Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin
1848

While Wagner’s Lohengrin doesn’t have the high-visibility bass clarinet solos of Tristan und Isolde (1865) or Siegfried (1876), it paved the way for those incredible solos by being one of Wagner’s first operatic works for the bass clarinet. It is not clear to this author if Lohengrin or Tannhäuser was actually the first Wagner opera to use bass clarinet, as the composer wrote the latter work in 1845 but then revised it in 1860, and it is the revised version that is the most widely available today.

If you are new to Wagner, it’s important that you understand the importance of leitmotif before you prepare to perform– or, arguably, listen to– any of the composer’s operatic works. A leitmotif is a snippet of music that represents a non-musical entity, such as a character, an object, an idea, or an emotion. This seems sort of obvious to us today because of our experiences with television shows and movies. It’s probably the most common use of leimotif today, because musical clues can provide important context for plot (or foreshadowing) in these idioms. In Wagner’s time, this was a revolutionary idea. 

Here’s a 10-minute explainer on leitmotifs and film music, or, if you prefer the condensed version, you can check out this 60-second video version instead.

Some of the primary leitmotifs in Lohengrin represent the title character, the Holy Grail, and the forbidden question– the condition of Lohengrin’s happiness with Elsa is that she can never ask him his name. This isn’t actually Lohengrin’s rule, but rather God’s; the knights who guard the Holy Grail can never reveal their identities, and if they do, they must return to the grail. Spoiler alert: the motive of the forbidden question appears frequently during the opera, so you know how it’s going to end as soon as Lohengrin introduces this theme.

Timbre is sometimes a factor in leitmotifs, and in Lohengrin, the bass clarinet is often assigned the forbidden question motive, either solo or with an ensemble, often the woodwind chorus. The excerpt shown at the top of this page is a particularly exposed example of this leitmotif. To view Lohengrin Act II in its entirety and hear this excerpt in context, visit this link.

The short clip below is the first statement of the forbidden question leitmotif, as Lohengrin promises to wed Elsa, on the condition that she agree to never ask him his name:

Much of Lohengrin bass clarinet part calls for bass clarinet in A. While not unheard of in the orchestral repertoire, A bass clarinet parts are fairly rare, as the instrument did not have enough staying power to live far beyond its infancy. The Lohengrin bass clarinet part is the first A bass clarinet part that we know of today, and the instrument was new enough that some contemporary sources called it a Wagner bass in A. In fact, it seems that the instrument might have been specifically purchased for the premiere of Lohengrin in 1850. Because of Wagner’s exile, Franz Liszt was conducting, and he wrote to the composer that a bass clarinet had been procured for the performances. Albert R. Rice speculates that the maker of this instrument was likely Wilhelm Christian Beck (1820 – 1866), a well-regarded clarinet maker from Weimar, although we do not know for sure. Beck’s extant bass clarinets are a double-bore bassoon shape, so it is probable that, if he did make this bass clarinet in A, it was in the older style rather than Adolphe Sax’s new straight-bore design.

Additionally, a great deal of the part is in bass clef, ostensibly to avoid the use of ledger lines in the part. The bass clef parts are written in the bass clarinet’s sounding range, and the treble clef parts are to be read up an octave from the normal clarinet fingerings that bass clarinetists usually use. Rice believes that Wagner switched between bass clarinet in B-flat and A to make the key signatures more friendly to the player, as it seems the instruments had very little timbral differences. Unfortunately, it is these considerate gestures that have made Wagner’s parts some of the most tricky and irritating for modern bass clarinet players. It is this author’s hope that someday a transcribed part in B-flat and treble clef throughout will be readily available, but for now, we continue to make our bass clarinetists run this strange and often frustrating gauntlet. 

Below is an example of how the transposition for these parts works. The first image is the original Wagner bass clarinet part, and the second is a version transposed to normal bass clarinet notation (without extra markings, just the notes). I chose the beginning of Act I for this example because it is written in A and has sections in both treble clef and bass clef.

Works Cited

Albert R. Rice, From the Clarinet d'Amour to the Contra Bass, p. 310-69.

Click on this video to watch a production of the opera, starting on Act II.