Seldom has the world of opera been as excited as it was by these performances, public and press revealing a rare unanimity in hailing them as outstanding. Die Presse spoke of a “starry occasion”, while Die Welt described it as “musically one of the finest Lohengrins of all time – a Lohen-Dream”. This punning was evidently catching, for the Münchner Merkur attempted a conflation of the German terms for swan (Schwan) and madness (Wahnsinn) and produced the portmanteau word Schwahnsinn.