Many quintessential high summer stories are lighter and gentler: Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream", Bergman's "Smiles of a Summer Night," and Woody Allen's "Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy" all succumb to the crazy perfection of the longest days of the year when the grasses are high, the nights warm and our vulnerability to the elements is briefly gone. If you got stranded all night in a warm forest, or had to lie down in that long, warm, yellow grass, you risked little beyond a few insect bites. And so, for that brief moment, inhibitions can go too. All the characters in all those titles mentioned above find an excuse to lie down, usually with the wrong person, in that long, concealing grass.
Mid-summer is approaching at the Lohengrinhaus. The nights are warm, the meadows are full of high grasses that rustle in the summer breeze. The hedgerows are frothing with fragrant white philadelphus which fills the air with it's soft, creamy scent of orange-blossom It would be fun to link Wagner's work of mid-summer folly and love "Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg" and high summer here but that long, lovely tale of young and old love at the summer solstice was still years away when he stayed here. Mythical swans and knights were on his mind. It would be even more fun to wonder whether he got to lie down in the high grass with the wrong person. But, unfaithful husband that he sometimes was, it seems that here in Graupa, his wanderings were restricted by circumstance if nothing else. He was here with first wife Minna, and life seemed to consist of composing, hiking and receiving visitors. Nevertheless walking through these same summer meadows, Wagner might have experienced some of those high-summer sensations - that feeling on a hot, still day that time is suspended and that youth, and even life, might last forever.
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