Two Marches and a Royal Wedding

Ask a room of people to hum the music for a bride walking up the aisle and most will hum the same few notes. Ask for the music as the couple walk back out and they will produce the same fanfare. Almost nobody in that room will know where either came from, and the answer is two works written for the stage within eight years of each other, and one royal wedding that put them together.

The processional is the Bridal Chorus from Richard Wagner's opera Lohengrin, first performed in Weimar in August 1850 under Franz Liszt. In German it begins Treulich geführt, faithfully led. In English it is usually sung, when it is sung at all, to words beginning Here comes the bride, which Wagner did not write.

The recessional is the Wedding March from Felix Mendelssohn's incidental music for Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, written in 1842 for a production at the Prussian court.

The wedding that joined them took place on 25 January 1858 in the Chapel Royal at St James's Palace, eighteen years after Queen Victoria's own. Her eldest daughter, also Victoria, the Princess Royal, aged seventeen, married Prince Frederick William of Prussia, and both pieces were played. The ceremony was reported in detail, and within a generation the pairing had become the standard for anyone who wanted their wedding to sound right.

Now the stories.

Lohengrin is a knight who arrives in a boat drawn by a swan to defend Elsa of Brabant, who has been falsely accused. He will marry her on one condition: she must never ask his name or where he came from. The Bridal Chorus is sung in the third act as the newly married pair are led to their chamber. Soon after the music ends, Elsa, tormented by doubts his enemies have planted, asks the forbidden question. Before the act is over he has revealed that he is a knight of the Grail, said farewell and gone, and Elsa collapses. It is a marriage that does not survive its wedding night, and the chorus is the last happy thing in it.

Mendelssohn's march belongs to a happier story, but not a simpler one. It accompanies the wedding at the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream, where three couples marry together: Theseus, Duke of Athens, and Hippolyta, the Amazon queen he defeated in battle; Lysander and Hermia; and Demetrius and Helena. Demetrius loves Helena only because the fairy king Oberon put the juice of a flower on his eyes in the forest, and nobody ever takes the spell off. One of the three grooms is marrying under an enchantment.

It would be easy to turn this into a joke about couples walking to music about doomed or bewitched marriages, and people do. The more interesting point is how a tradition is set.

A custom followed by millions is often a decision made once, by somebody very visible, and then copied. The copying is not foolish. If you want your wedding to look and sound like a proper wedding, the safest way is to do what the most watched wedding did, and the most watched weddings of the nineteenth century were royal. Victoria's dress in 1840 and her daughter's music in 1858 are two decisions within one family and eighteen years, and between them they shaped the look and the sound of a great many weddings that followed.

What does not survive the copying is the context. The dress lost its reasons and the music lost its stories. That is what copying does, and it is why asking where a custom came from so often produces a surprise.

The music has its objectors, and they are a reminder that the context never entirely disappears. Wagner published an antisemitic essay in 1850, the year Lohengrin opened, and many Jewish couples choose other music for that reason. Mendelssohn was born into a Jewish family and baptised as a child, and the Nazi state banned his music, encouraging composers including Carl Orff to write replacement scores for Shakespeare's play. Some clergy discourage both pieces in church on the simpler ground that they are theatre music.

Which, on the evidence, is exactly what they are.