Saying I Do to Wagner's Bridal Chorus
The Backstory

Writing on the boss's time

Between 1845 and 1848, I had a steady job as the Royal Saxon Court Kapellmeister in Dresden. Nobody actually commissioned me to write Lohengrin, so I simply sat down and wrote all the words and the music for the three-act opera myself. That included the chorus you know as the Bridal Chorus, though I gave it the formal German title Treulich geführt. I had the whole production planned out for Dresden, thinking my employer would be delighted with my new work.

How to lose a venue in one uprising

Unfortunately, while I was preparing the opera, I got deeply involved in radical leftist politics. In 1849, I took part in the May Uprising in Dresden, which is not the best way to stay on good terms with a royal court. When the uprising was crushed, the authorities issued a warrant for my arrest instead of a ticket to my premiere. The Dresden production was cancelled on the spot, and I had to pack my bags and flee into political exile in Zurich, Switzerland.

A premiere without the composer

While I was stuck in Switzerland, my good friend Franz Liszt came to the rescue. He conducted the world premiere of the complete opera in August 1850 at the Grand Ducal Court Theatre in Weimar. He even picked the twenty-eighth of August on purpose, just to honour the birthday of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. I was not allowed back into Germany, so I had to sit in exile and imagine how my music sounded.

Waiting eleven years for a seat

From what I heard later, the singing and the staging at that first performance in Weimar had quite a few weaknesses. Even so, the opera and its best numbers caught on quickly and became hugely popular all across Europe during the 1850s. The publisher Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig brought out a vocal score arranged by Theodor Uhlig in 1851, and the full orchestral score followed a year later. As for me, I did not actually see a complete staged performance of my own opera until 1861 in Vienna, which is a very long time to wait in the lobby.

The wrong end of the wedding

In English-speaking countries, people call this piece the Wedding March or Here Comes the Bride, and they play it as the bride walks down the church aisle. If you look at the first scene of my third act, however, the church ceremony is already completely over before the first note sounds. The bridal party is actually singing as they lead the newlyweds into the bedroom for the night. So every time a bride walks toward the altar to my tune, she is technically skipping the service and heading straight for the bedroom.

The shortest honeymoon in opera

There is an even bigger irony in using this music to wish a couple a long and happy life together. Later in that exact same scene, before the night is even through, the marriage falls apart completely. Elsa breaks her sacred promise by asking Lohengrin to reveal his forbidden name and where he came from. Because she asks the one question she promised never to ask, he has to leave her immediately and forever, making it the shortest honeymoon in theatrical history.

Leave the church organ alone

Most people today only ever hear this piece played on a solo church organ, which always surprises me a little. I never wrote it as an instrumental organ march at all, and I certainly did not expect a single organist to do all the heavy lifting. In the theatre, you hear a full Romantic orchestra joined by extra instruments right there on the stage, all backing a four-part chorus. With all those voices singing the melody together, the music sounds much warmer and gentler than a booming organ ever could.

Please do not run down the aisle

I wrote the piece in two-four time, which gives it a natural left-right stepping rhythm for the procession. At the very top of the score, I put the German instruction Mäßig bewegt, meaning that the music should move along at a moderate, comfortable pace. After the main processional theme, I gave the chorus a contrasting middle section before bringing the opening melody back again to round out a three-part form. It moves like a polite group of friends guiding a couple down a hallway, not a military parade marching into battle.

Blame it on a royal wedding

You might wonder how a doomed bedroom scene from a German opera turned into the standard music for walking into a church. That tradition started in January 1858, when Victoria, the Princess Royal, chose my music for her wedding to Prince Frederick William of Prussia. Once a royal bride uses your tune for her big day, every other bride wants to do the exact same thing. People clearly liked the royal association much better than they knew the tragic plot of my third act.

Not the other wedding guy

Because of all these weddings, people constantly mix up my piece with the other famous Wedding March in C major. That one was written by Felix Mendelssohn for A Midsummer Night's Dream, and it is a completely separate composition. Traditionally, couples use my music to walk into the church at the start and save his music for walking back out at the end. I suppose between the two of us, we have the doors of the church completely covered, even if I never meant to be in the building at all.