; and the eternally wise
critics agreed in thinking this absolutely wrong. They told him the
feather was out of place--it made him appear ridiculous, and so on.
Maurel retorted that he was playing the part of a fierce barbarian
chief who would not look, he thought, like a gilded butterfly, and
that his notion was to look as ferocious as he could. Now the odd
thing is, that though Maurel was right, we critics were in a sense
right also. As the music used to be played, a Telramund one degree
nearer to a man than the average Italian baritone seemed ludicrously
out of place; and when, in addition, the Lohengrin was a would-be
lady-killer without an inch of fight in him, Henry the Fowler a
pathetic heavy father, and Elsa a sentimental milliner, there was
something farcical about Maurel's red feather and generally militant
aspect. What we critics had not the brains to see was that the playing
of the music was wrong, and that Maurel was only wrong in trying to
play his part in the right manner when Lohengrin, Elsa, King, and
conductor were all against him in their determination to do their
parts wrong. Mr. Bispham follows in Maurel's footsteps, as he
frequently does, in a modified costume, but when for the first time
the orchestra played right he would not have seemed ridiculous had he
stuck Maurel's red feather into his helmet. The whole scene became a
different thing: we were thrown at once into the atmosphere of an
armed camp full of turbulent thieves and bandits itching for fighting,
and wildly excited with rumours of conflicts near at hand. Amidst all
this excitement, and amidst all the unruly fighters, Telramund,
strongest, fiercest, most unruly of them all, has to open the drama;
and to command our respect, to make us feel that it is he who is
making the drama move, that it is because all the barbarians are
afraid of him that the drama begins to move at all, he cannot possibly
look too ferocious and hot-blooded, too strong of limb and tempestuous
of temper. The proof that this (Seidl's) reading of the opera was the
right one, was that, in the first place, the drama immediately
interested you instead of keeping you waiting for the entry of Elsa;
and, in the second place, that the noisy, energetic playing of the
opening scene threw the music of Elsa and Lohengrin into wonderfully
beautiful relief--a relief which in the old way of doing the opera was
very much wanting. To play "Lohengrin" in the old way is to deny
Wagner t