März: Lohengrin
Christine Goerke performing as the sorceress Ortrud in the Metropolitan Opera's production of Richard Wagner's Lohengrin
Themen: Glaube, Vertrauen, Offenbarung, Geheimnis
Element: Marmor, Stille, Eleganz der Alten Welt
The Score at a Glance
Dauer: ~3–4 hours, a walk that alternates between waterfront wandering and threshold ascents
Distanz: ~2.5–3 miles, reservoir loop, processional routes, and cathedral terrain
Beste Zeit: Morning → early afternoon — mist and light on water and stone matter
Wetter: Clear or overcast works, mist and haze deepen the Swan narrative
Zugänglichkeit: Flat paths around reservoir plus gradual uphill cathedral segments
Essentieller Moment: The arrival at the cathedral steps with the Bridal Chorus as a processional threshold
Thematic Frame
Lohengrin is Wagner’s opera about conditional belonging. Not exile like Holländer, not annihilating desire like Tristan, but the precarious entrance into a world that demands both trust and silence. In the myth, a mysterious knight arrives by a swan-drawn boat to defend Elsa, but only on condition that she never ask his name or origin. When she cannot hold that silence, he must leave. And she inherits the cost of her question.
March is often a month of not-yet-spring in New York. Grey water, floating ice, the hint of thaw without warmth. It is a fitting urban metaphor for the Lohengrin narrative. A score of hope tethered to impossibility. Trust arrives, but with strings. Relief comes, but only conditionally. Belonging here is always provisional.
Your March circuit stages this by placing you beside water that reflects the possibility of rescue (the reservoir), then moving you into a procession toward architectural authority (the cathedral), and finally into a distant sanctuary of memory and myth (the Roerich Museum). These are urban analogues for Elsa’s journey. A crossing from suspicion to belief, from surface to promise, and from promise to disappearance.
German language learning in March becomes not just contextual, but conditional. Phrases which signal trust and promise. And the cost of breaking silence. This is not the freedom of January, nor the inner night of April. This is the threshold between what can be spoken and what must remain unasked. The heart of Lohengrin’s tragedy.
Listening Index (The Musical Spine)
Prelude to Act I: Mist over water, vision of the Swan Knight
Elsa’s Dream (Einsam in trüben Tagen): Promise and longing eying rescue
Bridal Chorus (Treulich geführt): Communal blessing toward the threshold
In Fernem Land: Lohengrin’s Grail narration in a far land
Prelude Reprise (optional): Silent echoes after departure
Listening Note: This month’s music marks thresholds rather than resolutions. Let the Prelude open your perception beside water; let the Bridal Chorus feel like a processional into an uncertain pledge; let In Fernem Land be the narration of promise that must recede when trust falters.
The Swan Lake: Central Park Reservoir
Opera focus: Act I Prelude + Elsa’s Dream
Why Here?
The Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir is Central Park’s largest body of water.
A 106-acre basin ringed by a 1.58-mile track, famous for skyline reflections and wide sky.
It’s a perfect stand-in for the Scheldt river where Lohengrin’s swan boat first appears.
Getting There
Best Subway:
B/C to 86 St: Walk east into the Park at 86th. Follow signs north to the Reservoir.
1/2/3 to 86 St (Broadway): Walk east along 86th to Central Park West, then into the Park and up.
Once in the Park, aim for the Reservoir running track entrance around 86th–90th on the west side.
Walk: Prelude with Water and Skyline
Track: Lohengrin, Prelude to Act I
Route:
Enter the track from the West 86th–90th Street gate.
Turn so we’re walking clockwise, with the water on your right and the Upper East Side skyline across the basin.
Start the Prelude as we first see a clear stretch of water.
What to Look at / Think About:
The Prelude begins with very high, quiet strings, hovering. Wagner wanted this to feel like light filtering down from the Grail realm, a vision before form.
Let your eyes follow a single swan / duck / row of buoys / ripple across the reservoir and pretend it’s the distant swan boat, barely visible in mist.
As the music slowly thickens, clock the architectural castles around you. The twin-towered Eldorado and other Upper West Side co-ops behind you, the Fifth Avenue palazzi ahead. They’re your 19th-century Brabant.
By the time the Prelude blossoms into full sound, we should be somewhere on the northwest curve, with broad water to one side and deep city behind.
Walk: Elsa’s Dream on the Eastward Curve
Track: Einsam in trüben Tagen, Elsa’s Dream
Elsa, accused of murdering her brother, tells King Heinrich she had a dream of a knight who will appear and defend her.
Route:
Let the Prelude end. Take a short silent segment of track as a reset.
When you hit a vantage where you see a long stretch of water and, ideally, a single boat or bird, start Elsa’s Dream.
Keep walking clockwise along the eastern edge, with the Upper West Side now across the water.
What to Look at / Think About:
Elsa sings about being alone in troubled days, comforted only by the vision of a knight who will come.
Map that onto the way March feels in New York. Still winter-grey water, but hints of light and buds at the reservoir edge.
Look for tiny signs of thaw. Early blossoms in the brambles, slightly softer light, joggers starting to dress for spring.
As the aria arches upward, imagine you’re Elsa building a story about a rescuer who will also become a constraint. The price of help will be silence about its source.
When the aria ends, pause. Pick a spot where you can see both shores at once. That frame, city to city, water between, is your mental bridge from the river of Act I to the distant Grail city of Act III.
Processional to the Hill: Walking St John the Divine
Opera focus: Bridal Chorus (without the wedding industrial complex)
Why Here?
The Cathedral Church of St John the Divine in Morningside Heights is one of the largest churches in the world and a monumental example of late 19th / early 20th-century Gothic Revival. It’s also famously unfinished. St John the Unfinished, with different architectural campaigns stitched together, including a major phase by Ralph Adams Cram, a key American Gothicist. Ross folds St John into his Morningside Wagner web as part of a modern Temple of the Grail landscape in upper Manhattan.
Getting from the Reservoir to the Cathedral
Two options:
Walk (The Full Processional):
Leave the Reservoir near West 96th St & Central Park West.
Walk north on Central Park West to 100th or 103rd St.
Go west to Columbus, then to Amsterdam Ave.
Continue north on Amsterdam to around 112th St. The cathedral’s main façade is at 1047 Amsterdam Ave, between 110th and 113th.
Or Subway Hop (Shorter):
From 86 St B/C, take the B or C north to 110 St – Cathedral Pkwy, then walk west along 110th to Amsterdam; the cathedral appears on your right.
Walk: Bridal Chorus as Urban Wedding Procession
Track: Bridal Chorus, Treulich geführt
In the opera, this isn’t actually the bride’s entrance but the music sung by the wedding party after the ceremony, escorting Elsa to the bridal chamber. A kind of communal blessing that will soon curdle into doubt.
How to Stage it:
Start the track once you’re on Amsterdam Ave heading north, somewhere around 106–108 St.
Imagine you are Elsa and Lohengrin’s retinue, walking toward a life-altering threshold you don’t fully understand.
What to Look at:
The avenue perspective itself, long, slightly uphill, with Columbia’s campus and the cathedral massing ahead. It’s a secular processional route.
Watch for small processions. Students in groups, dog walkers, people heading to the farmer’s market (if it’s a weekend). They’re your wedding chorus.
As the Chorus builds, let your attention oscillate between:
The stone bulk of the cathedral coming into view,
And the knowledge that in the opera, this music leads straight to the seed of Elsa’s fatal question.
By the time the chorus resolves, aim to be standing at the foot of the cathedral steps, looking straight up at the rose window.
Inside / Around St John: Unfinished Grail Hall
Opera focus: Silent architecture, mental fragments of Prelude and Dream
We can go in or just circle the exterior. Both work.
If you go inside: What St John is:
Episcopal cathedral for the Diocese of New York, one of the largest church buildings in the world.
A hybrid of Romanesque and Gothic Revival, with Cram’s elongated nave and unrealized spire giving it that strange, stretched profile.
Ross and others have pointed out how easily this sort of space can double, in the imagination, as a Grail hall. High vaults, colored windows, processional aisles.
How to Move Through it:
Walk slowly up the central nave in silence at first. Let your inner ear replay the opening of the Prelude, as if it were the ceiling music of Monsalvat.
Look for:
The way light filters through stained glass onto stone,
The sheer vertical pull of the columns,
Any side chapels which feel like mini-stages.
Pick a seat halfway up the nave and:
Mentally replay Elsa’s Dream without the recording.
Ask yourself: What stories about ‘distant knights’ do I still tell myself? Jobs, relationships, institutions that will ride in and fix everything, if only I trust them enough not to ask questions?
If you Stay Outside: Do a Perimeter Walk:
From the main steps, go right (south) along Amsterdam to 110th,
Turn left and trace the southern edge of the close,
Curve around the back near Morningside Drive,
Come out along the north side back to Amsterdam.
As you walk, toggle short fragments of the Prelude on and off, a few minutes at a time, to let the music light up different façades. Think of the cathedral as an unfinished Grail project, much like Lohengrin is an early Grail sketch before Parsifal.
The Far Land: Walk to the Nicholas Roerich Museum
Opera focus: In Fernem Land inside a house full of mountain Grails
Why Here?
The Nicholas Roerich Museum at 319 W 107th St is a small townhouse museum on the Upper West Side, just off Riverside Drive. Roerich was a Russian painter, mystic, and theater designer. He created designs for most of Wagner’s operas and thought constantly about music, color, and spiritual landscapes. His Himalayan canvases in particular feel like stand-ins for Monsalvat, the Grail castle in a far land, unapproachable to your steps that Lohengrin sings about.
Ross folds the Roerich Museum right into his Wagner-Morningside puzzle, alongside St John, West Point, Grant’s Tomb, and Rockefeller’s Parsifal Quarters carillon. All part of his Walking Tour of Wagner’s New York.
Getting There from St John the Divine
From the cathedral steps, walk west along 112th or 111th St toward Broadway.
Continue to Riverside Drive if you like a river glimpse, then turn left (south).
At 107th St, turn left (east); the museum townhouse is mid-block at 319 W 107th.
If you want a subway hop from Cathedral Pkwy 110 (1 train) ride one stop south to 103 St, then walk north-west to 107th & Riverside and across.
Inside Roerich: In Fernem Land among Painted Temples
Track: In Fernem Land, unnahbar euren Schritten, Lohengrin’s Grail narration
In this aria, Lohengrin finally breaks the rule, giving his name and explaining that he comes from the realm of the Holy Grail; because Elsa has asked, he must now return there.
How to Stage it:
Once inside, pick a room dominated by mountain canvases. Jagged peaks, temples, glowing skies.
Start In Fernem Land while standing fairly still, letting your gaze settle on one painting.
What to Look at / Think About:
Roerich explicitly loved Wagner and designed sets for his operas, thinking in terms of color harmonies as music.
As Lohengrin describes a distant, inaccessible sanctuary where the Grail is guarded and knights are sent forth on missions, match each phrase to parts of the painting:
The castle-like outcroppings as Monsalvat’s outer walls,
The light source in the painting as the Grail glow,
The steep, narrow paths as the route back that Elsa is now barred from taking.
Think about how this tiny, almost hidden townhouse, easily missed from the street, is itself a far land in New York. A niche sanctuary for a nearly forgotten artist who saw Wagner through mountains and temples rather than through Bayreuth mist. When the aria reaches its quiet close, look down at the floor and imagine the swan boat waiting just outside the frame of the painting, ready to carry the knight away.
Optional: Riverside Edge. The Swan Departs.
Opera focus: Silent coda, a hint of Prelude again
From 107th & Riverside:
Walk half a block west to Riverside Park.
Find a spot where you can see the Hudson River and, if the light cooperates, New Jersey’s bluffs.
This is your final riverbank of the day. A broader, grittier stand-in for the moment when the swan returns and Lohengrin has to leave.
We Can Either:
Sit in silence and let our brains replay fragments of the Prelude, or
Restart the very opening minute. Those high strings again, and imagine the Grail boat receding west, out past the Palisades.
Toward April: Tristan und Isolde
Lohengrin is sustained by a fragile agreement. That belonging can be preserved if certain questions remain unasked. Trust replaces knowledge. Silence replaces proof. For a time, the world holds. But this arrangement carries its own violence. What cannot be spoken does not disappear; it accumulates pressure. Doubt does not dissolve. It waits.
March ends with departure not because faith failed, but because silence proved impossible to maintain. Once the question is asked, the miracle withdraws. Authority vanishes. The promise of rescue reveals itself as temporary, conditional, and ultimately insufficient for a life that must endure daylight and explanation.
Tristan und Isolde begins where this fragile contract collapses. April abandons the pretense that order can be sustained through trust or silence. Instead of regulating desire, Tristan seeks to escape the world that demands regulation at all. If Lohengrin asked us to believe without knowing, Tristan refuses both belief and knowledge. Turning inward toward night, suspension, and the annihilation of distinction itself.
The question shifts again. Not What must remain unasked? but What if the world itself is the problem?
April enters that darkness deliberately.
