Lohengrin

• Lohengrin premiered in Weimar, at the Grossherzogliches Hoftheater on August 28, 1850. As usual, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music. He completed his score in 1848. 
• Like Parsifal, Lohengrin is a story from the Holy Grail legends. Wagner first encountered the Lohengrin story in a publication from the Königsberg Germanic Society during the winter of 1841-2. In 1845 he read both Wolfram von Eschenbach’s poem Parzivâl and an anonymous epic on the story of Lohengrin. 
• Prelude to Act I: Wagner explained that the Prelude represented angels carrying the Holy Grail down from heaven, then re-ascending. The high register passage at the beginning in the strings and woodwinds is meant to evoke the numinous shimmering appearance of the Grail.¹

Synopsis from The Metropolitan Opera 

“Papa told her about a Lohengrin performance. It was just before his first entrance. He was ready to step into the boat, which, drawn by a swan, was to take him on-stage. Somehow the stagehand on the other side got his signals mixed, started pulling, and the swan left without Papa. He quietly turned around and said: ‘What time’s the next swan?'”

Walter Slezak, on his father Leo Slezak and opera’s most legendary moment of swan boat comedy²

1. Barry Millington, “Lohengrin (I),” Grove Music Online (2002), accessed November 9, 2021,  https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-5000902851. 
2. Walter Slezak, What Time’s the Next Swan? (UK: Doubleday, 1962), 210.