Lohengrin at Nationaltheater Mannheim

The Count of Telramund and his wife Ortrud attempt to interrogate Elsa, sister of the murdered Duke Gottfried. "From a distant land" the unknown knight Lohengrin appears and saves Elsa on the condition that she never asks for Lohengrin’s name nor his origin ever. But at the wedding Elsa cannot stand the promise any longer and breaks her word. Lohengrin reveals his identity and proclaims that he must return to from where he had come. The schemers seem to prevail, but suddenly Gottfried, who was believed dead, returns.

“Lohengrin sought the woman who believed in him: who did not ask who he was and from where he came, but who loved him as he was and as he appeared to her", Wagner wrote in a message to his friends .

The prohibition to ask question is a precondition for Lohengrin that his higher nature remains unrevealed. But this is actually how his peculiar characteristic is made evident and his miraculous appearance is depicted. Because of this tragic dialectic the disaster is inevitable and necessary as the promise of not asking questions would even be broken without the initial intrigues. The catastrophe is not the purpose of the act, but rather its inner motivation, as the inevitability of conflict becomes the crucial idea of Wagner.

With the completion of Lohengrin on the 28th of April, 1848, Richard Wagner's creative period of the romantic opera comes to an end. More than five years pass until Wagner continues his composition works.