The Middle of the Distance

Abstract

In the perception of Richard Wagner's Lohengrin and in scholarly discourse on it, the legend associated with the tales of the Knights of the Grail prevails. But the romantic element in opera had a political and even revolutionary meaning for Wagner. The historical layer of the operatic action in Lohengrin draws on the Deeds of the Saxons by Widukind of Corvey and recounts the birth of the Yrst Germanic parish, united by Henry the Fowler, the “Father of the Fatherland” — and the Yrst Germanic emperor. The Romantic generation of German revolutionaries — Wagner's peers and associates — excavated the ancient history of Germany and German mythology from old manuscripts and established it in the minds of the aedgling nation. Lohengrin was the Yrst German opera to give artistic life to the revolutionary and patriotic ideas of the German Renaissance. The peculiarity of the opera lies in the interplay of the original Wagnerian principles of composition with operatic forms of Italian origin. The composer would later cite Johann Sebastian Bach as the ideal example of the “Germanic” in his ludicrous French wig and his fundamentally Italian style. By combining the rhetorical principle directly derived from Bach's music with a variety of German melodic sources from chorales to Romantic songs, Wagner had fully mastered his musical language. This article examines the compositional symmetries, supports, and arches that build the integral structure, new duet forms, and other Yndings that had a continuation in operas aber Lohengrin, as well as the main feature of this work: the combination of lyricism and tragedy, history and myth, which opens the way to countless interpretations of meaning on the modern opera stage.