Stephen Moss's A to Z of WagnerRichard Wagner This article is more than 10 years oldA to Z of Wagner: E is for winsome heroines
This article is more than 10 years oldFrom Eva and Elsa to Elisabeth – Wagner liked his heroines winsome, and beginning with EE is for Eva, Elsa and Elisabeth.
Wagner definitely had a thing about the letter E as far as his winsome heroines are concerned.
Eva Pogner is the love interest in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, fought (or rather sung) over by the noble Walther von Stolzing and the comic stereotype Sixtus Beckmesser, Wagner's revenge on music critics. Eva is an archetypal Wagnerian heroine – beautiful, desirable and entirely forgettable. Eva is also the name Wagner gave to his second (illegitimate) daughter with the then Cosima von Bülow, and of one of his great-granddaughters, Eva Wagner-Pasquier, today joint director of the Bayreuth Festival with her half-sister Katharina Wagner.
Elsa, the heroine in Lohengrin, is more interesting: a medieval noblewoman with a knight fixation. After being accused by her evil guardian Telramund of murdering her brother Gottfried, she summons up the knight of her dreams to protect her honour. He arrives on a boat pulled by a very large swan, and asks only one thing – that she never asks his name. This is fine at first, but when they get married it naturally starts to bother Elsa. When she at last poses the fatal question, Lohengrin says the pernickety rules governing the Knights of the Grail have been broken and he has to go home, and poor Elsa drops dead. But at least Gottfried returns, released from the curse of Telramund's witch-like consort Ortrud, who had turned him into … you guessed it … a swan.
In Tannhäuser, Elisabeth also performs the role of sacrifice, dying so that her knightly lover – the eponymous Tannhäuser – can be redeemed after spending a dirty weekend in Venusberg. The opera combines the Eurovision elements of Meistersinger with the courtly romance of Lohengrin. It's a preposterous confection, but as usual with Wagner the magnificence of the music more than makes up for the absurdities of the plot.
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E is also for Erda, the earth goddess in the Ring cycle, who is not at all winsome. She is wise, tough, all-seeing and usually wrapped in Miss Havisham-style gauze. She is the mother of Brünnhilde and possibly of the latter's eight Valkyrie sisters – the text is inconclusive. She is also indisputably mother of the three Norns. How she has managed to produce so many children while spending most of her time asleep is another mystery.
Previous articles in the series
A is for Alberich
B is for Bayreuth
C is for Cosima
D is for Death
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