Some observations on Lohengrin
If the Grail is in the world but not of the world, then so too is its servant, the Swan Knight Lohengrin. Elsa needs him to defend her honour but, in return, he seeks a love that is perfect trust. Their marriage prospects are doomed from the start because, to put it starkly, Lohengrin is of the spirit and Elsa of the flesh. It is not Elsa’s frailty that is the issue - her curiosity is entirely reasonable - rather, it is the impossibility of reconciling the irreconcilable that lies at the heart of this beautiful and poignant opera.
Marriage - Wagner knew - often foundered on the hopelessness of trying to reconcile the irreconcilable. Liszt understood this (he was the work’s first champion) as did the young Ludwig of Bavaria, whose Wagnerian infatuations began with a performance of Lohengrin. Indeed Ludwig’s last-minute abandonment of his marriage to the Duchess Sophie (who, fatally, signed her letters ‘Elsa’) seems the first of many examples of Ludwig’s life imitating Wagner’s art.
The legends of the Swan Knight were well known in the 12th century and their roots go back even further. The incentive for many of the stories seems to have been the need to ascribe a supernatural origin to a ruling house. A mysterious stranger arrives among a people, becomes their ruler and the ancestor of the reigning house, and then disappears again. What a helpful legend this must have been for noblemen whose lineage was subject to doubt or innuendo? Lohengrin doesn’t father a line in any literal sense but he does restore Gottfried to human form and declare him to be the new ruler of Brabant, which is effectively the same thing.
The general idea of the forbidden question can be traced to antiquity, but we find a more particular explanation in Wolfram’s Parzival. At one point, Parzival’s half brother, the Muslim Feirefiz, decides to be baptised – not out of religious conviction but so that he can marry a beautiful Christian woman. When Feirefiz is baptised he is then able to see the Grail which hitherto had been invisible to him. On the Grail (which is a sacred stone in Wolfram’s account) appears the text:
Any Templar appointed by God’s hand to be master over a foreign folk must forbid the asking of his name or race and help them to their rights. But if the question is asked of him, they shall no longer have his help.
Feirefiz, like Lohengrin, does indeed go off to be ‘master over a foreign folk’ – in his case to India. So, behind the forbidden question in the opera is the Grail’s own injunction to all who serve it. Lohengrin simply has no choice.
Ortrud’s paganism and connotations of cannibalism.
Ortrud worships the old gods: Wotan, Freia and the rest. She steadies Friedrich’s nerve by telling him that the mysterious knight will be forced to disclose his name and race, and then his power will be at an end. She explains that anyone who owes his strength to magic would be vulnerable should he be deprived of even the smallest part of his body. If, during the combat, Friedrich had cut off a finger – even a finger joint – then the stranger would have been powerless.
The idea of neutralising a person’s powers by cutting off a piece of his body seems an odd thing for Wagner to introduce into the opera. Where does that come from? In one of the poetic continuations of Wolfram’s Parzival, called Der jüngere Titurel, Loherangrin (as his name is spelt) marries a noble woman who is told by one of her maids that she can secure her husband’s constancy by cutting off a morsel of his flesh and eating it. She cannot bring herself to do this, so her parents undertake to do it for her.
Some of Wagner’s contemporaries thought his treatment of Elsa too cruel and tried to persuade him to give the work a happier ending. For a while he hesitated and at one point, even agreed. Then he realised that no other ending could possibly be considered if the drama was to remain true to itself, and so he left it intact. Undoubtedly, this was the right decision.
Perhaps Elsa should have noted more carefully Lohengrin’s remark to the swan when he first arrived on the banks of the Scheldt: “Glide back over the wide water to the place from which you brought me; return to where alone our happiness lies!” Then his departing words would not have come as such a shock: “Farewell, my sweetest wife! I shall antagonize the Grail if I remain longer. Farewell, farewell!”