this awareness, suffers knowing that he must fulfill this demand and in doing so ruin their love. He will seal his own doom when the gleam of his godly form destroys his lover. Is the man who craves for God not destroyed? Composition Lohengrin was written and composed between 1845 and 1848 when Wagner worked as Kapellmeister at the Royal Dresden court. The opera's genesis, however, starts some years earlier when Wagner was living and working in Paris. By late 1841, Wagner had conceived a five-act historical opera based on the Hohenstaufen dynasty entitled Die Sarazenin (The Saracen Woman) and, although he lavished on it all the trappings of Grand Opera, his attention was soon distracted by a Volksbuch that he obtained through his friendship with the philologist Samuel Lehrs. The book in question was Ludwig Bechstein's 1835 anthology of legends Der Sagenschatz und die Sagenkreise des Thüringerlandes. As well as being the means by which Wagner first became aware of the Lohengrin legend, the anthology also retold the tale of Tannhäuser. Seeking a more authentic picture of the Tannhäuser legend, Lehrs then provided Wagner with the annual proceedings of the Königsberg Germanic Society which not only included C.T.L. Lucas's critical study of the "Wartburg war" but also included a piece of criticism about the poem Lohengrin, together with a lengthy narrative of the rambling epic's principal content. Thus, Wagner admits, with one blow a whole new world was opened to him, and although unable to find the form to master the material for his own dramatic purpose, he could clearly visualize Lohengrin and it remained as an inextinguishable image within him. Stewart Spencer neither regards the abandonment of the Hohenstaufen projects during the 1840s at this time nor, more specifically, in the musical and formal dissimilarities between Rienzi and Der fliegende Holländer as symptomatic of a fundamental turn from history towards myth. Instead Spencer argues that Wagner did not draw any fundamental distinction between history and myth, and that Wagner's response to myth is dynamic and dialectical. History per se might be arid and reductive but it contained within it the potential for a categorical interpretation allowing Wagner to make use of Leopold August Warnkönig's (1835–42), three volume Flandrische Staats- und Rechtsgeschichte bis zum Jahr 1305 to be mined for an accurate evocation of tenth century Brabant. It would be nearly four years before Wagner's image of Lohengrin would