Bridal Chorus: A Song History
The melody English speakers call "Here Comes the Bride" began as "Treulich geführt," a chorus in Richard Wagner's opera Lohengrin, first performed at Weimar on 28 August 1850 under the auspices of Wagner's friend Franz Liszt.[1][2] The chorus stands at the start of Act III, after a wedding that is implied rather than shown: its words send the newlyweds away from the festivities toward their bridal chamber.[2] Musicologist Matthias Range points out that this makes it an odd fit for a bride walking up the aisle, since in the opera it belongs to the end of the wedding day rather than its beginning.[2] Wagner conducted it in London during a series of concerts in 1855, billed as "Epithalamium."[2]
William Hogarth, The Wedding of Stephen Beckingham and Mary Cox, oil on canvas, 1729. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). A church wedding painted more than a century before Lohengrin, shown for its subject.
It is often said that the chorus became a wedding march when it accompanied the bride at the 1858 marriage of Victoria, Princess Royal, to Prince Frederick of Prussia, but Range's study of the records finds that she entered the chapel to a march by Handel, and that Wagner's chorus was heard instead at the State Concert held at Buckingham Palace that evening.[2] Oxford University Press's music blog likewise places the chorus in the concert that followed the ceremony.[3] The earliest report of church use that Range found dates from September 1875, when an organist at a wedding near Liverpool played it as the register was being signed; by 1877 it was accompanying a bride's entrance at St George's, Hanover Square, in London.[2] Royal weddings lent it prestige, beginning with Princess Beatrice's in 1885, when it was played as she came up the aisle, and in 1890 the American critic Gustav Kobbé described it as a companion to Mendelssohn's Wedding March at nearly every wedding.[2] Even so, Range shows that its place in the service stayed unsettled for decades, with many organists playing it near the end of the ceremony rather than for the bride's arrival.[2]
The familiar English nickname came later: Range suggests it may well derive from Here Comes the Bride, a 1915 silent film made by the Lubin company, although nothing shows that the film's title was connected with Wagner's music at the time.[2] It has stayed in demand: an organist quoted on Oxford's blog said she played it at 30 to 40 percent of the weddings she accompanied.[3]
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