hat mood of rapturous
self-effacement. It is perhaps a young man's mood; certainly it is
identical with the ecstasy with which one contemplates a perfect piece
of art, or a life greatly lived; and here it finds splendid
expression.

"LOHENGRIN"

"Lohengrin" has been sung scores of times at Covent Garden in one
fashion or another; but I declare that we heard something resembling
the real "Lohengrin" for the first time when the late Mr. Anton Seidl
crossed the Atlantic to conduct it and other of Wagner's operas. We
had come to regard it as a pretty opera--an opera full of an
individual, strange, indefinable sweetness; but Mr. Anton Seidl came
all the way from New York city to show us how out of sweetness can
come forth strength. Mr. Seidl was a Wagner conductor of the older
type, and with some of the faults of that type; he knew little or
nothing of the improvements in the manner of interpreting Wagner's
music effected by Mottl, Levi, and that stupendous creature Siegfried
Wagner; he was a survival of the first enthusiastic reaction against
Italian ways of misdoing things; and he was, if anything, a little too
strongly inclined to go a little too far in the opposite direction to
the touch-and-go conductors. But there is so much of sweetness and
delicacy in "Lohengrin" that the whole opera, including the sweet and
delicate portions, actually gains from a forceful and manly
handling--gains so immensely that, as already said, those of us who
heard it under Mr. Seidl's direction must have felt that here, at
last, was the true "Lohengrin," the "Lohengrin" of Wagner's
imagination. It was a pleasure merely to hear the band singing out
boldly, getting the last fraction of rich tone out of each note, in
the first act; to hear the string passages valiantly attacked, and the
melodies treated with breadth, and the trumpets and trombones playing
out with all their force when need was, holding the sounds to the end
instead of letting them slink away ashamed in the accepted Italian
style. And not only were these things in themselves delightful--they
also served to make the drama doubly powerful, and the tender parts of
the music doubly tender, to show how splendid in many respects was
Wagner's art in the "Lohengrin" days, and to prove that Maurel's way
of doing the part of Telramund some years ago was, as Maurel's way of
doing things generally are, perfectly right. Maurel, it will be
remembered, stuck a red feather in his cap