n and sacred early
morning stillness; and nothing could be more effective, as background
and relief to these, than the warlike music of the first act, and the
ghastly opening of the second act, so suggestive of horrors and the
spells of Ortrud winding round Frederic's soul. Then there is Elsa's
dream, the magical music of Lohengrin's tale, the music of the Bridal
procession in the second act, the great and tender melody first sung
by Elsa and Ortrud, and then repeated by the orchestra as Ortrud
allows Elsa to lead her into the house, the whole of the
Bridal-chamber duet, and perhaps, above all, Lohengrin's farewell. To
whatever page of the score you turn, there is perfect beauty--after
the first act not a great deal that is powerful or meant to be
powerful, but melody after melody that entrances you merely as
absolute music without poetic significance, and that seems doubly
entrancing by reason of the strange, remote feeling with which it is
charged, and its perpetual suggestion of the broad stream flowing
ceaselessly from far-away Montsalvat to the sea. "Lohengrin" is a
fairy-story imbued with seriousness and tender human emotion, and the
music is exactly adapted to it.

"TRISTAN AND ISOLDA"

Says Nietzsche (pretending to put the words into the mouth of
another), "I hate Wagner, but I no longer stand any other music"; and
though the saying is entirely senseless to those who do hate Wagner,
the feeling that prompted it may be understood by all who love him and
who stand every other music, so long as it is real music. Immediately
after listening to "Tristan and Isolda" all other operas seem away
from the point, to be concerned with the secondary issues of life, to
babble without fervour or directness of unessential matters. This does
not mean that "Tristan" is greater than "Don Giovanni" or the
"Matthew" Passion--for it is not--but that it speaks to each of us in
the most modern language of the most engrossing subject in the world,
of oneself, of one's own soul. Who can stay to listen to the sheer
loveliness of "Don Giovanni," or follow with any sympathy the farcical
doom of that hero, or who, again, can be at the pains to enter into
the obsolescent emotions and mode of expression of Bach, when Wagner
calls us to listen concerning the innermost workings of our own being,
and speaks in a tongue every word of which enters the brain like a
thing of life? For one does not have to think what Wagner means: so
direct