“Marital Relations” in Wagner’s Operas

   Prompted by a recent very good concert performance of the second act of Tristan und Isolde (Orquesta Filarmónica de la UNAM with a group of soloists from everwhichwhere), I got to thinking about marital relations—or quasi-such—in Wagner. There were the opera’s title characters having what on American streets is called a one-night-stand. In the first act they fall in love, having been tricked by Brangäne’s potion, and in Act III they both die, Tristan of the wound he received in the fight that took place when the lovers were discovered and Isolde, arriving in time to see her lover die, expires at the conclusion of the glorious Liebestod.

   Mulling, I then thought of another high-profile Wagnerian one-night-stand, this time with the music—equally great but quite different—leading up to the off-stage consummation. Siegmund, pursued, stumbles into Sieglinde’s house while Hunding, her husband, was away. In a long duet (Walküre, Act I, Scene 3), they discover [1] that they are brother and sister and [2] that they love each other. That great duet ends with Siegmund’s triumphant, “So blühe denn Wälsungen Blut.” (“So let the blood of the Wälsung flourish!”) They run out of Hunding’s hut to the last bars of Act I, out into the spring.

   And that encounter yielded Siegfried. Indeed, that flourishing of the blood of the Wälsung is a necessary step that makes the second two operas of the Ring possible, that is, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung. But while the demise of Siegmund the next morning (Act II) is depicted in the opera, Sieglinde’s death, soon after Siegfried’s birth, is told of but not shown.

   If these are the important one-night liaisons in two Wagner operas, there are betrothals, so to speak, that are never consummated. Senta, in the Fliegende Holländer, promises to be forever faithful to the Dutchman. But when he and his crew take off, Senta propels herself into the sea to die.

   The second case is that of an actual marriage that remains unconsummated, that of Lohengrin and Elsa von Brabant. Lohengrin arrives on the scene just in time to fight successfully for Elsa. As a result, Lohengrin and Elsa marry, an event introduced by the familiar wedding march.

   But there is a fly in the ointment: Lohengrin had told Elsa never to ask him his name nor where he came from: “Woher ich kam der Fahrt, noch was mein Nam’ und Art.” Alas, Elsa can’t resist. Before the wedding night really begins, it comes to an end. Elsa asks the forbidden questions and Lohengrin leaves her.

   In what is in effect the opera’s final scene, Lohengrin tells all in the so-called Grals Erzählung, ending with “Mein Vater Parsifal trägt seine Krone, sein Ritter ich, bin Lohengrin genannt.”  (“My father Parsifal wears his crown, I, his knight, am named Lohengrin.”) Upon being called, a swan pulling a small boat shows up to take our hero away. It is never revealed why Lohengrin wanted to remain anonymous in the first place.

   Tannheuser makes up for all these very limited sexual encounters. While the opera concludes with an unconsummated love affair of Tannheuser and Elizabeth, it begins with our hero spending more than a year on Venusberg, where abstinence was hardly the practice.  In a Peter Sellars version of Tannheuser at Chicago’s Lyric Opera some years ago the opera’s hero shacked up, instead, with an airline stewardess in a nearby motel. Venusberg seems vastly more attractive.