Wagner: Wedding March, from Lohengrin

It took Wagner almost a decade to gestate the opera Lohengrin, his third masterpiece after The Flying Dutchman and Tannhäuser. His first encounter with the medieval German myth had been in 1841 but it took him five years to figure out how to bring it to the stage. Then, two years later, in 1848, he finished composing the score.

Lohengrin
The story takes place in the tenth century and tells the vicissitudes of Elsa, unjustly accused of making her brother – then a child but a future duke – disappear. An enigmatic knight will arrive to protect her and eventually take her in marriage, as long as he never asks for her name. The knight, naturally, is Lohengrin, who like all knights of the Holy Grail, must remain anonymous while performing his good deeds. Lohengrin arrives in a boat, towed by a swan. In that same boat he will leave when Elsa, curious, asks for his name, thus ending the enchantment.

Richard Wagner (1813 - 1893)

The author in exile

Wagner was 35 years old when he finished the work. For some time he had begun to embrace political positions close to the left and a little more, going so far as to invite the renowned Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin to his home. Things did not go well, especially after the rebellion known as the Dresden Uprising in 1849, and as a result, Wagner had to go into exile.
Before leaving Dresden, he asked his friend Franz Liszt (whose daughter Cosima would later marry Richard, 24 years older) to ensure that Lohengrin was performed in his absence. So Liszt did, conducting the premiere of the work in Weimar, in August 1850.

Prelude to Act III - The Wedding March

The opera, a romantic piece and the closest to the author's "Italian opera", with a script in German by Wagner himself – like all his masterpieces –, is set in three acts and lasts no more and no less than four hours. The famous wedding march, performed at every wedding in the Western world, also called the Bridal Chorus and known in the English-speaking world with the colloquial title of Here Comes the Bride, marks the beginning of Act III, when Elsa and her anonymous knight, called by the chorus, enter the bridal chamber.

The rendition is by the Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra and Choirs, conducted by Janos Kovacs, at the Palace of Arts in Budapest.