nts 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 d