In 1860, Wagner conducted selections of his work at three performances in Paris. One of those attending was Charles Baudelaire, and what he wrote about it helped determine literary history. Here is Baudelaire's response to the overture to Lohengrin (1850):

Immediately obvious here are the themes of light and visual expansiveness, as emphasised by Baudelaire's own italics – which have been added, as Baudelaire subsequently indicates, to highlight parallels between his own response and those of two other writers he later quotes: the composer, Wagner, and Wagner's close associate and collaborator (and future father-in-law), Franz Liszt. Like Baudelaire himself, then – though without the latter's prior knowledge, as Baudelaire is at pains to stress – Wagner too has described this music in terms of solitude and massive spaces, whilst Liszt, also, has found himself thinking of light effects (an ‘iridescent haze’) and colours (‘gold’ and ‘blue’) (p. 329; emphases in original).