Introduction: The Song Contest in Lohengrin

LOHENGRIN BEGING WITH A GROUP OF STROPHES whose significance, at least in hindsight, is clear: they position Wolfram von Eschenbach as the narrator of the Swan Knight story by showing how he came to tell it at the court of Landgrave Hermann I of Thuringia. Yet, as the qualifier about reading the strophes in retrospect already suggests, their relationship to the whole of which they are a part is by no means straightforward. On the one hand, the status of Wolfram as narrator is crucial to the conception of Lohengrin, and the strophes are thus anchored firmly in it by virtue of their outcome. On the other hand, focusing on the compositional function of the strophes raises the question of their status on the levels of text and narrative: how, if at all, is the invocation of Wolfram to perform at the end of the strophes integrated into a sequence in terms of both the events leading up to it and those that follow in the story he tells? The question is particularly important because of the role played by transmission and textual history as complicating factors: the strophes also belong to the Wartburgkrieg, a textual conglomerate— now accessible in a significant new critical edition by Hallmann— that grew up around the song contest that supposedly took place in the presence of Landgrave Hermann. Although fictional from a modern perspective, it was treated as fact in Latin and vernacular historiography and hagiography, which date the contest to 1206 or 1207. The representation of these events in the Wartburgkrieg became the foremost medieval German manifestation of a much wider practice of depicting poetic rivalry in works of art, such as Virgil's Eclogues or Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and—most apposite in the present context— Tannhäuser und der Sängerkrieg auf Wartburg.

The fact that the opening strophes contain material from the Wartburgkrieg has most clearly shaped work on textual criticism, which has sought to reconstruct how the combination of different clusters of material in Lohengrin came about.