Ring. I would quickly add, howeer, that
Lohengrin's sword fight with Friedrich is quickly redeemed by the chorus which concludes the
first act, it is a thrilling scene-closer!
Well, so much for the bad and the ugly. Luckily for me, Wagner himself is not here to
hear these remarks! So I will conclude by touching on two of the great achievements of
Lohengrin.
Many people have looked at the Ortrud/Friedrich scene that opens Act 2 as a step
forward, a deepening in Wagner that leads to the profound psychological relationships and
the interior dramas of the later operas. Frankly, I confess that I find this encounter
musically tedious, and always hope it will pass quickly.
I think that the great breakthrough is, rather, in the Bridal Chamber Scene. This is
where I begin to hear what we call "continuous music" in Wagner, a naturalness of
dialogue, an actual conversation between characters that propels the drama realistically.
Here is the synthesis between traditional operatic recitative and set piece that is one of
Wagner's greatest achievements.
Here is just the beginning of the scene, taken from one of the greatest of all Wagner
recordings -- featuring Lauritz Melchior.
EXAMPLE 9
Finally, I must mention one of the great glories in all Wagner, the Lohengrin
Prelude, which, after all, was written AFTER the opera itself. On one level, this piece is, as
suggested earlier, very much an orchestral etude. It is rigid in form -- a kind of reverse bow
form, beginning at the highest strings, lowering itself instrument by instrument, octave by
octave, to the double clash of the cymbals, and then rising again to where it had begun.
This piece reflects, for one thing, Wagner's now complete grasp of dramatic structure
-- the climax coming about two-thirds of the way through, and the denouement, as in any good
short story, taking us back over ground already covered. But this is much more than an
orchestral exercise. There is a patent projection of harmonic invention. The piece is a case
study of orchestration. It is an achievement of polyphonic layering that foreshadows the
Meistersinger Prelude.
I'm not going to play an excerpt from the Prelude tonight, because it's time for me to
give way to a more talented speaker, and no doubt it will be played over the weekend, but also
because the Prelude is so perfectly integrated, so much of a piece, that to excerpt it would
be sinful.
Wagner, of course, described the Prelude in great detail, in terms of the revelation
of the Grail. Saul Lilienstein showed us last year how Leni Riefenstahl turned it into
horrible magic on film, Adolph Hitler descending from the heavens into Nuremberg. It is a
piece that grips our emotional imaginations in an internal, disturbing way that the
magnificent overtures to Dutchman and Tannhäuser do not. It is, as a matter
of fact, the first day of the rest of Wagner's artistic life.