Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, Band 65/2008, Heft 1, S. 45-60

Arne Stollberg: „Hartnäckig auf dem christlichen Standpunkte“. Wagners Lohengrin am Ende der absoluten Musik*

In the first years of his exile in Zurich, Wagner’s attitude toward Lohengrin is marked by a strange ambivalence. On the one hand he tries to justify this “romantic opera” in light of his newly-developed theory of music drama by way of self re-interpretation (Eine Mitteilung an meine Freunde). On the other hand he refers to this earlier opera as a “sloughed-off snake skin” that should be thoroughly ignored in lieu of Der Ring des Nibelungen. This fluctuation between incorporation and rejection accurately mirrors the gradual change in Wagner’s aesthetics during the late 1840s, namely, his growing scepticism of a romantic, Christian-based notion of art, which he allegorically staged in Lohengrin, only to allow its decline in the end. Thus, the well-known interpretation of Lohengrin as an “allegory of the artist” (Stefan Kunze) deserves more precision. In the allegorical context of the opera, the swan knight not only represents art per se but also the most Christian of all the arts, the art of music in its purest form—absolute music.

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