Lohengrin

Wagner’s sixth opera and the first work by the Leipzig Genius to be performed in Italy (Bologna, 1871), Lohengrin is described on the score as a ‘romantische Oper,’ underlining the fact it belongs to the cultural mood that combined a new sensitivity with the need to emancipate itself from ‘classical’ forms, in the name of the artist’s freedom. ‘Romantische’ and, therefore, ‘durchkomponierte’ or ‘composed without interruptions’, it therefore abandons the traditional articulation in closed numbers, in order to build a musical discourse that flows continuously. Although some parts, which can be isolated from the rest, are still recognisable– Elsa’s dream, the wedding march, the Elsa-Lohengrin love duet, the final story of the Knight of the Grail –, the ‘infinite melody’ is already prefigured in the work, which will constitute the musical fabric of Der Ring, accompanied by other precursor aspects of the Tetralogy: the presence of a plot of Leitmotive (‘the Grail’, ‘the swan’, ‘Lohengrin’, ‘Elsa’, ‘Ortrud’, ‘divine judgment’, ‘the prohibition of asking’) and the contrast between the ‘elect’ (the Lohengrin-Elsa couple, nobly founded on love) and the ‘rejects’ (the Telramund-Ortrud couple, responding to a ‘bourgeois’ logic of power), created through two different ‘harmonious-timbrical climates’: the one representing in a major key the inner light, the essence of positive heroes; the other is gloomy, revealing in a minor key the ‘black’ soul of the wicked’.