Chapter 9

'LOHENGRIN'

I

_Lohengrin_ was first drafted in 1845--for Wagner during this period allowed no grass to grow under his feet. He was a member of a coterie that met at Angell's restaurant, and there on November 17 he read the complete libretto to his friends and acquaintances. Schumann was amongst them, and he bluntly asserted that such a libretto could not be set. Others were more favourable, but many were doubtful. However, that made little difference to Richard. He knew his own strength and trusted his instinct; and however much he was urged to alter the _dénouement_, he stuck to his guns and his libretto.

In point of structure the libretto of _Lohengrin_ closely resembles that of its predecessor. There are even fewer set pieces, there are more fragmentary speeches. The drama is so contrived as to let in the set pieces naturally: of the old forced operatic business of sending out or bringing in characters as seems advisable there is not a sign. The story is on the whole simpler than that of _Tannhäuser_. Lohengrin is son of Parsifal, head of the mystic Montsalvat monastery where the Holy Grail is kept; where the monks never seem precisely to die; and where, without marriage and even without women, children are somehow born to the favoured ones. He comes in a magic boat drawn by a swan to aid Elsa against Telramund and his wife, who falsely accuse her of having murdered her brother; he fights for her and overcomes the accusers, first exacting a promise that she will never ask him his name nor where he comes from. She promises, yielding herself unconditionally to him; and so ends Act One. Next Ortrud, wife of Telramund, gets Elsa's ear, begging for mercy, and contrives to poison the girl's mind with doubts regarding Lohengrin; and when later the wedding procession is nearing the church, Telramund himself accuses Lohengrin before the king and all the crowd of sorcery and witchcraft. Nothing happens at the moment; Telramund is pushed on one side, and the procession goes its way. But in the next act, when Lohengrin and Elsa are left alone she can no longer restrain her curiosity nor conceal her fears: in spite of his warnings she questions him. At the moment Telramund and other nobles rush in to assassinate him; he kills Telramund, orders the other nobles to bear the body into the judgment hall, and tells Elsa he must leave her. In the next scene he reveals himself, and the swan returns to take him away. Ortrud mocks him and tells how she, after all, has triumphed, for she changed Elsa's brother into a swan; Lohengrin kneels and prays; the swan disappears and the missing brother springs up; a dove descends and is attached by Lohengrin to the boat, and he goes back to Montsalvat.

Now I would ask the reader if this story is reasonable, if any "meaning" or moral can be read into it. On the face of it Lohengrin's conditions are preposterous. Yet he is bound by the laws of the magic domain he comes from; he trusts Elsa and does battle on her behalf without any proof of her innocence; and she has no patience to wait for him to explain matters. On the other hand, he hears her prayer in a magical way, and comes drawn in a magic boat; and she has a perfect right to assume that he would not have fought for her if he had not known by his arts that she was innocent. It was just over this _dénouement_, this forsaking of Elsa because of her inquisitiveness, that many of Wagner's friends boggled; and nothing that he then or afterwards wrote in defence of it seems to me worth a moment's serious consideration. Mr. Ernest Newman suggests that perhaps Wagner was using the savage's notion that in giving up your name you are placing yourself in some one's power; but there is not a hint of that in the drama. The thing to me is simply a fairy story. We must accept Lohengrin and the conditions in which he lives, moves and has his being. He is not his own master: somewhere far away he has an all-powerful over-lord who, for no useful purpose to be comprehended by mortal, sent him to rescue Elsa under these conditions. And I say that, far from having a meaning, a "purpose," _Lohengrin_ is pure romance, as innocent of moral ideas as any genuine mediæval romance. Wagner's "explanations," like Bishop Berkeley's, take a great deal of explaining; and though Glasenapp, Wolzogen and the rest have covered many reams of paper in doing it, we are not an inch nearer to perceiving a grain of sense in the whole affair. There is only one part of it which can be, in one sense, explained--Wagner's intense acrimony in his treatment of the female puppet Elsa. Even in 1845 he had grown restive under the insults and stupidity of court officials and the Press, and doubtless he had threatened often enough to quit for ever the degraded German theatre. He never could see that the German theatre had never been any better than it then was, but on the contrary, a great deal worse; he never realized that it was on the up-grade, and that he was to be instrumental in elevating it. He was like a mechanic called in (by destiny) to repair a rickety machine, who because it won't go when he "wills" it, kicks it to pieces. The Reissigers and the rest were simply parts of the machine that were out of order: time and patience were required to eliminate them and put in sound working parts. Wagner could not understand this any more than he could understand why all German (or rather, Saxon) mankind should not at once be perfect, think alike and form the ideal State. So, as he could not kick the Dresden Court Opera to pieces, he long meditated quitting it--so much he explicitly affirmed afterwards--and he must have worried Minna sadly. She understood neither his qualities nor his defects, his ideals nor the short-sighted impatience which rendered it impossible for him ever to attain them: she saw only too clearly that at any moment he might kick over the traces, and that the starvation and misery of the Paris episode would have to be faced again. We can readily picture him coming in raging after a conflict at the theatre with official imbecility, and Minna, instead of sympathizing, counselling him to be wise and temporize. His exasperation grew, and only the events of 1849 prevented a rupture--so much seems certain--and he vented his spleen by making Elsa a stupid, shallow, faithless creature who feels no gratitude towards the hero who saved her from being burnt, but by maddening female pertinacity, wrong-headedness and wilfulness destroys her own and his happiness. As the reader will perceive later, I by no means defend Wagner in this domestic squabbling, but something must be said for him; I don't say, either, that he created Elsa to express his views about his wife, but I do say that his feelings account for the excess of his rancour against his own creation. So pitiable a specimen of feminine inquisitiveness, bad temper and ungenerosity has never been put on the stage as the heroine of a grand opera. Possibly Lohengrin saw this; and, neglecting his recent marriage-vow, he went back to Montsalvat, where, as we know, there were no women. All this would have to be said in the course of this book; and I say it now because it helps us to understand a defect in the art of a beautiful opera.

A beautiful opera _Lohengrin_ certainly is--the most beautiful of all Wagner's operas. The story of it is a fairy story, as I have said, and superficially a very ordinary sort of fairy story. We have the distressed maiden in the hands of persecutors, the knightly hero who rescues her, the maiden's faithlessness, and the contemptuous departure of the hero. But Wagner has clothed the whole of this work-a-day mediæval legend in a wondrous atmosphere of mystical beauty, and that beauty springs from the thought of the river.

II

It is necessary to discuss as briefly as may be the leitmotiv, because with _Lohengrin_ Wagner first began to use it with serious purpose. In the _Dutchman_ two themes may be rightly described as leitmotivs; in _Tannhäuser_ not one theme may be rightly so described. While in _Lohengrin_ Wagner showed himself as much as ever the inspired musician, he made for the first time use of the leitmotiv for dramatic as well as musical ends. There we find three leitmotivs: one intended by the power of association of ideas to evoke on the instant the vision of Montsalvat and the Grail; a second to recall the thought and emotion of Lohengrin the man; the third to remind us of the conditions which Lohengrin imposes on Elsa before he is willing to fight for her. The first (_a_, p. 191) is perhaps the most lovely thing Wagner invented; the third (_d_)--not second--is a thing any one might have concocted, though not a thing that any one I ever heard of could use as Wagner uses it; the second (_c_) is by way of being a study for the best of the _Parsifal_ themes. It must be remarked, in passing, that the study is much more finely used than when his powers, largely exhausted by a tedious struggle with the world, had got into a state of decrepitude.

The leitmotiv (_a_) is of a serene beauty. I must cut out of it a little bit (_b_) which colours the opera and gives it atmosphere from the beginning far more than the complete theme. It is this, more than anything else, which gives _Lohengrin_ the vividness of reality combined with the vanishing loveliness of a sweet dream. The idea of the swan, symbolizing the broad, shining river flowing from afar-off mysterious lands to the eternal sea, is given us in this phrase, as delicate and as firm, as unmistakable, as ever painter drew with his brush. Here we have, not indeed Montsalvat the domain of monks, but the land of ever-enduring dawn--a land that other poets have dreamed of, a land where hope could be subsisted on. From beginning to end Lohengrin, the man on the stage, moves in the atmosphere of this strange, dreamy, fresh and silent land: if he did not, no one would tolerate for a moment his behaviour. It is the magic charm that reconciles him to us; it is this that makes us feel how he is conditioned, chained, cribbed, cabined and confined. In obedience to inexorable law he comes down the river, drawn by the swan; in obedience to the same inexorable law he is drawn away, as helplessly as a needle drawn by a magnet.

The prelude opens with a series of chords, ascending, all on A. Handel might have done this: none of the Viennese composers could, or perhaps I should rather say, would, have done it. Beethoven got as near to the naked truth as ever composer did in dealing with the emotions of humanity; Mozart, too, worked his miracles; Weber, non-Viennese though he was, gave us weird, fantastic pictures of fairy adventures in the darkness of grim woods, but nothing more. It was left for Wagner to give us in a few bars a picture, such as no painter could have painted, of the blue heavens on an almost unimaginably fine day. The blue sky, the thin, clear air, the sunlight, are all given us in the first few bars. It is far from my wish to intrude my personal history into these pages, but I wish to give a convincing example of an episode of a sort familiar to all those who have experimented with Wagner's music. A relative of mine, who had spent many of his earlier years in travelling the southern Atlantic and the Pacific in sailing vessels, heard me play on the piano, as an illustration of some argument I was foolish enough to advance, these opening bars of the _Lohengrin_ prelude. He immediately said, "That takes me back into the Trades"--the sweet days of perfect peace in southern climes, where the sky was blue for day after day and week after week, where the wind sang cheerfully without change for weeks on end, where a delicious sun made all men (no matter what the feeling was on those foul old ships) feel good-natured and good-hearted. That is to say, my relative at once felt the magical truthfulness of Wagner's touch: the sweet, clear air, the sunlight; and that is the atmosphere Wagner wanted to establish at the beginning of this most magical of operas. Out of the blue sky comes the Montsalvat (not necessarily the Grail) motive; it descends with ever-gathering fulness, through key after key, until at last it culminates in a tremendous climax for the brass: then comes a wondrous cadence, falling slowly, as a mountain stream falls over slabs of smooth-worn mountain rock, until we get back to the original atmosphere. The Montsalvat vision has faded away into the blue whence it came. Wagner afterwards achieved some marvellous things, but none more marvellous than this.

The curtain rises: there is a rum-tum-tum by the orchestra. We are at once in the discord of a turbulent armed camp: the fury of Telramund against those who are not convinced of his evidently prejudiced view that Elsa holds the lands he wishes to hold, is made to resound in the orchestra as not the most expert Italian composer could make it resound by the voices. When Elsa enters to defend herself the music changes its character utterly; it is the embodiment of the sweetness of young feminine kindly nature; and it is odd that Wagner, when writing this music, which he fancied was the most German ever written, should have gone so far as, in some of its finest parts, to steal bits of the Austrian hymn, composed, as we may remember, by not even an Austrian, but a Croatian, pure Slav, composer. Elsa's account of her dream is not dramatic as Wagner, by the time he wrote his next work, would have understood the term--in shape it is an Italian aria, and everything is at a standstill until it is finished--yet it occurs fittingly, and prepares us by ethereal music for the music of a gentleman who is very unethereal. In form the whole scene is as near as may be a regular Italian opera scene. King Henry the Fowler and his nobles show mighty patience in sitting or standing it out to the end. The business of a champion for Elsa being called for, the moments of suspense, the prayers of Elsa and her attendant maidens, the fiery impatience of Telramund and the premature triumph of Ortrud are all done with Wagner's consummate skill in writing purely theatrical music; and when the swan and the hero are sighted the excitement is worked up with the same skill to a glorious triumph, and we hear the Lohengrin, "as hero," theme in its full splendour. Then comes the fighting music, which, like all fighting music, is mediocre stuff, and the gorgeous set piece, the finale. This last is quite old-fashioned opera, but it is not forced in: it happens inevitably. The themes are mainly new, but the Lohengrin heroic theme is worked in triumphantly. Technically there is no advance or change in _Lohengrin_: the counterpoint and interweaving of themes of _Tristan_ and the _Mastersingers_ were to come a few years later. Indeed, there is less of Wagner the contrapuntal virtuoso in _Lohengrin_ than in _Tannhäuser_.

III

In the music, as in the drama, the second act presents a total contrast to the first. The music of the first is throughout full of sunlight. At times it may be strident, violent, rather tumultuous; but sweetness is the prevailing note, and as soon as Elsa comes on we have the sheer loveliness of first her answers to the king, and then of her vision; then comes Lohengrin, bringing with him the breath of the land of eternal dawn, and of the shining river down which he was drawn by the swan; then after the (rather theatrical) prayer, a few moments of noise while the fighting is being arranged and carried out; then, so to speak, the glorious midday sunshine of the finale. The second act opens with two sinister phrases heard in the darkness (_e_ and _f_)--Ortrud is planning vengeance, and the theme of Lohengrin's warning and threat to Elsa is presently heard; that warning gives her the hint as to the way of achieving vengeance. Ortrud and Telramund, outcast, crouch there in the night; Ortrud deeply scheming, Frederick, poor dupe, madly fuming, while the lights blaze at the palace windows, and the trumpets sound out as the feast proceeds within. He rages, and a theme (_f_) quoted is abruptly transformed into (_g_) as he bitterly casts upon Ortrud the blame for their downfall. The vocal parts are neither recitative nor true song; the orchestral tide is developed in much the same symphonic style as in _Tannhäuser_. We are still no nearer to the perfect blending of the orchestral stream and the vocal parts that we get in _Tristan_ and in the _Mastersingers_. The style is not homogeneous: the stream is broken by theatrical exclamations and snatches of recitative that not only break the flow, but differ in character from the rest. But the elasticity of motion is a great advance on _Tannhäuser_: Wagner was coming to his own, and much of _Tannhäuser_ strikes one as cumbrous and heavy in comparison. That sinister atmosphere of mystery is never lost; the gloom and the wretched crouching figures, the fierce anger and Ortrud's alternate cajoling and threatening may be said, without exaggeration, to sound from the orchestra with as powerful an effect on the imagination as the sights and sounds on the stage. Most magnificent is the descending chromatic passage that accompanies Ortrud as she casts her spell again over Frederick. It resembles closely an Erda theme of the _Ring_--as is quite natural, for one chromatic scale cannot but resemble another. The significance of the resemblance is that the strange harmonies are also much alike, and the central idea is the same in the two cases: the idea of old Mother Earth, her everlasting stillness in strange places, her never-ceasing internal workings, her mysterious power. In the _Ring_ there is nothing baneful in the conception: it is Nature at work in her sleep amongst the silent hills: mysterious, indeed, but doing no evil. Here it is the earth as conceived by the mediæval mind, the earth to which the coming of the White Christ had banished all the gods of the older world, there to become the malevolent, malignant divinities of the new world, and believed in as such by the first adherents of the new religion. Frederick was a Christian, mediæval style, and he implicitly believes that Ortrud can call up wicked spirits, and by their aid weave enchantments when the God of the East is not looking. The same may be said of the king, and indeed all the characters in _Lohengrin_: again I say the opera is a fairy drama in which these things must be assumed and accepted. That wondrous passage must have sounded doubly wonderful in the ears of two generations back; blent with that second sinister Ortrud theme, it accomplishes as much in a dozen or so bars as Weber could accomplish in as many pages. That Ortrud theme seems to wind round Frederick's soul until at last he is wholly in his wife's grip; and the scene ends with an invocation to "ye Powers that rule our earthly lot"--the malignant gods of the underworld. We, knowing the kind of music Wagner had in his mind when he wrote the libretto of _Lohengrin_, can easily understand Schumann's dismay when this scene was read to him: nothing of the sort had been composed before.

Suddenly Elsa appears on the balcony, and the character of the music changes at once: all now is sweetness and light. Her serenade (to herself) is a simple and very lovely thing, making full half of its effect through its contrast with the harshness, agitation and gloom of all that has gone before. There is a master-touch when Ortrud calls softly, "Elsa": by one stroke, an abrupt strange chord, the whole atmosphere is for the moment altered: the dreariness of the call is unforgetable. There are many hints of Ortrud's purpose given out more and more plainly till the climax is reached in her invocation to Wotan, chief of the malignant divinities. (It is strange to think that when he wrote this Wagner must already have had the other and more celebrated Wotan in his thoughts.) Much of Elsa's melody is of a very Weberesque quality--and is none the worse for it: far better that than the touches of Bellini, Marschner and Spontini that abound in the earlier operas. One or two other points may be noted. At the words "Rest thee with me" we get a tune which might have grown out of one previously heard and one in the bedroom scene--not only does the tune resemble the others closely, but the rhythm of the phrases Elsa addresses to Ortrud is the same as that of the phrases with which Lohengrin seems to caress Elsa. There is, of course, no "significance" in the sense in which the word is used by the Wagnerians. The short duet following contains a divine melody, but Ortrud's "aside" is a fairly lengthy one--forty bars--and is a bit of conventionalism which Wagner soon discarded. The melody is played again as Elsa leads her enemy into the house; Frederick returns to curse Ortrud and Lohengrin in the same breath; all the sweetness goes out of the music as Elsa disappears from view, and the scene closes as it opened, in gloom.

As daylight breaks Wagner indulges in one of the effects he was fond of at this period. The reveille is sounded from a turret, and an answering call comes from a distance; and the two parties trumpet it in alternation until every one is awakened. It is a quasi-musical effect only: there is no invention: the trumpet chords serve the purpose and nothing more. He never reverted to this rather bald method of filling up time while his people are being got on the stage: compare this passage with, for instance, Hagen's call in _The Dusk of the Gods_. The latter is rich and full of picturesque music: it means something and is, in fact, an effective piece in a concert-room. Or take the watchman with his cow-horn in the _Mastersingers_; the music is redolent of the old world; it impresses the imagination more than an entry in Pepys--"the watchman calling two of the morning and a thick snow falling." In the _Lohengrin_ days his method still requires these _longueurs_, these dry patches: later his mastery over his material enabled him to deal his theatrical and his musical stroke at the same time. As knights and retainers flock in, a long and elaborate chorus is sung--a musical, not a dramatic, chorus, almost as much in the _Rienzi_ manner as in the manner of _Tannhäuser_. It is curious to observe how cautious and tentative Wagner was at this stage of his growth. He was still groping, seeing only very dimly the destination he would reach by the way he was taking. _Lohengrin_, had he followed the plan he would certainly have adopted ten years later, would have been terser, more closely dramatic, and would have made only a short opera; there would have been fewer set numbers and a much smaller quantity of the magnificent music. The whole idea, I have already said, is not a dramatic one, but a musical one; and the advance on the _Dutchman_ lies in the skill with which the musical opportunities seem to grow out of the drama and are not pressed into it. In this respect it is hardly an advance on _Tannhäuser_; indeed three of the great ensembles have not an adequate dramatic motive. That at the end of the first act, splendid music though it is, is a quite operatic finale, so conventional that only when rendered in the conventional operatic manner does it sound and appear impressive. It becomes, when done in this manner, a kind of dance, for towards the finish all the crowd should form in long lines and go twining about in a ballet figure. In this opening chorus of knights and retainers in the Second Act (scene ii) the musical inspiration is intense; but words are repeated as irrationally as in a Handel oratorio chorus; and the same is the case in the bridal procession music. Wagner still had a hankering after imposing spectacle and brilliant choral writing. That bridal procession and chorus are, of course, supremely beautiful music: music and spectacle were aimed at and achieved, not music and drama, in the later Wagnerian sense.

The scene of the interruption of the procession first by Ortrud and then by Frederick has always seemed to me superfluous as well as stagey. The whole thing is pure melodrama of the kind that used to be popular until a very few years ago; and the music is as melodramatic as the two incidents. The scene is far too long, and is thus rendered doubly nonsensical. Only a few minutes before, the Herald has announced the King's decree: any one harbouring either of the offenders "will share his [it ought to be their] doom with life and limb." Yet the offenders themselves are allowed to break up an orderly procession and to hurl angry diatribes at the very people they have been banned for seeking to injure. For many minutes Ortrud, encouraged by a furious orchestra, pours forth a stream of insult directed at Lohengrin and Elsa: she is not immediately seized and carried off to be tortured: the bystanders utter a few exclamations, and leave Elsa to reply for herself. When the king and Lohengrin enter they content themselves with gentle remonstrances: even Frederick draws from them only dignified if somewhat scornful protests. There has been some other rather futile business: a few conspirators planning to support Frederick in attacking not only Lohengrin, but the king. The flower of a loyal army look on at all this and go on their way, leaving Frederick free to make an attempt on Lohengrin's life in the third Act. Again I emphasise a point because it reveals exactly how far Wagner's art had got at this period. Well might he feel it necessary, before proceeding to other masterpieces, to discover where he stood, what was his ideal, and how he might attain it. For, observe, he wanted to depict in music an imperious, ambitious, unscrupulous and wicked woman with a temper that in the end is her own undoing; he felt the necessity of contrasting her with Elsa, sweet, gentle and lamentably weak--Elsa, who is strong, or, rather, pertinacious, only once, and at the wrong time; and, third, he felt that his act would terminate rather tamely with a mere wedding-march. The result is this noisy melodramatic scene, with its melodramatic music. It could not be otherwise. Music cannot express anger--at best it can only suggest. By anger I mean human anger--the god's wrath of a Wotan is a different matter. Brünnhilda knows Wotan to be angry by the raging storm that marks his path through the heavens, by the lightnings and thunders; and we have all enough of our primitive ancestors in us to feel in some degree as they felt--indeed, plenty of people to-day see in a storm a manifestation of the wrath of the Almighty. Human anger has never been put into music. Why, Ortrud alternates her rantings (mere recitative) with beautiful phrases of the same pattern as those sung by Elsa! The music for the orchestra is turbulent rather than forcible; it is incoherent in the old-fashioned way: essentially--in spite of a free use of discords--it is as old-fashioned as anything in _Don Giovanni_. Frederick and Lohengrin have hot words, and Telramund is supposed to be a hotheaded idiot and Lohengrin a spotless, handsome hero; and lo! with due regard for the respective ranges of their voices, they might sing each other's music and no harm done. When the chorus enters a very imposing piece of music is wrought, largely out of the Ortrud insinuating theme (_f_); but it is not dramatic music. The ending with the resumption of the procession is one of Wagner's noblest things. It is not in the customary sense of the phrase an operatic finale, but a perfectly satisfying piece of music that prepares us for a pause during which we can take breath before the action of the drama is taken up again in the third Act.

IV

In that act we have the central idea of the opera--the poetic and the musical idea--clearly, definitely set forth--the idea of Montsalvat, far away up the rippling river on which the white swan floated--Montsalvat, the land of eternal dawn, where all things remained for ever young, and the flowers and the corn grew always and never faded nor fell to the sickle. It is the land Mignon aspired to--"Oh let me for ever then remain young"--the impossible dream of poets and millions of men and women who were not poets: Nirvana, with a difference; that realm in which, tired with the struggles and fights in the devious ways of this dark world, they should after death awake refreshed in a serene light and pure air, thereafter to dwell for ever in a state of untroubled blessedness, where all earth's puzzles solve themselves, and life is seen to be complete. As Senta's ballad is the germ of the _Dutchman_, so is Lohengrin's narrative, "In fernem Land," the germ of this more beautiful opera. It plays a more important part in _Lohengrin_ than does the ballad in the _Dutchman_. Without exaggeration, the life, colour and emotion of the narrative wash backwards and forwards over the _Lohengrin_ score, relieving scenes that might be tedious and worrying--like those Ortrud scenes I have just described--and making the beautiful pages still more beautiful. The land of dawn, fresh and pure, the limpid river: these, the essence of _Lohengrin_ and the pervading atmosphere, proceed from the narrative.

But much has to be got through before this point is reached. First, we have the gorgeous prelude--the most brilliant Wagner wrote, and the last he was to write that has no thematic connection with any portion of the opera. Here we have no summary of the act, no hint of impending disaster and tragedy, but simply a joyous, rattling preliminary to the procession that escorts Lohengrin and Elsa to the bridal chamber. It starts off with immense spirit, the music leaping straight up, hesitating a moment on a cross-accent, then a noisy shake reaching its highest note, and after a clash of the cymbals sliding off into the more regular rhythm, broken slightly by occasional syncopations, in which the piece as a whole is conceived. The melody in the bass that follows, and the more tender strains of a middle section, are familiar to every one nowadays--in fact, so familiar that we are likely to overlook the intense originality of the whole thing. When we remember the course the drama has now to take, the tragic beauty of its close, we can perceive how exactly right Wagner's feeling was when he left the plan he adopted throughout the _Dutchman_ and _Tannhäuser_--the plan either of summing up or foreshadowing the ensuing scenes, or of making the prelude part of the first scene. Of course the music at the beginning of Act II is rather in the nature of an introduction than of a distinct prelude; but Act III is not prefaced by so much as that. Rather, it suggests that since Elsa and Lohengrin entered the church all has been rejoicing, and that we catch only the tail-end of the feast as the party comes on the stage.

The wedding chorus I pass over as rather trivial; and it contains between the middle section and the repetition the eight most trivial bars Wagner put to paper--I do not except the weakest portions of _Rienzi_. The opening of the great love scene--the most curious love scene in the world--is pure deliciousness. Nothing of the passion, flaming hot and terrible, of _Tristan_ is here; only a sense of sheer delight and happiness. Melody after melody--of a very Weberesque pattern, of course, but sweet, voluptuous--is poured forth; and a graver tone comes into the music only when Elsa begins timidly to lead up to the questionings of Lohengrin which are her aim. She hints at what she wants, and Lohengrin gives her, to a very pretty tune, an answer that can merely be called sublimely fatuous. Drawing her to the window, he bids her breathe in the odours from the flowers in the moonlit garden beneath. "But," he blandly adds, "don't ask whence their sweet scent comes, or you will its wondrous charm destroy." The song is, I say, a pretty one; indeed, it is so pretty that but for the enchantment of each successive phrase no one could stand the monotony of so long a series of four-bar phrases. Of that fault in _Lohengrin_ I shall have more to say presently. More dramatic, living, and less mechanical stuff follows at once: Elsa is not to be put off in that way, and in agitated strains to an agitated but not spasmodic accompaniment she presses on towards disaster. Lohengrin's warning sounds out, sinister; Lohengrin pleads, always stupidly, but to music of growing intensity and grip; the measures are no longer cut to a pattern, not incoherent as they are in the squabbles of the second Act; and at last a passage of Wagner at his theatrical best is reached when he solemnly warns her again--"Greatest of trusts, Elsa, I have shown thee." To another most lovely theme he tries again to soothe her: she will not listen, and the Ortrud theme begins to writhe in the orchestra, and we know that Elsa's soul is fast bound in the spell of suspicion which Ortrud put upon her. She gets nearer and nearer to the fatal question, and suddenly in the impotent rage of a fretful woman who cannot get her way--a woman driven mad by baseless jealousy--in fancy she sees the swan coming to lead Lohengrin away from her; with mournful and dreary effect a fragment of the swan theme sounds from the orchestra. This simple touch is weird to a degree never dreamed of by all the purveyors of operatic horrors; it is unearthly, uncanny, in its wild beauty. The climax is immensely powerful, but very simple, and, above all, sheer art of the theatre. There is a crash as Frederick rushes in to be instantly killed; a bass passage tears down the scale to the depths; and the horns sustain two pianissimo chords, two notes in each; then silence, broken only by soft drum-beats to make the silence felt. Elsa has fainted, and as she revives we hear a bit of the duet--Lohengrin's tenderness as he tends her, and a fleeting dream of Elsa's, perhaps, seem to blend in it. All is finished.

To compare this duet with that in _Tristan_ would be profitless but for one reason. Wagner had not yet reached that perfect mastery of his art which enabled him, so to speak, to fuse the dramatic and the musical inspiration. We saw how in the _Dutchman_ the music rose to its full height and splendour when the drama was sincere and true; in _Tristan_ drama and music are inseparable. In _Lohengrin_, where the inspiration is, if not wholly, at any rate mainly, musical, the drama seems at times to be somewhat of a hindrance. I have mentioned the fine dramatic or stage touches; but the finest things occur when the pair, singly or together, are singing music that would be as effective on a concert platform as on the stage. The art, that is, is far away from the art of the _Tristan_ duet. At many points the situation is saved by Wagner's stage dexterity: only when the music is almost as completely self-moulded as in a symphony, or any other form of "absolute" music, is it at its best. For practical purposes with Wagner the songs are "absolute" music: the words were his own, and he could alter them to suit the musical exigency.

V

The opening of the next scene is spectacular, and the music is not striking--for Wagner, though Marschner or Spontini might have owned it with pride. The entry of the nobles bringing Frederick's corpse, the entry also of Elsa, "like Niobe, all tears," are theatrically powerful. Elsa's entry is a particularly beautiful example of what I have previously called Wagner's dramatict use of the leitmotiv. There are twenty bars of accompaniment, and in that space we have three motives, so arranged that those who knew their significance, but had never seen the earlier portions of the opera, might easily read the whole of Elsa's sad history. As she is led in, stricken down and miserable, the warning theme is heard; then that winding, insidious theme associated with Ortrud; and last, four bars of the music heard in the first act when she stands helpless before the king and has nothing wherewith to answer her accusers: she is as miserable now as she was then, and the cause of it Lohengrin's edict and her defiance of it under Ortrud's influence. The device I have always maintained to be a naïve one; but it may be used to a sublime end, as in the _Dusk of the Gods_ funeral procession, or as here, to emphasize Elsa's situation, and to remind us at once of her being the authoress of her own destruction. This is followed by acclamations as Lohengrin enters, and nothing further of note occurs until he declares that, for reasons which he cannot give, he will not go forth to fight the foe with the Brabantians; and this declaration is set to the same passage, or part of it, in which he has lately warned Elsa not to question him (p. 175). The meaning of the words and the dramatic significance of this musical phrase are beyond my understanding. If Lohengrin did not mean to tell his secret the musical phrase might imply that he had no intention of letting them ask for it. But he has come there with no other intention than that of revealing everything--and, in a word, the whole business is incomprehensible because there is nothing to be comprehended--because it is sheer nonsense. How Wagner, even supposing he had originally some other idea for the ending of the work, could let so flat a contradiction of his final plan stand--this also is more than I can understand; for in later years he saw his opera performed. And at that I must leave the matter. Lohengrin presently proceeds to disclose his secret in that wondrous "In fernem Land"--surely the most superb thing of its sort ever written. The vocal part is--as I have already pointed out, this is often the case in Wagner--something between pure song and recitative; and here it is of a quality he himself rarely matched--not even in _Tristan_. Technically, it is a piece of descriptive music for instruments; but the words which give it significance and point are set to phrases themselves so beautiful, pathetic and inevitable that one feels that the vocal part and the orchestral were begotten simultaneously in that marvellous brain. In other chapters I will point to passages, especially in the _Ring_, where quite obviously the voice part has been laboriously worked in with instrumental music already conceived in its final form; but that was in Wagner's later years, when the free inspiration, enthusiasm and energy of his _Tristan_ and _Lohengrin_ and _Mastersingers_ days had for ever departed. There is an accent of passionate grief in Lohengrin's words to Elsa, and of remorse in Elsa's wailings; but the most touching thing in this final scene is the song in which he hands her his sword, horn and ring, to be given to her brother should he return. The note of regret, especially in the poignant "leb' wohl," reminds one irresistibly of Wotan's farewell to Brünnhilda. The latter is broader, richer, vaster,--and yet the tender simplicity of this is inexpressibly touching. After that the opera proceeds to its conclusion in what one may call a normal manner: there is nothing, anyhow, in the music that requires analysis.

VI

_Lohengrin_ cannot be called Wagner's greatest achievement, but it is a "fine," if not a "first careless rapture" whose freshness he never quite recaptured. Yet, in a way, it is the most mannered of his works. I know of no opera where one phrase, one harmony or set of harmonies, or one violin figure is made to serve so many and such widely different purposes; and not since the early seventeen hundreds had the perfect cadence been so hard worked. Only two numbers are in other than four-four time--the prayer and the wedding song. The melodies on page upon page consist of regular four-bar lengths, commonly terminating in a full close. We can admit all this--indeed, we must admit it all--and then we are only bound the more to admire the vast amount of variety Wagner got in spite of all the obstacles self-placed in his way. His fondness for the diminished seventh, constantly exploited throughout, was perhaps a fondness for his own adopted child--for no one had ever properly employed it before: to him and to every one at the time his use of it was new. Many points in his prolonged passages which are simply arpeggios of the chord of the diminished seventh must have seemed novel in the eighteen-forties, though we hardly notice them now. The four-bar lengths send the music along with a swing very different from the jerkiness of contemporary opera music. The cadence is used only to attain, so to speak, a fresh jumping-off place: there is no moment of real rest: simultaneously with the attainment of a point of rest the new impulse is felt, and away the thing flies again. But what compensates for all these defects--and defects they are--is the perpetual presence of the Montsalvat music: we are never long without hearing some of it. The Montsalvat music is the source of the charm and fascination of the opera, and its purity and freshness seem likely for ever to keep the opera sweet.