Daniel Sheridan, Sounding the Silver Age: The Weimar ‘Lohengrin’ and Choral Monuments

November 2016, Volume 10, Number 3, 4–17.

Posterity has subjected the premiere of Lohengrin on 28 August 1850 at the Weimar Hoftheater under the directorship of Franz Liszt to a notable degree of mythologising. Richarrd Taruskin, for example, goes so far as to characterise the performance as 'the very event that led to the christening of the music of the future’. Such hyperbole owes itself not insignificantly to the fact that the premiere functioned as a proverbial ‘meeting of the minds’ for two of the figures (Liszt and Wagner) who would come to be framed as crucial to the advancement of German music. The staging was already a momentous one for Wagner, as it was the first debut of ‘new’ Wagner material since the Dresden premiere of Tannhäuser in 1845 and as such was efficacious in putting Wagner’s music back in the public eye, in the wake of the composer’s ‘exile’ in the aftermath of the 1849 Dresden uprising; the highly publicised nature of the 1850 performance in Weimar provided a spike in exposure (national and international) to Wagner, which also saw a commensurate increase in critical attention as the performance was covered by the music press.